Thurs /Friday, Feb 11/12 Concluding Born a Crime

 

Patricia Noah, Trevor's mom

We are going to conclude Born a Crime, culminating with a violent incident that transformed the family's lives. 

Part 1: Below is a synopsis of what has transpired, before this culminating incident.

1. Trevor's mom had married Abel, and when Trevor was nine years old, his step-brother, Andrew was born. 

2. Trevor's life was unaffected for the most part with the arrival of Andrew. 

3. After a visit to Abel's parent's home, however, there was a shift in the family dynamics. 

4. The relationship between Patricia and Abel became strained as they were on two opposite sides of a shifting cultural view. 

5. She was a free spirit whereas his tradition taught him to reign in his wife. Eventually, this relationship soured even more. 

6.He grew violent and hit her after a drinking spree one night. The police would hear none of it and blew it off casually.

7.  Patricia moved away to Trevor's grandmother place to live there.

8.  Abel convinced her to come back to live with him with the help of her mother who had been abused by her husband as well. 

9. This relationship soured, even more, the violence became too much to bear and spilled over to Trevor after their family business, Mighty Mechanics, Abel's garage, collapsed. 

10. Trevor moved out, and so did Patricia, but not in the way you would imagine.

11. She built a shack outside their house in Highlands North, a jab at Abel's public persona he wished to keep unblemished.

12.  She and Abel had a second son, Isaac when she was 44 years old even after having her tubes tied. Hence the name Isaac.  (Bonus 100 points for anyone who can make the Biblical connection as to why Patricia chose the name Isaac; send in an e-mail.)

15.Eventually, she got fed up with living with Abel, because of his drinking problem and physical abuse and ended up leaving him. 

16.She bought yet another house in Highlands North where she met someone else and moved on. 

17. Abel could not see his children any more.

18.  At the time, Trevor Noah shows were gaining popularity, and he was becoming increasingly famous. 

19. One day, when Patricia, Andrew, Isaac, and their new extended family were on their way back home from church, they found an alcohol-fueled Abel waiting with a gun. 

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PART 2:  Flashback to when Patricia was still with Abel

Thought to consider. Why did Patricia not leave?

“This thing?” I told her. “This dysfunctional thing? I won’t be a part of it. I can’t live this life with you. I refuse. You’ve made your decision. Good luck with your life. I’m going to live mine.”

 She understood. She didn’t feel betrayed or abandoned at all

“Honey, I know what you’re going through,” she said. “At one point, I had to disown my family to go off and live my own life, too. I understand why you need to do the same.”

So I did. I walked out. I didn’t call. I didn’t visit. Isaac came and I went, and for the life of me I could not understand why she wouldn’t do the same: leave. Just leave.

I didn’t understand what she was going through. I didn’t understand domestic violence. I didn’t understand how adult relationships worked; I’d never even had a girlfriend. I didn’t understand how she could have sex with a man she hated and feared. I didn’t know how easily sex and hatred and fear can intertwine.

I was angry with my mom. I hated him, but I blamed her. I saw Abel as a choice she’d made, a choice she was continuing to make. My whole life, telling me stories about growing up in the homelands, being abandoned by her parents, she had always said, “You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.”

 She never let me see us as victims. We were victims, me and my mom, Andrew and Isaac. Victims of apartheid. Victims of abuse. But I was never allowed to think that way, and I didn’t see her life that way. Cutting my father out of our lives to pacify Abel, that was her choice. Supporting Abel’s workshop was her choice. Isaac was her choice. She had the money, not him. She wasn’t dependent. So in my mind, she was the one making the decision.

It is so easy, from the outside, to put the blame on the woman and say, “You just need to leave.” It’s not like my home was the only home where there was domestic abuse. It’s what I grew up around. I saw it in the streets of Soweto, on TV, in movies. Where does a woman go in a society where that is the norm? When the police won’t help her? When her own family won’t help her? Where does a woman go when she leaves one man who hits her and is just as likely to wind up with another man who hits her, maybe even worse than the first? Where does a woman go when she’s single with three kids and she lives in a society that makes her a pariah for being a manless woman? Where she’s seen as a whore for doing that? Where does she go? What does she do?

But I didn’t comprehend any of that at the time. I was a boy with a boy’s understanding of things. I distinctly remember the last time we argued about it, too. It was sometime after the bicycle, or when she was moving into her shack in the backyard. I was going off, begging her for the thousandth time.

“Why? Why don’t you just leave?” 

She shook her head.

 “Oh, baby. No, no, no. I can’t leave.”

 “Why not?” 

“Because if I leave he’ll kill us.”

 She wasn’t being dramatic. She didn’t raise her voice. She said it totally calm and matter-of-fact, and I never asked her that question again.

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PART 3:

Then one morning I was in bed around ten a.m. and my phone rang. It was on a Sunday. I know it was on a Sunday because everyone else in the family had gone to church and I, quite happily, had not. The days of endlessly schlepping back and forth to church were no longer my problem, and I was lazily sleeping in. The irony of my life is that whenever church is involved is when shit goes wrong, like getting kidnapped by violent minibus drivers. I’d always teased my mom about that, too. “This church thing of yours, all this Jesus, what good has come of it?”

 I looked over at my phone. It was flashing my mom’s number, but when I answered, it was Andrew on the other end. He sounded perfectly calm.

“Hey, Trevor, it’s Andrew.”

 “Hey.”

 “How are you?”

 “Good. What’s up?” 

“Are you busy?”

 “I’m sort of sleeping. Why?”

 “Mom’s been shot.” 

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Okay, so there were two strange things about the call.

First, why would he ask me if I was busy? Let’s start there. When your mom’s been shot, the first line out of your mouth should be “Mom’s been shot.” Not “How are you?” Not “Are you busy?” That confused me. The second weird thing was when he said, “Mom’s been shot,” I didn’t ask, “Who shot her?” I didn’t have to. He said, “Mom’s been shot,” and my mind automatically filled in the rest: “Abel shot mom.”

“Where are you now?” I said.

 “We’re at Linksfield Hospital.”

 “Okay, I’m on my way.” I jumped out of bed, ran down the corridor, and banged on Mlungisi’s door.

 “Dude, my mom’s been shot! She’s in the hospital.”

 He jumped out of bed, too, and we got in the car and raced to the hospital, which luckily was only fifteen minutes away. At that point, I was upset but not terrified. Andrew had been so calm on the phone, no crying, no panic in his voice, so I was thinking, She must be okay. It must not be that bad. I called him back from the car to find out more.

 “Andrew, what happened?”

 “We were on our way home from church,” he said, again totally calm. “And Dad was waiting for us at the house, and he got out of his car and started shooting.”

“But where? Where did he shoot her?”

 “He shot her in her leg.”

 “Oh, okay,” I said, relieved.

 “And then he shot her in the head.”

 When he said that, my body just let go. I remember the exact traffic light I was at. For a moment there was a complete vacuum of sound, and then I cried tears like I had never cried before. I collapsed in heaving sobs and moans. I cried as if every other thing I’d cried for in my life had been a waste of crying. I cried so hard that if my present crying self could go back in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, “That shit’s not worth crying for.” My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn’t me feeling sorry for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express that pain in any other way, shape, or form. She was my mom. She was my teammate. It had always been me and her together, me and her against the world. When Andrew said, “shot her in the head,” I broke in two.

The light changed. I couldn’t even see the road, but I drove through the tears, thinking, Just get there, just get there, just get there. We pulled up to the hospital, and I jumped out of the car. There was an outdoor sitting area by the entrance to the emergency room. Andrew was standing there waiting for me, alone, his clothes smeared with blood. He still looked perfectly calm, completely stoic. Then the moment he looked up and saw me he broke down and started bawling. It was like he’d been holding it together the whole morning and then everything broke loose at once and he lost it. I ran to him and hugged him and he cried and cried. His cry was different from mine, though. My cry was one of pain and anger. His cry was one of helplessness.

I turned and ran into the emergency room. My mom was there in triage on a gurney. The doctors were stabilizing her. Her whole body was soaked in blood. There was a hole in her face, a gaping wound above her lip, part of her nose gone. She was as calm and serene as I’d ever seen her. She could still open one eye, and she turned and looked up at me and saw the look of horror on my face.

 “It’s okay, baby,” she whispered, barely able to speak with the blood in her throat.

 “It’s not okay.”

 “No, no, I’m okay, I’m okay. Where’s Andrew? Where’s your brother?”

 “He’s outside.”

 “Go to Andrew.”

“You’re not fine, you’re—” 

“Shhhhhh. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. Go to your brother. Your brother needs you.”

 The doctors kept working, and there was nothing I could do to help her. I went back outside to be with Andrew. We sat down together, and he told me the story. They were coming home from church, a big group, my mom and Andrew and Isaac, her new husband and his children and a whole bunch of his extended family, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. They had just pulled into the driveway when Abel pulled up and got out of his car. He had his gun. He looked right at my mother.

 “You’ve stolen my life,” he said. “You’ve taken everything away from me. Now I’m going to kill all of you.” 

Andrew stepped in front of his father. He stepped right in front of the gun.

 “Don’t do this, Dad, please. You’re drunk. Just put the gun away.”

 Abel looked down at his son. “No,” he said. “I’m killing everybody, and if you don’t walk away I will shoot you first.”

 Andrew stepped aside.

 “His eyes were not lying,” he told me. “He had the eyes of the Devil. In that moment I could tell my father was gone.”

For all the pain I felt that day, in hindsight, I have to imagine that Andrew’s pain was far greater than mine. My mom had been shot by a man I despised. If anything, I felt vindicated; I’d been right about Abel all along. I could direct my anger and hatred toward him with no shame or guilt whatsoever. But Andrew’s mother had been shot by Andrew’s father, a father he loved. How does he reconcile his love with that situation? How does he carry on loving both sides? Both sides of himself?

 Isaac was only four years old. He didn’t fully comprehend what was happening, and as Andrew stepped aside, Isaac started crying.

 “Daddy, what are you doing? Daddy, what are you doing?”

 “Isaac, go to your brother,” Abel said.

 Isaac ran over to Andrew, and Andrew held him.

 Then Abel raised his gun and he started shooting. My mother jumped in front of the gun to protect everyone, and that’s when she took the first bullet, not in her leg but in her butt cheek. She collapsed, and as she fell to the ground she screamed. “Run!”

 Abel kept shooting and everyone ran. They scattered. My mom was struggling to get back to her feet when Abel walked up and stood over her. He pointed the gun at her head point-blank, execution-style. Then he pulled the trigger. Nothing. The gun misfired. Click! He pulled the trigger again, same thing. Then again and again. Click! Click! Click! Click! Four times he pulled the trigger, and four times the gun misfired. Bullets were popping out of the ejection port, falling out of the gun, falling down on my mom and clattering to the ground. 

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I kept asking Andrew questions, trying to get more details. Then, as we were talking, a nurse came outside looking for me.

 “Are you the family?” she asked. 

“Yes.”

 “Sir, there’s a problem. Your mother was speaking a bit at first. She’s stopped now, but from what we’ve gathered she doesn’t have health insurance.”

 “What? No, no. That can’t be true. I know my mom has health insurance.” She didn’t. As it turned out, a few months prior, she’d decided, “This health insurance is a scam. I never get sick. I’m going to cancel it.” So now she had no health insurance.

 “We can’t treat your mother here,” the nurse said. “If she doesn’t have insurance we have to send her to a state hospital.”

 “State hospital?! What—no! You can’t. My mom’s been shot in the head. You’re going to put her back on a gurney? Send her out in an ambulance? She’ll die. You need to treat her right now.”

 “Sir, we can’t. We need a form of payment.” “I’m your form of payment. I’ll pay.” “Yes, people say that, but without a guarantee—” I pulled out my credit card. “Here,” I said. “Take this. I’ll pay. I’ll pay for everything.”

 “Sir, hospital can be very expensive.” “I don’t care.” “Sir, I don’t think you understand. Hospital can be really expensive.”

 “Lady, I have money. I’ll pay anything. Just help us.”

 “Sir, you don’t understand. We have to do so many tests. One test alone could cost two, three thousand rand.”

 “Three thousan—what? Lady, this is my mother’s life we’re talking about. I’ll pay.”

 “Sir, you don’t understand. Your mother has been shot. In her brain. She’ll be in ICU. One night in ICU could cost you fifteen, twenty thousand rand.”

 “Lady, are you not listening to me? This is my mother’s life. This is her life. Take the money. Take all of it. I don’t care.”

 “Sir! You don’t understand. I’ve seen this happen. Your mother could be in the ICU for weeks. This could cost you five hundred thousand, six hundred thousand. Maybe even millions. You’ll be in debt for the rest of your life.”

 I’m not going to lie to you: I paused. I paused hard. In that moment, what I heard the nurse saying was, “All of your money will be gone,” and then I started to think, Well…what is she, fifty? That’s pretty good, right? She’s lived a good life. I genuinely did not know what to do. I stared at the nurse as the shock of what she’d said sunk in. My mind raced through a dozen different scenarios. What if I spend that money and then she dies anyway? Do I get a refund? I actually imagined my mother, as frugal as she was, waking up from a coma and saying, “You spent how much? You idiot. You should have saved that money to look after your brothers.” And what about my brothers? They would be my responsibility now. I would have to raise the family, which I couldn’t do if I was millions in debt, and it was always my mother’s solemn vow that raising my brothers was the one thing I would never have to do. Even as my career took off, she’d refused any help I offered. “I don’t want you paying for your mother the same way I had to pay for mine,” she’d say. “I don’t want you raising your brothers the same way Abel had to raise his.” My mother’s greatest fear was that I would end up paying the black tax, that I would get trapped by the cycle of poverty and violence that came before me. She had always promised me that I would be the one to break that cycle. I would be the one to move forward and not back. And as I looked at that nurse outside the emergency room, I was petrified that the moment I handed her my credit card, the cycle would just continue and I’d get sucked right back in. People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn. I pressed my credit card into the nurse’s hand. “Do whatever you have to do. Just please help my mom.” 

We spent the rest of the day in limbo, waiting, not knowing, pacing around the hospital, family members stopping by. Several hours later, the doctor finally came out of the emergency room to give us an update.

 “What’s happening?” I asked.

 “Your mother is stable,” he said. “She’s out of surgery.”

 “Is she going to be okay?” He thought for a moment about what he was going to say. “I don’t like to use this word,” he said, “because I’m a man of science and I don’t believe in it. But what happened to your mother today was a miracle. I never say that, because I hate it when people say it, but I don’t have any other way to explain this.” The bullet that hit my mother in the butt, he said, was a through-and through. It went in, came out, and didn’t do any real damage. The other bullet went through the back of her head, entering below the skull at the top of her neck. It missed the spinal cord by a hair, missed the medulla oblongata, and traveled through her head just underneath the brain, missing every major vein, artery, and nerve. With the trajectory the bullet was on, it was headed straight for her left eye socket and would have blown out her eye, but at the last second it slowed down, hit her cheekbone instead, shattered her cheekbone, ricocheted off, and came out through her left nostril. On the gurney in the emergency room, the blood had made the wound look much worse than it was. The bullet took off only a tiny flap of skin on the side of her nostril, and it came out clean, with no bullet fragments left inside. She didn’t even need surgery. They stopped the bleeding, stitched her up in back, stitched her up in front, and let her heal. “There was nothing we can do, because there’s nothing we need to do,” the doctor said. My mother was out of the hospital in four days. She was back at work in seven. —

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After an hour or so of waiting, she opened her unbandaged eye. The second she did, I lost it. I started bawling. She asked for some water and I gave her a cup, and she leaned forward a bit to sip through the straw. I kept bawling and bawling and bawling. I couldn’t control myself.

 “Shh,” she said. “Don’t cry, baby. Shhhhh. Don’t cry.”

 “How can I not cry, Mom? You almost died.”

 “No, I wasn’t going to die. I wasn’t going to die. It’s okay. I wasn’t going to die.”

 “But I thought you were dead.” I kept bawling and bawling. “I thought I’d lost you.”

 “No, baby. Baby, don’t cry. Trevor. Trevor, listen. Listen to me. Listen.”

 “What?” I said, tears streaming down my face. 

“My child, you must look on the bright side.”

 “What? What are you talking about, ‘the bright side’? Mom, you were shot in the face. There is no bright side.”

 “Of course there is. Now you’re officially the best-looking person in the family.”

 She broke out in a huge smile and started laughing. Through my tears, I started laughing, too. I was bawling my eyes out and laughing hysterically at the same time. We sat there and she squeezed my hand and we cracked each other up the way we always did, mother and son, laughing together through the pain in an intensive-care recovery room on a bright and sunny and beautiful day.

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Bonus: You may substitute one of your missing writing assignments for the following by responding in a minimum of 200 words.

What is the black tax and how have we something similar in the United States?