Even when I thought I was liked, I wasn’t. One year I got a brand-new bike during the summer holidays. My cousin Mlungisi and I were taking turns riding around the block. I was riding up our street when this cute colored girl came out to the road and stopped me. She smiled and waved to me sweetly.
“Hey,” she said, “can I ride your bike?”
I was completely shocked. Oh, wow, I thought, I made a friend.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
I got off and she got on and rode about twenty or thirty feet. Some random older kid came running up to the street, she stopped and got off, and he climbed on and rode away. I was so happy that a girl had spoken to me that it didn’t fully sink in that they’d stolen my bicycle. I ran back home, smiling and skipping along. My cousin asked where the bicycle was. I told him.
“Trevor, you’ve been robbed,” he said. “Why didn’t you chase them?”
“I thought they were being nice. I thought I’d made a friend.”
Mlungisi was older, my protector. He ran off and found the kids, and thirty minutes later he came back with my bike.
Things like that happened a lot. I was bullied all the time. The incident at the mulberry tree was probably the worst of them. Late one afternoon I was playing by myself like I always did, running around the neighborhood. This group of five or six colored boys was up the street picking berries off the mulberry tree and eating them. I went over and started picking some to take home for myself. The boys were a few years older than me, around twelve or thirteen. They didn’t talk to me, and I didn’t talk to them. They were speaking to one another in Afrikaans, and I could understand what they were saying. Then one of them, this kid who was the ringleader of the group, walked over. “Mag ek jou moerbeie sien?” “Can I see your mulberries?” My first thought, again, was, Oh, cool. I made a friend. I held up my hand and showed him my mulberries. Then he knocked them out of my hand and smushed them into the ground. The other kids started laughing. I stood there and looked at him a moment. By that point I’d developed thick skin. I was used to being bullied. I shrugged it off and went back to picking berries.
Clearly not getting the reaction he wanted, this kid started cursing me out. “Fok weg, jou onnosele Boesman!” “Get the fuck out of here! Go away, you stupid Bushie! Bushman!” I ignored him and went on about my business. Then I felt a splat! on the back of my head. He’d hit me with a mulberry. It wasn’t painful, just startling. I turned to look at him and, splat!, he hit me again, right in my face.
Then, in a split second, before I could even react, all of these kids started pelting me with berries, pelting the shit out of me. Some of the berries weren’t ripe, and they stung like rocks. I tried to cover my face with my hands, but there was a barrage coming at me from all sides. They were laughing and pelting me and calling me names. “Bushie! Bushman!” I was terrified. Just the suddenness of it, I didn’t know what to do. I started crying, and I ran. I ran for my life, all the way back down the road to our house.
When I ran inside I looked like I’d been beaten to a pulp because I was bawling my eyes out and was covered in red-purple berry juice. My mother looked at me, horrified.
“What happened?”
In between sobs I told her the story. “These kids…the mulberry tree…they threw berries at me…” When I finished, she burst out laughing. “It’s not funny!” I said.
“No, no, Trevor,” she said. “I’m not laughing because it’s funny. I’m laughing out of relief. I thought you’d been beaten up. I thought this was blood. I’m laughing because it’s only berry juice.”
My mom thought everything was funny. There was no subject too dark or too painful for her to tackle with humor. “Look on the bright side,” she said, laughing and pointing to the half of me covered in dark berry juice. “Now you really are half black and half white.”
“It’s not funny!”
“Trevor, you’re okay,” she said. “Go and wash up. You’re not hurt. You’re hurt emotionally. But you’re not hurt.”
Half an hour later, Abel showed up. At that point Abel was still my mom’s boyfriend. He wasn’t trying to be my father or even a stepfather, really. He was more like a big brother than anything. He’d joke around with me, have fun. I didn’t know him that well, but one thing I did know about him was that he had a temper. Very charming when he wanted to be, incredibly funny, but fuck he could be mean. He’d grown up in the homelands, where you had to fight to survive. Abel was big, too, around six-foot-three, long and lean. He hadn’t hit my mom yet. He hadn’t hit me yet, either. But I knew he was dangerous. I’d seen it. Someone would cut us off in traffic. Abel would yell out the window. The other guy would honk and yell back. In a flash Abel would be out of our car, over to theirs, grabbing the guy through the driver’s-side window, screaming in his face, raising a fist. You’d see the other guy panic. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
When Abel walked in that night, he sat down on the couch and saw that I’d been crying.
“What happened?” he said.
I started to explain. My mother cut me off. “Don’t tell him,” she said. She knew what would happen. She knew better than me.
“Don’t tell me what?” Abel said.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“It’s not nothing,” I said.
She glared at me. “Don’t tell him.”
Abel was getting frustrated. “What? Don’t tell me what?”
He’d been drinking; he never came home from work sober, and the drinking always made his temper worse. It was strange, but in that moment I realized that if I said the right things I could get him to step in and do something. We were almost family, and I knew if I made him feel like his family had been insulted, he’d help me get back at the boys. I knew he had a demon inside him, and I hated that; it terrified me how violent and dangerous he was when he snapped. But in that moment I knew exactly what I had to say to get the monster on my side.
I told him the story, the names they called me, the way they attacked me. My mother kept laughing it off, telling me to get over it, that it was kids being kids, no big deal. She was trying to defuse the situation, but I couldn’t see that. I was just mad at her. “You think it’s a joke, but it’s not funny! It’s not funny!”
Abel wasn’t laughing. As I told him what the bullies had done, I could see the anger building up inside him. With Abel’s anger, there was no ranting and raving, no clenched fists. He sat there on the couch listening to me, not saying a word. Then, very calm and deliberate, he stood up.
“Take me to these boys,” he said.
Yes, I thought, this is it. Big brother is going to get my revenge for me.
We got into his car and drove up the road, stopping a few houses down from the tree. It was dark now except for the light from the streetlamps, but we could see the boys were still there, playing under the tree. I pointed to the ringleader. “That one. He was the main one.” Abel slammed his foot on the gas and shot up onto the grass and straight toward the bottom of the tree. He jumped out. I jumped out. As soon as the kids saw me they knew exactly what was happening. They scattered and ran like hell.
Abel was quick. Good Lord, he was fast. The ringleader had made a dash for it and was trying to climb over a wall. Abel grabbed him, pulled him down, and dragged him back. Then he stripped a branch off the tree, a switch, and started whipping him. He whipped the shit out of him, and I loved it. I have never enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed that moment. Revenge truly is sweet. It takes you to a dark place, but, man, it satisfies a thirst.