![]() I’ve g ot dozens o pictures o me walking wi th this woman who looks like me but who isn’t my mother. ![]() Queen would walk next to me and act like she was my mother, and my mother would walk a ew steps behind, like she was the maid working or the colored woman. When we wanted to go out to the park, my mom would invite her to go with us. There was a col- ored woman named Queen who lived in our block o fats. She ound a crèche in a colored area where she could leave me while she was at work. So my mom moved me around the world as a colored child. It was illegal t o be mixed (to have a black parent and a white parent), but it was not illegal to be colored (to have two parents who were both colored). My mom, same as she ’d done with her fat and with her maid’s uni- orms, ound the cr acks in the system. When I was two, you’d have thought I was our. When I was one you’d have thought I was two. When I was a newbor n, she could wrap me up and take me anywhere, but very quickly that was I couldn’t walk with my mother, either a light- skinned child with a black woman would raise too many questions. I thought it was a game and kept chasing him. W e were in the park, he was walking a good bit away rom us, and I ran ater him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Peop le started looking. My mother tells me that onc e, when I was a todd ler, my dad tried to go with us. It ’s the Cen- tral Park o Joha nnesburg- beautiul gardens, a zoo, a giant chess- board with human- sized pieces that people would play. My mom and I used to go to Joub ert Park all the time. I we let the house, he’d have to walk across the street rom us. The only time I could be with m y ather was indoors. Where most child ren are proo o their parents’ lov e, I was the proo o their criminality. We’d sneak around and visit my dad when we could. So the three o us ormed a kind o amily, as much as our peculiar situation would allow. And he hadn’t, but once I existed he realized he couldn’t have a son livin g around the corner and not be a part o my lie. “You said that you didn’t want to be involved,” she said. The next week she went to visit him, with no baby. ![]() She’d rented a new fat or hersel in Joubert Park, the neighborhood adjacent to Hillbrow, and that ’s where she took me when she let the hospital. And my mother, true to her word, was prepared or him not to be involved. It just says that I’m rom another country. And it doesn’t say that I’m Swiss, which the government wouldn’t allow. So my birth certicate doesn’t say that I’m Xhosa, which tech- nically I am. My mother lied and said I was born in Ka- Ngwane, the semi- sovereign homelan d or Swazi people living in South Arica. Under apartheid, the government labeled everything on your birth certicate: race, tribe, nationality. They probably knew she was lying, but they accepted it because they needed an explanation. “His ather is rom Swaziland,” my mother said, reerring to the tiny, landlocke d kingdom in the west o South Arica.
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