Born a Crime

Before Chapter 10 begins, Noah talks about his mom was always trying to teach him about women when he was growing up:

She was so preoccupied with teaching me how to be a man that she never taught me how to be a boy. How to talk to a girl or pass a girl a note in class—there was none of that. She only told me about adult things. She would even lecture me about sex. I was a kid, that would get very awkward. ‘Trevor, don’t forget: You’re having sex with a woman in her mind before you’re having sex with her in her vagina’ (127).

When Chapter 10 begins, Noah recalls being 12 years old and transferring from the Catholic school to H.A. Jack primary school. They didn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day in Catholic school, so this Valentine’s Day is his first time. He doesn’t initially understand how it works, but his friends tell him that he has to ask a girl to be his Valentine. They all convince him to ask the only other colored person in the school, Maylene. He asks her underneath the McDonald's arch, and she says "yes" and kisses him.

On Valentine’s Day Noah goes to school with flowers, a teddy bear, and a card for Maylene. She takes his gifts but tells him that she can no longer be his Valentine because she’s with Leonardo now, a white, good-looking, popular guy. Noah recalls: “As devastated as I was, I understood why Maylene made the choice that she did. I would have picked Leonardo over me, too” (133).

Before Chapter 11 begins, Noah relates his struggle, both economically and socially: “Petrol for the car, like food, was an expense we could not avoid, but my mom could get more mileage out of a tank of petrol than any human who has ever been on a road in the history of automobiles” (135). He tells the anecdote of how his mom used to turn the car off at stop lights and make him push the car, inch by inch in a gridlock, just to conserve petrol.

When Chapter 11 opens, Noah recalls starting eighth grade at Sandringham High School, a “Model C school, which meant it was a mix of government and private, similar to charter schools in America” (138). Sandringham attracts a culturally and socio-economically diverse range of students from all over. People still tend to group themselves by color, which means Noah faces the same dilemma he did as his previous school: “Where was I supposed to go? Even with so many different groups to choose from, I wasn’t a natural constituent of any particular one. I obviously wasn’t Indian or Chinese. The colored kids would shit on me all the time for being too Black” (138).

South Africans don’t have cafeterias; rather, they buy food from a “tuck shop, a little canteen” (138), and then eat their food wherever they like. People buy their lunch from the tuck shop after the daily assembly, but there are terribly long lines. The longer a person stands in line, the less time they have to eat. Noah ends up becoming the tuck-shop guy “out of necessity" (39). He explains: "I needed a way to fit in. I also needed money, a way to buy the same snacks and do the things that the other kids were doing” (39). As the tuck-shop guy, Noah takes food orders from fellow students and then races to the front of the tuck-shop line. He buys the food, delivers it the student, and then takes a percentage of whatever that student was going to spend.

He relates his experience as a tuck-shop clerk:

I was an overnight success. Fat guys were my number-one customers. They loved food, but couldn’t run. I had all these rich, fat white kids, who were like, "This is fantastic! My parents spoil me, I’ve got money, and now I’ve got a way I can get food without having to work for it—and I still get my break." I had so many customers I was turning away kids (140).

In this way, Noah makes a decent living while also making friends across racial divides.

Before Chapter 12 begins, Noah reminisces about regret:

I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in my life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to (143).

Chapter 12 opens with Noah recounting his high school years: “In high school, the attention of girls was not an affliction I suffered from. I wasn’t the hot guy in class. I wasn’t even the cute guy in class. I was ugly” (145). He has acne and can’t afford a decent haircut or fashionable clothes. He considers himself a funny guy, but realizes that “cool guys get girls, and funny guys get to hang out with the cool guys with their girls” (146). He is friends with a beautiful girl named Johanna, but only because they share a similar past of going to the same schools. Noah considers Johanna’s best friend, Zaheera, to be stunning, a colored version of Salma Hayek. Noah has a huge crush on Zaheera, and lucky for him, not many guys are after her because she’s so shy.

He becomes close friends with Zaheera: “At a certain point I decided to map out a strategy. I decided to be best friends with Zaheera and stay friends with her long enough to as her to the matric dance, what we call our senior prom. Mind you, we were in grade nine at this point” (147). He ends up getting her phone number, and they talk nearly every day. Then one day he notices that Zaheera hasn’t been at school and he can’t get ahold of her. Johanna tells him that Zaheera’s dad got a job in America and they moved. She says that Zaheera was super sad to leave because apparently, she had a huge crush on Noah and was always waiting for him to ask her out. He feels heartbroken by not only Zaheera’s absence, but by the missed opportunity.

Before Chapter 13 begins, Noah explains how he came to live in a white neighborhood:

In every nice neighborhood there’s the one white family that Does Not Give a Fuck. You know the family I’m talking about. They don’t do their lawn, don’t paint the fence, don’t fix the rook. Their house is shit. My mom found that house and bought it, which is how she snuck a Black family into a place as white as Highlands North (151).

The neighborhood is mostly Jewish families, and Noah is literally the “only black kid in the white suburb” (151). He says the only way he ever made friends was by befriending the children of domestic workers.

Chapter 13 opens with Noah reminiscing about Teddy, his best friend at Sandringham: “Teddy and I got along like a house on fire, one of those friends where you start hanging out and from that day forward you’re never apart. We were naughty as shit, too. With Teddy, I’d finally met someone who made me feel normal” (153). Teddy’s mom is a domestic worker, and they often take a 40-minute walk between his house and Teddy’s house in a wealthy suburb near their school. On the weekends they hang out at the mall despite not having any money to buy things. They soon find out that after the mall closes, a certain stationary shop uses a metal gate instead of a door, meaning if they put their arms through the gate they can pull out alcohol-filled chocolates: “We’d hit the jackpot. We started going back again and again to steal more” (154). However, one Sunday night, a security guard catches them. They run from the guard but get split up. Noah escapes, but Teddy gets caught.

The next day at school Noah is called into the principal’s office. The head of mall security and two police officers are in the office. They tell Noah that Teddy was caught stealing, and they want to know if Noah knows anything about it. He says "no," but then they show him a videotape of the event. Noah is terrified, thinking they will certainly recognize him on the video and he’ll be caught. Instead of recognizing that it’s Noah on the video next to Teddy, they ask him if he knows of any white kids that Teddy hangs out with. Noah is dumbfounded that they can’t see that it’s him on screen. He then realizes why they don't recognize him:

Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a black-and-white screen next to a Black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera has to pick, it picks me as white […]. In this video, there was a Black person and a white person (158).

Noah, although relieved to be off the hook, feels angry and invisible: “These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them” (159).

Before Chapter 14 begins, Noah says that South Africa has 11 official languages: “It’s the Tower of Babel in South Africa. Every single day. Every day you see people completely lost, trying to have conversations and having no idea what the other person is saying […]. The crazy thing is that, somehow, it works. Society functions. Except when it doesn’t” (161).

In the beginning of Chapter 14, Noah discusses how he found entrepreneurial success: “By the end of high school I’d become a mogul. My tuck-shop business had evolved into a mini-empire that included selling pirated CDs I made at home” (163). He says that thanks to the computer his mom bought him, “the Internet, and the fortunate gift of a CD writer from a friend, I was in business” (163). During this time life is good. He’s making lots of money, and despite not having a girlfriend, he has “the naked ones on his computer” (164). Although the matric dance is coming up, he just assumes he isn’t going because he won’t be able to get a date.

He has two middlemen working for him, Tim and Sizwe, who sell his CDs in different areas in exchange for a cut of the profit. He says that Tim is a hyperactive chatterbox with the propensity for lying. Tim tells Noah that if he gets him a better cut on the CDs he’s selling, then he’ll get him a date to the dance with the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen, but Noah is skeptical: “I knew Tim was full of shit, but the thing that makes a con man successful is that he never gives you nothing. He delivers just enough to keep you believing” (167). Tim ends up introducing Noah to Babiki; true to Tim’s word, she is the most beautiful girl Noah has ever seen.

Noah and Babiki hang out a handful of times. She is shy and quiet, but Tim says that she will go to the dance with him. To make himself more attractive for Babiki, Noah relaxes his hair and gets cornrows and buys a new, expensive outfit. He picks Babiki up in a car he borrowed from Abel and they drive to the dance. She is silent the entire ride and refuses to get out once they arrive at the dance. She keeps telling him "no" every time he tries to convince her to leave the car. Eventually Noah’s friends come out to see what’s going on, and one of them discovers that Babiki doesn’t speak English; she speaks Pedi, one of the few languages Noah doesn’t speak. After trying to track down someone that might speak Pedi to no avail, he takes her back home. She kisses him on the mouth before she leaves, which confuses Noah.