“Awunakuvumela umntana womlungu ame ngaphandle. The family would see me and invite me in. It didn’t matter if we knew the deceased or not. Neighbors and acquaintances eat outside in the yard and in the street, and the family eats indoors.Įvery funeral I ever went to, I ate indoors. Usually you get a cow and slaughter it and your neighbors come over and help you cook. I think people felt like the dead person was more important because a white person had come to the funeral.Īfter a funeral, the mourners all go to the house of the surviving family to eat.Ī hundred people might show up, and you’ve got to feed them. Then they’d wave and say, “Oh!” like they were more shocked by me walking in than by the death of their loved ones. I’d go to funerals and I’d walk in and the bereaved would look up and see me and they’d stop crying. They’d seen the white police roll through, but they’d never dealt with a white person face-to-face, ever. What I didn’t understand at the time was that the other kids genuinely had no clue what a white person was.īlack kids in the township didn’t leave the township. Others would run up and try to touch me to see if I was real. Others would call out to their parents to come look. Whenever the kids in the street saw me they’d yell, “Indoda yomlungu!” I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark.Īt the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black-and then there was me.
Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. There were no other mixed kids around so that I could say, “Oh, this happens to us.” It’s because I’m me that’s why this is happening. It was, “Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is Trevor.” It wasn’t, “Trevor doesn’t get beaten because Trevor is white.” I thought of it as having to do with Trevor. I could champion racial justice in our home, or I could enjoy granny’s cookies.Īt that point I didn’t think of the special treatment as having to do with color. I knew my cousins were getting beaten for things that I’d done, but I wasn’t interested in changing my grandmother’s perspective, because that would mean I’d get beaten, too. Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks. She believed if you spare the rod, you spoil the child.īut everyone else said, “No, he’s different,” and they gave me a pass. My mom was the only force I truly feared. If something got broken or if someone was stealing granny’s cookies, it was me. Misbehavior that my cousins would have been punished for, I was given a warning and let off.Īnd I was way naughtier than either of my cousins. My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids. There were so many perks to being “white” in a black family, I can’t even front. “I believe your perception of race is flawed, Grandfather.” “Mastah must always sit in the backseat.” In the car, he insisted on driving me as if he were my chauffeur. My grandfather did, too, only he was even more extreme. My grandmother treated me like I was white. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. “Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said.Ī black child, you hit them and they stay black. He’s the naughtiest child I’ve ever come across in my life.” She found my cousin with a bandage over her ear and my gran crying at the kitchen table. Later that night my mother came home from work. Then she beat the shit out of Mlungisi, too. My grandmother finished up with Bulelwa’s ear and whipped out a belt and she beat the shit out of Bulelwa. My grandmother patched up Bulelwa’s ear and made sure to stop the bleeding.īecause clearly we’d done something we were not supposed to do, and we knew we were going to be punished. There was blood coming out of my cousin’s head. My grandmother came running in from the kitchen. I was operating on my cousin Bulelwa’s ear with a set of matches when I accidentally perforated her eardrum. I was a doctor and they were my patients. One afternoon I was playing with my cousins.