Born a Crime: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

As always, Patricia lets nothing stand between her family and church(es) on Sunday; and, as always, Trevor thinks of an excuse to get out of it (even though, this time, he certainly has sins to repent for). This final preface recalls the events of the first chapter, but also foreshadows the end of this chapter, when medicine and Jesus become decisive factors in Patricia’s life.

Trevor sees a parallel between himself, who dresses up for girls, and his mother, who dresses up for Jesus; this recalls his argument that God replaced husbands in Soweto, sustaining women spiritually when men are unavailable due to work or prison.

Trevor and Patricia are both radically independent; neither feels the need for an adult man to round out their family dynamic, and Patricia starts dating him simply because she likes him, not because she needs him. Of course, this contrasts with Abel’s own motivations for dating her—just like with people in the community, he needs to be needed and depended upon, which Patricia does not give him.

Trevor’s gut feeling here foreshadows the gradual dissolution of Abel’s relationship with Patricia and the family, recalling his earlier statement that South Africans’ English manes are chosen for convenience, whereas their native names are self-fulfilling prophecies that represent their personality. He soon sees that Abel’s traditional Tsonga conceptions of gender are fundamentally incompatible with Patricia’s independence, and she is not afraid to point out how ridiculous she finds it that his family effectively treats women as servants.

Abel begins acting out the standard gender roles of Tsonga culture, based on a fundamental belief that he owns his family and thus gets to decide what he wants to do with them. He isolates Patricia in order to consolidate her control over her, but since Trevor is not his biological son, he feels little connection to him.

Abel’s desire for control over the family contrasts with his complete lack of control over himself (or anything at all) when he is drunk, which becomes most of the time; he seems to have no empathy whatsoever for the family and uses escalating violence to control Patricia’s actions. As always, she refuses to live by other people’s rules, and so she has no interest in giving him a second chance or the control that he craves. In fact, she stands her ground on principle, and he attacks her because he is incapable of resolving conflicts, asserting his masculinity, or defining his relationship with her through words or principles. Unable to justify why she owes him complete control over her life, Abel resorts to brute force, which can be seen as a sort of moral cowardice.

Clearly, the South African police have little interest in protecting everyone equally. Even though they have harassed Trevor, demanding bribes and arresting him without solid evidence, when there is obvious proof of Abel’s assault they do nothing, even taking his side and treating him as the victim of a wife audacious enough to report abuse.

One of the most tragic elements of Patricia’s relationship with Abel is that she sincerely invests in him, tries to save his business for him, and is perfectly capable of doing so, while he views her as a piece of property to be owned and controlled. Her trust in Abel even draws the family back into poverty, as they lose their Eden Park home to the “black tax.” Patricia and Abel’s realization about his company’s debts is also a version of this tax, since it shows how black business owners’ inability to learn the rules of the white capitalist economy during apartheid stifles them. On top of this, they start out centuries behind when they are finally allowed to participate in this economy at the end of apartheid, as Trevor discussed in his chapter on the “Cheese Boys.”

Abel is more incensed to lose control of his business than he is to lose his profits; in a sense, he is so stuck on short-term projects and the appearance of control that he cannot act strategically in the long term. This also more fundamentally reflects the lack of knowledge and resources that Trevor sees as one of the main factors locking black South Africans into a cycle of poverty.

Although Patricia’s corporal punishment taught Trevor valuable lessons, he seems to teach her that those lessons are transmissible without violence (and she likely worries about replicating the effects of Abel’s abuse). Trevor’s argument about the transformative potential of love is the central strand in his portrait of his relationship with his mother; she allowed him to succeed by opening worlds that he was not supposed to access, and of course her kind of mutual world-making love stands in opposition to Abel’s controlling, world-restricting, violent conception of love.

Abel’s attacks give Trevor a small taste of the daily terror his mother must endure—but courageously confronts for years, since she is not lucky enough to simply isolate herself from him. Further demonstrating how Abel views family as property, he sees children as nothing more than extensions of their fathers: he treats Andrew well because Andrew is his own son and effectively does not consider Trevor part of the family because Trevor is Robert’s. Patricia’s parental role plays no part in this equation of male “ownership.”

At a certain point, Patricia realizes that Abel poses a threat to her financial future even if she leaves, not to mention the threat he poses to her physical safety; she takes on the traditional male role instead of the female one, and Abel blames her even though she is merely filling in to cover for his own failures. So she is in a double bind: either she lets her family starve (because Abel cannot pay the bills) or she gets blamed for keeping the family afloat. Her resort to prayer suggests that she feels there is nothing more she can do to resolve the situation.

Abel is spiraling out of control in even more domains of his life, as evidenced particularly by his abuse of his workers. While his violence is an attempt to regain control over others, it instead pushes others away, making it even harder for him to control them and frustrating him even further; violence is a self-perpetuating cycle, much like the historical cycles of violent ethnic and racial hierarchy in South Africa among the Dutch, British, coloreds, and various African indigenous groups that Trevor has summarized throughout the book. Whereas Abel cannot discern love from violence, Trevor has already shown that they are opposites, since violence perpetuates the condition of power asymmetry (even if it occasionally changes who is in power) while love allows parties to insist on equality and mutual interest, so thereby “create a new world.”

Abel’s gun—which he is definitely willing to use—suggests that he is falling deeper into his cycle of violence, trying to control the entire world like a “policeman” to cope with his accelerating loss of control over himself. Still unable to see Trevor as anything more than a symbol of the fact that Patricia has not always been “his,” Abel’s masculinity becomes so fragile that he quite literally cannot stand to have Trevor around the house.

The police continue to take Abel’s side, but Patricia insists on continuing to call them for the same reasons she builds the shack: because they may eventually help, and because it allows her to make a point that Abel’s actions are wrong. Yet Abel still sees Patricia’s independence as a sign of his own weakness, although it remains unclear why, given that independence, she is still with him after all this abuse.

In retrospect, Trevor realizes that he was naïve about both relationships and cultural expectations at the time due to his youth and inexperience; this is also, luckily, because his main loving relationship (that with his mother) has been so unconditionally enriching and positive. In hindsight, Trevor now sees why his mother made the decision she did: she was entirely serious about the threat Abel posed and focused more on her safety than her independence. And the fact that domestic violence remains a cultural norm shows how patriarchy remains pervasive after apartheid, intersecting with racial, ethnic, and cultural prejudice; there is an entire distinctive women’s experience of colonialism and apartheid that Trevor can only catch glimpses of (for instance, through realizing this cultural norm, or through his moment of empathy with Babiki at prom).

Patricia’s prediction—and Trevor’s worst fear—tragically comes true. His “raw pain” encompasses various kinds of loss: the loss of his mother’s freedom from Abel, regret at temporarily distancing himself from the family, and of course most of all the loss of his main “teammate,” teacher, and inspiration in life. Trevor respects his mother more than anyone else in the world and thinks that she is the last person in the world who would deserve such a fate, not only because she was an incredible mother but also because of her devotion to God and because she has already overcome so much during and after apartheid, thanks solely to her own fearlessness.

Incredibly, even despite her injuries, Patricia continues to put Trevor’s needs first and worries more about his sanity than her own grave condition.

Patricia is also astonishingly selfless during Abel’s attack, throwing herself in front of her family even though she certainly knows that she is the primary target anyway. He continues to believe that he had an inalienable right to own his family, which Patricia has “taken […] away” by simply pursuing her own freedom. (According to this twisted logic, if the family is “his,” he also has the right to destroy it.) While Isaac is still very young, Andrew is indubitably in the hardest position, especially since he spent so many years trying to stop his father’s violence and genuinely loving him despite it.

Unlike after his previous episodes of violent abuse, Abel shows no signs of remorse but also remains emotionally level; his attempt to kill Patricia is not a crime of passion but rather one of cold, calculated vengeance, because he believes he has been denied his due (an obedient family). Yet again, he conceives love as a legalistic duty rather than an interpersonal feeling, and so has no sense that his abuse would make it justifiable for Patricia to leave him (despite seemingly recognizing and apologizing for his mistakes every time).

Like in the United States and much of the developing world, good medical care is a privilege reserved for the rich in South Africa; paying his mother’s bills is a version of the “black tax” that could threaten to leave him with neither money nor Patricia. But the fact that he considers what she would do shows how successfully she has imprinted her moral values in him; he only ever considers not paying because he knows how much his freedom matters to her.

Astonishingly, Patricia emerges from the shooting almost unscathed; the bullet’s path is so improbable that even the doctor cannot think of a rational explanation. Trevor’s decision to pay her fees and Patricia’s life’s worth of prayers clearly seem to have been rewarded.

Patricia’s response to nearly dying is almost inhumanly optimistic and shows that her resilience is boundless: through humor, she takes one of the worst imaginable human experiences in stride, and the last chapter ends just like the first one, with her and Trevor laughing their way out of a situation that would terrorize almost anyone else.

Even more frightening than Abel’s cold-blooded murder attempt is the fact that he did not seem to be in another one of his out-of-control drunken rages; rather, he had a concrete plan, acted in accord with the most extreme imaginable version of possessive love, and left the situation with a level head and his son. It is difficult to underestimate how traumatizing this must be for Isaac, who understands what he has just seen and yet seems too young to fully process its implications and emotional consequences for his relationships with his parents.

Abel’s fate shows how deeply flawed South Africa’s justice system continues to be after apartheid. It sharply contrasts with those of the people Trevor met in jail, who were invariably charged with much more minor crimes; the Tsonga man who shoplifted video games to feed his family probably received a harsher sentence than Abel, who shot his ex-wife in the head out of spite. Unfortunately, this is unsurprising given how lightly the police took all of Patricia’s earlier domestic violence calls; clearly, those in the legal system are more interested in personal gain and social control than justice.

Patricia appears to have achieved another miracle through prayer: not only did she take a bullet to the head and survive nearly unscathed, but Abel’s gun misfires precisely when he is preparing to murder her. With the experts unable to explain either of these, her devotion finally appears to have been repaid.

The hospital bill seems like a third miracle: while the cost of Patricia’s treatment initially threatened to bankrupt the family, undo all of Trevor’s economic progress, and send them back into poverty, ultimately it is far less than the nurse warned. The book closes with a characteristic exchange between Trevor and Patricia—through religion and humor, she always manages to see the bright side.