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me aside and told me what I was in for.
The way the system works in South Africa is that you’re arrested and held in a cell at the
police station until your bail hearing. At the hearing, the judge looks at your case, hears
arguments from the opposing sides, and then he either dismisses the charges or sets bail and
a trial date. If you can make bail, you pay and go home. But there are all sorts of ways your
bail hearing can go wrong: You get some court-appointed lawyer who hasn’t read your case
and doesn’t know what’s going on. Your family can’t pay your bail. It could even be that the
court’s backed up. “Sorry, we’re too busy. No more hearings today.” It doesn’t matter the
reason. Once you leave jail, you can’t go back to jail. If your situation isn’t resolved that day,
you go to prison to await trial. In prison you’re housed with the people awaiting trial, not with
the general population, but even the awaiting-trial section is incredibly dangerous because
you have people picked up for traffic violations all the way up to proper hardened criminals.
You’re stuck there together, and you can be there for days, weeks, maybe months. It’s the
same way in America. If you’re poor, if you don’t know how the system works, you can slip
through the cracks, and the next thing you know you’re in this weird purgatory where you’re
not in prison but you’re not not in prison. You haven’t been convicted of any crime, but
you’re still locked up and can’t get out.
This cop pulled me aside and said, “Listen, you don’t want to go to your bail hearing.
They’ll give you a state attorney who won’t know what’s going on. He’ll have no time for you.
He’ll ask the judge for a postponement, and then maybe you’ll go free or maybe you won’t.
Trust me, you don’t want to do that. You have the right to stay here for as long as you like.
You want to meet with a lawyer and set yourself up before you go anywhere near a court or a
judge.” He wasn’t giving me this advice out of the goodness of his heart. He had a deal with a
defense attorney, sending him clients in exchange for a kickback. He handed me the
attorney’s business card, I called him, and he agreed to take my case. He told me to stay put
while he handled everything.
Now I needed money, because lawyers, as nice as they are, don’t do anything for free. I
called a friend and asked him if he could ask his dad to borrow some money. He said he’d
handle it. He talked to his dad, and the lawyer got his retainer the next day.
With the lawyer taken care of, I felt like I had things under control. I was feeling pretty
slick. I’d handled the situation, and, most important, Mom and Abel were none the wiser.
When the time came for lights-out a cop came and took my stuff. My belt, my wallet, my
shoelaces.
“Why do you need my shoelaces?”
“So you don’t hang yourself.”
“Right.”
Even when he said that, the gravity of my situation still wasn’t sinking in. Walking to the
station’s holding cell, looking around at the other six guys in there, I was thinking, This is no
big deal. Everything’s gonna be cool. I’m gonna get out of this. I thought that right up until
the moment the cell door clanged shut behind me and the guard yelled, “Lights out!” That’s
when I thought, Oh, shit. This is real.
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