boys who solved mysteries or some shit. I had no time for that. Give me Roald Dahl. James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. That was my fix.
I had to fight to convince my mom to get the Narnia books for me. She didn’t like them.
“This lion,” she said, “he is a false God—a false idol! You remember what happened when Moses came down from the mountain after he got the tablets…”
“Yes, Mom,” I explained, “but the lion is a Christ figure. Technically, he is Jesus. It’s a story to explain Jesus.”
She wasn’t comfortable with that. “No, no. No false idols, my friend.”
Eventually I wore her down. That was a big win.
If my mother had one goal, it was to free my mind. My mother spoke to me like an adult, which was unusual. In South Africa, kids play with kids and adults talk to adults. The adults supervise you, but they don’t get down on your level and talk to you. My mom did. All the time. I was like her best friend. She was always telling me stories, giving me lessons, Bible lessons especially. She was big into Psalms. I had to read Psalms every day. She would quiz me on it. “What does the passage mean? What does it mean to you? How do you apply it to your life?” That was every day of my life. My mom did what school didn’t. She taught me how to think.
—
The end of apartheid was a gradual thing. It wasn’t like the Berlin Wall where one day it just came down. Apartheid’s walls cracked and crumbled over many years. Concessions were made here and there, some laws were repealed, others simply weren’t enforced. There came a point, in the months before Mandela’s release, when we could live less furtively. It was then that my mother decided we needed to move. She felt we had grown as much as we could hiding in our tiny flat in town.
The country was open now. Where would we go? Soweto came with its burdens. My mother still wanted to get out from the shadow of her family. My mother also couldn’t walk with me through Soweto without people saying, “There goes that prostitute with a white man’s child.” In a black area she would always be seen as that. So, since my mom didn’t want to move to a black area and couldn’t afford to move to a white area, she decided to move to a colored area.
Eden Park was a colored neighborhood adjacent to several black townships on the East Rand. Half-colored and half-black, she figured, like us. We’d be camouflaged there. It didn’t work out that way; we never fit in at all. But that was her thinking when we made the move. Plus it was a chance to buy a home—our own home. Eden Park was one of those “suburbs” that are actually out on the edge of civilization, the kind of place where property developers have said, “Hey, poor people. You can live the good life, too. Here’s a house. In the middle of nowhere. But look, you have a yard!” For some reason the streets in Eden Park were named after cars: Jaguar Street. Ferrari Street. Honda Street. I don’t know if that was a coincidence or not, but it’s funny because colored people in South Africa are known for loving fancy cars. It was like living in a white neighborhood with all the streets named after varietals of fine wine.
I remember moving out there in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d never seen, seeing people I’d never seen. It was flat, not many trees, the same dusty red-clay dirt and grass as Soweto but with proper houses and paved roads and a sense of suburbia to it. Ours was a tiny house at the bend in the road right off Toyota Street. It was modest and cramped inside, but walking in I thought, Wow. We are really living. It was crazy to have my own room. I didn’t like it. My whole life I’d slept in a room with my mom or on the floor with my cousins. I was used to having other human beings right next to me, so I slept in my mom’s bed most nights.
There was no stepfather in the picture yet, no baby brother crying in the night. It was me and her, alone. There was this sense of the