653289528350

I didn’t know where to go.
I looked over at the colored corner. I was staring at the most notorious, most violent
prison gang in South Africa. I looked like them, but I wasn’t them. I couldn’t go over there
doing my fake gangster shit and have them discover I was a fraud. No, no, no. That game was
over, my friend. The last thing I needed was colored gangsters up against me.
But then what if I went to the black corner? I know that I’m black and I identify as black,
but I’m not a black person on the face of it, so would the black guys understand why I was
walking over? And what kind of shit would I start by going there? Because going to the black
corner as a perceived colored person might piss off the colored gangs even more than going to
the colored corner as a fake colored person. Because that’s what had happened to me my
entire life. Colored people would see me hanging out with blacks, and they’d confront me,
want to fight me. I saw myself starting a race war in the holding cell.
“Hey! Why are you hanging out with the blacks?”
“Because I am black.”
“No, you’re not. You’re colored.”
“Ah, yes. I know it looks that way, friend, but let me explain. It’s a funny story, actually.
My father is white and my mother is black and race is a social construct, so…”
That wasn’t going to work. Not here.
All of this was happening in my head in an instant, on the fly. I was doing crazy
calculations, looking at people, scanning the room, assessing the variables. If I go here, then
this. If I go there, then that. My whole life was flashing before me—the playground at school,
the spaza shops in Soweto, the streets of Eden Park—every time and every place I ever had to
be a chameleon, navigate between groups, explain who I was. It was like the high school
cafeteria, only it was the high school cafeteria from hell because if I picked the wrong table I
might get beaten or stabbed or raped. I’d never been more scared in my life. But I still had to
pick. Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides,
but eventually life will force you to pick a side.
That day I picked white. They just didn’t look like they could hurt me. It was a handful of
average, middle-aged white dudes. I walked over to them. We hung out for a while, chatted a
bit. They were mostly in for white-collar crimes, money schemes, fraud and racketeering.
They’d be useless if anyone came over looking to start trouble; they’d get their asses kicked as
well. But they weren’t going to do anything to me. I was safe.
Luckily the time went by fairly quickly. I was in there for only an hour before I was called
up to court, where a judge would either let me go or send me to prison to await trial. As I was
leaving, one of the white guys reached over to me. “Make sure you don’t come back down
here,” he said. “Cry in front of the judge; do whatever you have to do. If you go up and get
sent back down here, your life will never be the same.”
Up in the courtroom, I found my lawyer waiting. My cousin Mlungisi was there, too, in
the gallery, ready to post my bail if things went my way.
The bailiff read out my case number, and the judge looked up at me.
“How are you?” he said.
I broke down. I’d been putting on this tough-guy facade for nearly a week, and I just
couldn’t do it anymore.