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couldn’t afford anything but a state attorney. He was going to go stand in the dock, unable to
speak or understand English, and everyone in the courtroom was going to assume the worst
of him. He was going to go to prison for a while and then be set free with the same nothing he
had going in. If I had to guess, he was around thirty-five, forty years old, staring down
another thirty-five, forty years of the same.
—
The day of my hearing came. I said goodbye to my new friend and wished him the best. Then
I was handcuffed and put in the back of a police van and driven to the courthouse to meet my
fate. In South African courts, to minimize your exposure and your opportunities for escape,
the holding cell where you await your hearing is a massive pen below the courtroom; you
walk up a set of stairs into the dock rather than being escorted through the corridors. What
happens in the holding cell is you’re mixed in with the people who’ve been in prison awaiting
trial for weeks and months. It’s a weird mix, everything from white-collar criminals to guys
picked up on traffic stops to real, hardcore criminals covered with prison tattoos. It’s like the
cantina scene from Star Wars, where the band’s playing music and Han Solo’s in the corner
and all of the bad guys and bounty hunters from all over the universe are hanging out—a
wretched hive of scum and villainy, only there’s no music and there’s no Han Solo.
I was with these people for only a brief window of time, but in that moment I saw the
difference between prison and jail. I saw the difference between criminals and people who’ve
committed crimes. I saw the hardness in people’s faces. I thought back on how naive I’d been
just hours before, thinking jail wasn’t so bad and I could handle it. I was now truly afraid of
what might happen to me.
When I walked into that holding pen, I was a smooth-skinned, fresh-faced young man. At
the time, I had a giant Afro, and the only way to control it was to have it tied back in this
ponytail thing that looked really girly. I looked like Maxwell. The guards closed the door
behind me, and this creepy old dude yelled out in Zulu from the back, “Ha, ha, ha! Hhe
madoda! Angikaze ngibone indoda enhle kangaka! Sizoba nobusuku obuhle!” “Yo, yo, yo!
Damn, guys. I’ve never seen a man this beautiful before. It’s gonna be a good night tonight!”
Fuuuuuuuuuck.
Right next to me as I walked in was a young man having a complete meltdown, talking to
himself, bawling his eyes out. He looked up and locked eyes with me, and I guess he thought
I looked like a kindred soul he could talk to. He came straight at me and started crying about
how he’d been arrested and thrown in jail and the gangs had stolen his clothes and his shoes
and raped him and beat him every day. He wasn’t some ruffian. He was well-spoken,
educated. He’d been waiting for a year for his case to be heard; he wanted to kill himself. That
guy put the fear of God in me.
I looked around the holding cell. There were easily a hundred guys in there, all of them
spread out and huddled into their clearly and unmistakably defined racial groups: a whole
bunch of black people in one corner, the colored people in a different corner, a couple of
Indians off to themselves, and a handful of white guys off to one side. The guys who’d been
with me in the police van, the second we walked in, they instinctively, automatically, walked
off to join the groups they belonged to. I froze.