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than your sibling, their arrival doesn’t change much for you. I wasn’t changing diapers; I was
out playing arcade games at the shop, running around the neighborhood.
The main thing that marked Andrew’s birth for me was our first trip to meet Abel’s
family during the Christmas holidays. They lived in Tzaneen, a town in Gazankulu, what had
been the Tsonga homeland under apartheid. Tzaneen has a tropical climate, hot and humid.
The white farms nearby grow some of the most amazing fruit—mangoes, lychees, the most
beautiful bananas you’ve ever seen in your life. That’s where all the fruit we export to Europe
comes from. But on the black land twenty minutes down the road, the soil has been
decimated by years of overfarming and overgrazing. Abel’s mother and his sisters were all
traditional, stay-at-home moms, and Abel and his younger brother, who was a policeman,
supported the family. They were all very kind and generous and accepted us as part of the
family right away.
Tsonga culture, I learned, is extremely patriarchal. We’re talking about a world where
women must bow when they greet a man. Men and women have limited social interactions.
The men kill the animals, and the women cook the food. Men are not even allowed in the
kitchen. As a nine-year-old boy, I thought this was fantastic. I wasn’t allowed to do anything.
At home my mom was forever making me do chores—wash the dishes, sweep the house—but
when she tried to do that in Tzaneen, the women wouldn’t allow it.
“Trevor, make your bed,” my mom would say.
“No, no, no, no,” Abel’s mother would protest. “Trevor must go outside and play.”
I was made to run off and have fun while my girl step-cousins had to clean the house and
help the women cook. I was in heaven.
My mother loathed every moment of being there. For Abel, a firstborn son who was
bringing home his own firstborn son, this trip was a huge deal. In the homelands, the
firstborn son almost becomes the father/husband by default because the dad is off working in
the city. The firstborn son is the man of the house. He raises his siblings. His mom treats him
with a certain level of respect as the dad’s surrogate. Since this was Abel’s big homecoming
with Andrew, he expected my mother to play her traditional role, too. But she refused.
The women in Tzaneen had a multitude of jobs during the day. They prepared breakfast,
prepared tea, prepared lunch, did the washing and the cleaning. The men had been working
all year in the city to support the family, so this was their vacation, more or less. They were at
leisure, waited on by the women. They might slaughter a goat or something, do whatever
manly tasks needed to be done, but then they would go to an area that was only for men and
hang out and drink while the women cooked and cleaned. But my mom had been working in
the city all year, too, and Patricia Noah didn’t stay in anyone’s kitchen. She was a freeroaming
spirit. She insisted on walking to the village, going where the men hung out, talking
to the men as equals.
The whole tradition of women bowing to the men, my mom found that absurd. But she
didn’t refuse to do it. She overdid it. She made a mockery of it. The other women would bow
before men with this polite little curtsy. My mom would go down and cower, groveling in the
dirt like she was worshipping a deity, and she’d stay down there for a long time, like a really
long time, long enough to make everyone very uncomfortable. That was my mom. Don’t fight
the system. Mock the system. To Abel, it looked like his wife didn’t respect him. Every other
man had some docile girl from the village, and here he’d come with this modern woman, a