4

"Crossing the line" each morning involved a stark transition. I started off on quiet, cobbled beach-town streets, among surf shops and Victorian mansions. Heading away from the coast, I drove northeast, into a wide wasteland of sand dunes. These were the Cape Flats. For a mile or more, there was nothing but sand and scrubby fynbos , with the Port Jackson scrub glinting in the low sun. Then the road skirted a large squatters' camp: half-glimpsed tar-paper shanties back among the dunes, underfed children in shapeless old sweaters crossing the road with plastic water bottles. Then came the bleak tenements of Lavender Hill, and the transition was made: from white to black South Africa, from the First World to the Third. Crowds of people tramped alongside the road, pedaled bicycles, and crammed into share-taxis. I was an anomaly; all the other commuters were headed for the white areas. I passed Jessie's Moslem Butchery, the Dandy Cash Store. Then the road curved into Grassy Park.

While it shared the bright, flat, sprawling quality of every place on the Cape Flats, Grassy Park felt less arbitrarily located than some of its sister communities, for it was bounded on three sides by marshes known as vleis. This gave it a rough kind of neighborhood coherence, around a market square known as Busy Corner. Grassy Park looked

nothing like "your ghettos such as Harlem." Where the feeling was not suburban, it was rural: donkey carts clopping down unpaved roads, farmers and fishermen selling their produce from wagons, stock grazing in empty lots. There were a few high-density apartment blocks, barren brick structures with graffiti-covered walls, unhealthy-looking stairwells, and little cookie-cutter sections of corrugated tin slapped on over the ground-floor doors. These places were called, incongruously enough, "the estates." They had been built in the 1960s by the Cape Town City Council. The oldest section of Grassy Park was also council housing—an area called Cafda, after the Cape Flats Distress Association, a private charity that had once administered the township. Cafda was all tiny red-brick cottages with roofs so low they seemed to have been built for dwarfs. The people in Cafda were very poor, but their neighborhood had one great softening feature: fine, full-sized eucalyptus trees. The rest of Grassy Park sat out in the sun and blowing sand. There were a few "pondoks," or shanties, built from scraps of wood and tin and iron, scattered around Grassy Park. But most of the housing, at least in the blocks around Grassy Park High, consisted of small, fairly new single-family homes, with electricity and indoor plumbing. Some of these houses were privately rented, but most were owned by the people who lived in them.

There were far more prosperous "colored" communities on the Cape Flats, places where the landscaping, the spacious new homes, looked much like their economic equivalents in the white areas, but private home ownership did serve to distinguish the bulk of Grassy Park from the bulk of the Cape Flats—and, for that matter, from the great majority of black South African communities. The government could uproot black property owners, as it had demonstrated countless times—indeed, it had done so to many people who were now Grassy Park residents. But it was much more likely to visit its removals on tenants and on squatters than on black homeowners. Most blacks lived in government housing of one kind or another. To have one's own home was a rare blessing, and provided a rare degree of security. Thus, people in Grassy Park were, as a rule, intensely house-proud. You could see it in the nameplates that adorned most houses: Our Haven, Valhalla, At Last. You could see it in the neat front yards and gardens, the fancy little homemade fences of wagon wheels or terra cotta, the ornate stained-glass front doors, and well-clipped bougainvillea hedges. The houses weren't precious or pretentious—most had chicken coops and serious kitchen gardens out back, growing corn, cabbage, beans, potatoes, beets, tomatoes—as much as they were

cheerful. Given the bleakness of the Flats, the harshness of the policies that had sent people out there to begin with, and the general hard lot of being black in South Africa, this air of sunny contentment struck me as remarkable.

Of course, there was more to it than met a foreigner's first glance. The wide, straight streets which I found so charmingly full of life—people always strolling to or from the shops or the bus stop at Busy Corner, children playing soccer in the quieter roads—were designed to accommodate the armored vehicles known as Hippos, to give the advantage during "times of unrest" to government forces. Some areas were extremely dangerous after dark: street gangs robbed and raped with horrifying freedom. It was many miles to work for most people, first by bus, then by train. Busy Corner had some amenities—a clinic, a pub, a small post office, a fish-and-chips shop, several of the little groceries known as cafés, even a branch of the Standard Bank—but most errands and shopping had to be done across the line. Just as black businessmen were not allowed to trade in the white areas, supermarkets and department stores were not built in black areas. Everywhere were women returning from expeditions to the big shopping malls in the white areas, toting bulging plastic bags. One thing I never saw in the entire year I worked there, though, was a white person on the street in Grassy Park.

The high school was two blocks from Busy Corner. It was one of the most substantial schools on the Cape Flats. There was a core of brick buildings around a courtyard, containing perhaps a dozen classrooms, with three or four smaller buildings out back. In a sandy field adjacent stood the scruffy, gray, two-story, pre-fab "new building," containing another ten classrooms, one of them mine. That was about it, really. There was no auditorium, no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no book lockers, no language labs, no heat. The "sports ground" was a glass- and rock-strewn horse pasture; the library owned fewer books than I do. The classrooms were full of broken windows, broken lights, decrepit desks, and yawning holes in the ceilings.

The contrast with the high schools across the line could scarcely have been more galling. Public schools for whites were vast, immaculate facilities. The new boys' high school in Wynberg, less than five miles from Grassy Park, had six tennis courts, three rugby fields, one hockey field, two squash courts, a swimming pool, a fully equipped gym, five science labs, a geography lab, and four soundproof music rooms.