653289528350

family in Soweto, my mom had no more freedom than she’d had in Transkei, so she ran away.
She ran all the way down to the train station and jumped on a train and disappeared into the
city, determined to sleep in public restrooms and rely on the kindness of prostitutes until she
could make her own way in the world.
—
My mother never sat me down and told me the whole story of her life in Transkei. She’d give
me little bursts, random details, stories of having to keep her wits about her to avoid getting
raped by strange men in the village. She’d tell me these things and I’d be like, Lady, clearly
you do not know what kind of stories to be telling a ten-year-old.
My mom told me these things so that I’d never take for granted how we got to where we
were, but none of it ever came from a place of self-pity. “Learn from your past and be better
because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let
the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.” And she never was. The
deprivations of her youth, the betrayals of her parents, she never complained about any of it.
Just as she let the past go, she was determined not to repeat it: my childhood would bear
no resemblance to hers. She started with my name. The names Xhosa families give their
children always have a meaning, and that meaning has a way of becoming self-fulfilling. You
have my cousin, Mlungisi. “The Fixer.” That’s who he is. Whenever I got into trouble he was
the one trying to help me fix it. He was always the good kid, doing chores, helping around the
house. You have my uncle, the unplanned pregnancy, Velile. “He Who Popped Out of
Nowhere.” And that’s all he’s done his whole life, disappear and reappear. He’ll go off on a
drinking binge and then pop back up out of nowhere a week later.
Then you have my mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. “She Who Gives Back.” That’s
what she does. She gives and gives and gives. She did it even as a girl in Soweto. Playing in the
streets she would find toddlers, three- and four-year-olds, running around unsupervised all
day long. Their fathers were gone and their mothers were drunks. My mom, who was only six
or seven herself, used to round up the abandoned kids and form a troop and take them
around to the shebeens. They’d collect empties from the men who were passed out and take
the bottles to where you could turn them in for a deposit. Then my mom would take that
money, buy food in the spaza shops, and feed the kids. She was a child taking care of
children.
When it was time to pick my name, she chose Trevor, a name with no meaning
whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family. It’s not even a Biblical name. It’s just
a name. My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate. She wanted me to be free to go
anywhere, do anything, be anyone.
She gave me the tools to do it as well. She taught me English as my first language. She
read to me constantly. The first book I learned to read was the book. The Bible. Church was
where we got most of our other books, too. My mom would bring home boxes that white
people had donated—picture books, chapter books, any book she could get her hands on.
Then she signed up for a subscription program where we got books in the mail. It was a series
of how-to books. How to Be a Good Friend. How to Be Honest. She bought a set of
encyclopedias, too; it was fifteen years old and way out of date, but I would sit and pore