Summary

“The Middle Children” by Rayda Jacobs starts with Sabah, who gets off the bus and takes the subway train in the section intended for white South Africans. She is constantly afraid that she will be caught, as she is a middle child, a mixed-race woman. On the subway, she looks at the people and she sees another mixed-race girl, whom she feels she understands because they are in the same position. Then she meets Stephanie, a former high school classmate who left the country with a German man, Wolfgang. Stephanie tells Sabah that she and her boyfriend moved back to South Africa and that her sister Laine is still with her husband Joachim, and that the couple has two children. She mocks Sabah for not being married yet and encourages her to find a foreigner because they like mixed-race girls. But Sabah’s situation is more complicated because she is not Christian like most white foreigners. She ...