Born a Crime: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

In his historical preface, Noah explains that South Africa’s first mixed-race people were born after Dutch colonists raped indigenous hunter-gatherer Khoisan women. Over generations, Khoisan people intermarried with slaves the Dutch imported from around the world, creating the population later known as “colored.” Colonists completely destroyed the original Khoisan population, and colored people have largely lost track of their heritage; they are culturally much closer to white Afrikaners than black natives.

The chapter begins with a “giant mulberry tree growing out of someone’s front yard” on Trevor and Patricia’s street in Eden Park. The neighborhood’s other children pick its berries and play together under it; Trevor has no friends there, even though for the first time he is living in a neighborhood where “everyone looked like me.” He realizes that “it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider”—in joining a world that is not his own, Noah always finds more acceptance among those he is joining than among his own “tribe.”

The apartheid government makes colored people “almost-whites” in order to ensure they align with the existing system rather than siding with blacks. “Colored people would get promoted to white” all the time by applying to the government (which would survey them based on appearance) and by disavowing their families and communities. There is also fluidity among the categories of colored, Indian, and even black—people could be promoted and demoted; sometimes white people can even be demoted to colored. And the colored community is incredibly racist, having been taught “that it was black people who were holding them back.”

So this makes it “weird” for Trevor, who is “colored by complexion but not by culture.” Some colored people hated his blackness (his speaking African languages), while others hate his whiteness (his English education and inability to speak Afrikaans, the predominant colored language).

Once, a colored girl “borrows” Trevor’s bicycle so that an older colored kid could steal it—luckily, Trevor’s cousin Mlungisi manages to find them and retrieve the bicycle. In fact, Trevor is “bullied all the time.” The worst is when some older colored boys start taunting him and throwing mulberries at him under the tree one day while yelling, “Bushie! Bushman!” Trevor runs home in tears and tells his mother, who breaks out into laughter—“out of relief,” she promises, because she is relieved to realize the red liquid covering her son is berry juice and not blood.

Abel comes over soon thereafter—he has not been violent with Trevor or his mother yet, but Trevor is already aware of his temper. Patricia urges Trevor not to tell a drunken Abel the story, but he does anyway, knowing he can use Abel’s anger to get back at his bullies. It works: Abel and Trevor visit the boys at the tree, and Abel beats the “ringleader” with a stick. At first, Trevor is overjoyed, but soon he sees “the look of terror in the boy’s face” and realizes that Abel is “a grown man venting his rage on a twelve-year-old boy.” Abel makes the boy come over and apologize, and Trevor recognizes himself in the boy. Later, Abel and Patricia get into a fight, and the boy’s father comes over. Abel intimidates him, saying, “Don’t fuck with me. I will kill you,” and the man leaves.