Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Funnily enough, I didn’t get into trouble with my mom when it happened. There was no ass-whooping waiting for me at home. She’d lost the bursary when she’d left her job at ICI, and paying for private school was becoming a burden. But more than that, she thought the school was overreacting. The truth is she probably took my side against Maryvale more often than not. She agreed with me 100 percent about the Eucharist thing. “Let me get this straight,” she told the principal. “You’re punishing a child because he wants Jesus’s body and Jesus’s blood? Why shouldn’t he have those things? Of course he should have them.” When they made me see a therapist for laughing while the principal hit me, she told the school that was ridiculous, too.
“Ms. Noah, your son was laughing while we were hitting him.”
“Well, clearly you don’t know how to hit a kid. That’s your problem, not mine. Trevor’s never laughed when I’ve hit him, I can tell you.”
That was the weird and kind of amazing thing about my mom. If she agreed with me that a rule was stupid, she wouldn’t punish me for breaking it. Both she and the psychologists agreed that the school was the one with the problem, not me. Catholic school is not the place to be creative and independent.
Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it’s ruthlessly authoritarian, and its authority rests on a bunch of rules that don’t make any sense. My mother grew up with these rules and she questioned them. When they didn’t hold up, she simply went around them. The only authority my mother recognized was God’s. God is love and the Bible is truth—everything else was up for debate. She taught me to challenge authority and question the system. The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her.
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When I was seven years old, my mother had been dating her new boyfriend, Abel, for a year maybe, but at that point I was too young to know who they were to each other. It was just “Hey, that’s mom’s friend who’s around a lot.” I liked Abel; he was a really nice guy.
As a black person back then, if you wanted to live in the suburbs you’d have to find a white family renting out their servants’ quarters or sometimes their garage, which was what Abel had done. He lived in a neighborhood called Orange Grove in a white family’s garage, which he’d turned into a cottage-type thing with a hot plate and a bed. Sometimes he’d come and sleep at our house, and sometimes we’d go stay with him. Staying in a garage when we owned our own house wasn’t ideal, but Orange Grove was close to my school and my mom’s work so it had its benefits.
This white family also had a black maid who lived in the servants’ quarters in the backyard, and I’d play with her son whenever we stayed there. At that age my love of fire was in full bloom. One afternoon everyone was at work—my mom and Abel and both of the white parents—and the kid and I were playing together while his mom was inside the house cleaning. One thing I loved doing at the time was using a magnifying glass to burn my name into pieces of wood. You had to aim the lens and get the focus just right and then you got the flame and then you moved it slowly and you could burn shapes and letters and patterns. I was fascinated by it.
That afternoon I was teaching this kid how to do it. We were inside the servants’ quarters, which was really more of a toolshed added on to the back of the house, full of wooden ladders, buckets of old paint, turpentine. I had a box of matches with me, too—all my usual fire-making tools. We were sitting on an old mattress that they used to sleep on the floor, basically a sack stuffed with dried straw. The sun was beaming in through the window, and I was showing the kid how to burn his name into a piece of plywood.
At one point we took a break to go get a snack. I set the magnifying glass and the matches on the mattress and we left. When we came back a few minutes later we found the shed had one of those doors that self-locks from the inside. We couldn’t get back in without going to get his mother, so we decided to run around and play in the yard. After a while I noticed smoke coming out of the cracks in the window frame. I ran over and looked inside. A small fire was burning in the middle of the straw mattress where we’d left the matches and the magnifying glass. We ran and called the maid. She came, but she didn’t know what to do. The door was locked, and before we could figure out how to get into the shed the whole thing caught—the mattress, the ladders, the paint, the turpentine, everything.
The flames moved quickly. Soon the roof was on fire, and from there the blaze spread to the main house, and the whole thing burned and burned and burned. Smoke was billowing into the sky. A neighbor had called the fire brigade, and the sirens were on their way. Me and this kid and the maid, we ran out to the road and watched as the firemen tried to put it out, but by the time they did, it was too late. There was nothing left but a charred brick-and-mortar shell, roof gone, and gutted from the inside.
The white family came home and stood on the street, staring at the ruins of their house. They asked the maid what happened and she asked her son and the kid totally snitched. “Trevor had matches,” he said. The family said nothing to me. I don’t think they knew what to say. They were completely dumbfounded. They didn’t call the police, didn’t threaten to sue. What were they going to do, arrest a seven-year-old for arson? And we were so poor you couldn’t actually sue us for anything. Plus they had insurance, so that was the end of it.
They kicked Abel out of the garage, which I thought was hilarious because the garage, which was freestanding, was the only piece of the property left unscathed. I saw no reason for Abel to have to leave, but they made him. We packed up his stuff, put it into our car, and drove home to Eden Park; Abel basically lived with us from then on. He and my mom got into a huge fight. “Your son has burned down my life!” But there was no punishment for me that day. My mom was too much in shock. There’s naughty, and then there’s burning down a white person’s house. She didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t feel bad about it at all. I still don’t. The lawyer in me maintains that I am completely innocent. There were matches and there was a magnifying glass and there was a mattress and then, clearly, a series of unfortunate events. Things catch fire sometimes. That’s why there’s a fire brigade. But everyone in my family will tell you, “Trevor burned down a house.” If people thought I was naughty before, after the fire I was notorious. One of my uncles stopped calling me Trevor. He called me “Terror” instead. “Don’t leave that kid alone in your home,” he’d say. “He’ll burn it to the ground.”
My cousin Mlungisi, to this day, cannot comprehend how I survived being as naughty as I was for as long as I did, how I withstood the number of hidings that I got. Why did I keep misbehaving? How did I never learn my lesson? Both of my cousins were supergood kids. Mlungisi got maybe one hiding in his life. After that he said he never wanted to experience anything like it ever again, and from that day he always followed the rules. But I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay. But after a while the bruises fade, and they fade for a reason—because now it’s time to get up to some shit again.
I grew up in a black family in a black neighborhood in a black country. I’ve traveled to other black cities in black countries all over the black continent. And in all of that time I’ve yet to find a place where black people like cats. One of the biggest reasons for that, as we know in South Africa, is that only witches have cats, and all cats are witches.
There was a famous incident during an Orlando Pirates soccer match a few years ago. A cat got into the stadium and ran through the crowd and out onto the pitch in the middl
It was front-page news all over the country. White people lost their shit. Oh my word, it was insane. The security guard was arrested and put on trial and found guilty of animal abuse. He had to pay some enormous fine to avoid spending several months in jail. What was ironic to me was that white people had spent years seeing video of black people being beaten to death by other white people, but this one video of a black man kicking a cat, that’s what sent them over the edge. Black people were just confused. They didn’t see any problem with what the man did. They were like, “Obviously that cat was a witch. How else would a cat know how to get out onto a soccer pitch? Somebody sent it to jinx one of the teams. That man had to kill the cat. He was protecting the players.”
In South Africa, black people have dogs.
FUFI
A month after we moved to Eden Park, my mother brought home two cats. Black cats. Beautiful creatures. Some woman from her work had a litter of kittens she was trying to get rid of, and my mom ended up with two. I was excited because I’d never had a pet before. My mom was excited because she loves animals. She didn’t believe in any nonsense about cats. It was just another way in which she was a rebel, refusing to conform to ideas about what black people did and didn’t do.
In a black neighborhood, you wouldn’t dare own a cat, especially a black cat. That would be like wearing a sign that said, “Hello, I am a witch.” That would be suicide. Since we’d moved to a colored neighborhood, my mom thought the cats would be okay. Once they were grown we let them out during the day to roam the neighborhood. Then we came home one evening and found the cats strung up by their tails from our front gate, gutted and skinned and bleeding out, their heads chopped off. On our front wall someone had written in Afrikaans, “Heks”—“Witch.”
Colored people, apparently, were no more progressive than black people on the issue of cats.
I wasn’t exactly devastated about the cats. I don’t think we’d had them long enough for me to get attached; I don’t even remember their names. And cats are dicks for the most part. As much as I tried they never felt like real pets. They never showed me affection nor did they accept any of mine. Had the cats made more of an effort, I might have felt like I had lost something. But even as a kid, looking at these dead, mutilated animals, I was like, “Well, there you have it. Maybe if they’d been nicer, they could have avoided this.”
After the cats were killed, we took a break from pets for a while. Then we got dogs. Dogs are cool. Almost every black family I knew had a dog. No matter how poor you were, you had a dog. White people treat dogs like children or members of the family. Black people’s dogs are more for protection, a poor-man’s alarm system. You buy a dog and you keep it out in the yard. Black people name dogs by their traits. If it has stripes, you call it Tiger. If it’s vicious, you call it Danger. If it has spots, you call it Spotty. Given the finite number of traits a dog can have, pretty much everyone’s dogs have the same names; people just recycle them.
We’d never had dogs in Soweto. Then one day some lady at my mom’s work offered us two puppies. They weren’t planned puppies. This woman’s Maltese poodle had been impregnated by the bull terrier from next door, a strange mix. My mom said she’d take them both. She brought them home, and I was the happiest kid on earth.
My mom named them Fufi and Panther. Fufi, I don’t know where her name came from. Panther had a pink nose, so she was Pink Panther and eventually just Panther. They were two sisters who loved and hated each other. They would look out for each other, but they would also fight all the time. Like, blood fights. Biting. Clawing. It was a strange, gruesome relationship.
Panther was my mom’s dog; Fufi was mine. Fufi was beautiful. Clean lines, happy face. She looked like a perfect bull terrier, only skinnier because of the Maltese mixed in. Panther, who was more half-and-half, came out weird and scruffy-looking. Panther was smart. Fufi was dumb as shit. At least we always thought she was dumb as shit. Whenever we called them, Panther would come right away, but Fufi wouldn’t do anything. Panther would run back and get Fufi and then they’d both come. It turned out that Fufi was deaf. Years later Fufi died when a burglar was trying to break into our house. He pushed the gate over and it fell on her back and broke her spine. We took her to the vet and she had to be put down. After examining her, the vet came over and gave us the news.
“It must have been strange for your family living with a dog that was deaf,” he said.
“What?”
“You didn’t know your dog was deaf?”
“No, we thought it was stupid.”
That’s when we realized that their whole lives the one dog had been telling the other dog what to do somehow. The smart, hearing one was helping the dumb, deaf one.
Fufi was the love of my life. Beautiful but stupid. I raised her. I potty-trained her. She slept in my bed. A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It’s like a bicycle but with emotions.
Fufi could do all sorts of tricks. She could jump super high. I mean, Fufi could jump. I could hold a piece of food out above my own head and she’d leap up and grab it like it was nothing. If YouTube had been around, Fufi would have been a star.
Fufi was a little rascal as well. During the day we kept the dogs in the backyard, which was enclosed by a wall at least five feet high. After a while, every day we’d come home and Fufi would be sitting outside the gate, waiting for us. We were always confused. Was someone opening the gate? What was going on? It never occurred to us that she could actually scale a five-foot wall, but that was exactly what was happening. Every morning, Fufi would wait for us to leave, jump over the wall, and go roaming around the neighborhood.
I caught her one day when I was home for the school holidays. My mom had left for work and I was in the living room. Fufi didn’t know I was there; she thought I was gone because the car was gone. I heard Panther barking in the backyard, looked out, and there was Fufi, scaling the wall. She’d jumped, scampered up the last couple of feet, and then she was gone.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. I ran out front, grabbed my bicycle, and followed her to see where she was going. She went a long way, many streets over, to another part of the neighborhood. Then she went up to this other house and jumped over their wall and into their backyard. What the hell was she doing? I went up to the gate and rang the doorbell. This colored kid answered.
“May I help you?” he said.
“Yeah. My dog is in your yard.”
“What?”
“My dog. She’s in your yard.”
Fufi walked up and stood between us.
“Fufi, come!” I said. “Let’s go!”
This kid looked at Fufi and called her by some other stupid name, Spotty or some bullshit like that.
“Spotty, go back inside the house.”
“Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Spotty? That’s Fufi!”
“No, that’s my dog, Spotty.”
“No, that’s Fufi, my friend.”
“No, this is Spotty.”
“How could this be Spotty? She doesn’t even have spots. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is Spotty!”
“Fufi!”
“Spotty!”
“Fufi!”
Of course, since Fufi was deaf she didn’t respond to “Spotty” or “Fufi.” She just stood there. I started cursing the kid out.
“Give me back my dog!”
“I don’t know who you are,” he said, “but you better get out of here.”
Then he went into the house and got his mom and she came out.
“What do you want?” she said.
“That’s my dog!”
“This is our dog. Go away.”
I started crying. “Why are you stealing my dog?!” I turned t
I jumped onto my bike and raced home, tears running down my face. I loved Fufi so much. To see her with another boy, acting like she didn’t know me, after I raised her, after all the nights we spent together. I was heartbroken.
That evening Fufi didn’t come home. Because the other family thought I was coming to steal their dog, they had decided to lock her inside, so she couldn’t make it back the way she normally did to wait for us outside the fence. My mom got home from work. I was in tears. I told her Fufi had been kidnapped. We went back to the house. My mom rang the bell and confronted the mom.
“Look, this is our dog.”
This lady lied to my mom’s face. “This is not your dog. We bought this dog.”
“You didn’t buy the dog. It’s our dog.”
They went back and forth. This woman wasn’t budging, so we went home to get evidence: pictures of us with the dogs, certificates from the vet. I was crying the whole time, and my mom was losing her patience with me. “Stop crying! We’ll get the dog! Calm down!”
We gathered up our documentation and went back to the house. This time we brought Panther with us, as part of the proof. My mom showed this lady the pictures and the information from the vet. She still wouldn’t give us Fufi. My mom threatened to call the police. It turned into a whole thing. Finally my mom said, “Okay, I’ll give you a hundred rand.”
“Fine,” the lady said.
My mom gave her some money and she brought Fufi out. The other kid, who thought Fufi was Spotty, had to watch his mother sell the dog he thought was his. Now he started crying. “Spotty! No! Mom, you can’t sell Spotty!” I didn’t care. I just wanted Fufi back.
Once Fufi saw Panther she came right away. The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining.