14

6A6 was my "register class"—like American homeroom. I spent more time with them than with any other class. In some ways, 6A6 was the most difficult group I taught. It was a big class—forty-one children—with a limited attention span. If the pace of a lesson flagged even for a moment, they could be lost in space for the rest of the period. They were a disparate, only modestly talented group, almost visibly suffering from a lack of solidarity. While my other Standard Six classes were already forging coherent class identities, 6A6 remained an unsynced welter of individual wills. This, I became convinced, affected their concentration. At any given time, most of their attention was being consumed by the search for a group identity. They were impa-

tient with each other, and could not sit still when I slowed things down to attend to the problems of one of their classmates.

Hester was in 6A6. She asked me if she could be the class monitor, taking attendance and so forth, and was immediately pushed aside by three or four other children who wanted the job themselves. Hester was obviously the best choice for monitor, the calmest, neatest, most organized of the candidates. But 6A6 did not exert the kind of joking, generalized pressure on the others to withdraw the way I believed my other classes would have done, and in the end I had to make the appointment myself. Hester turned out to be not only a reliable taker of attendance, but a valuable source of information about the moods and problems of her classmates.

6A6 was "immature," Meryl said. I thought of them as lost and unfocused. They responded best, I found, when I broke them up into small groups, gave each group a specific assignment, and circulated among them, observing and advising. But even then, some children fussed endlessly about which group they wanted to be in and had trouble getting anything done.

6A7 revolved around a core of stylish, outgoing girls: Natalie, Angela, Mieta, Desiree. Their raciness set the tone for the class. Natalie and Angela were gum-chewing, brisk, flirtatious, given to carrying perfume and makeup in their schoolbags. Desiree was a horsey, appealing girl with silky eyelashes and great aplomb. Mieta was short, soft-spoken, bright, and probably quite spoiled—her family's house, I noticed, was named after her. 6A7 was with it. If a classmate failed to answer a question correctly, some wag would be heard tapping out the drumbeat to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," a then-current pop hit. There were a number of boys in 6A7 who, perhaps inspired by the flashy girls in the class, also cut striking figures. Philip, a long-limbed, velvet-voiced boy with jet-black skin, was said to be a gifted cricketer. Terence was a handsome, fast-moving kid whose character seemed to alternate daily between supercilious mischiefmaker and vulnerable young sensitive. 6A7 had none of the identity problems 6A6 had; but class discussions were difficult. There were just too many kids with too much to say. (6A7 reminded me of another Top Forty song then popular on the Cape Flats: the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight.") On the other hand, having students write on the blackboard worked well in such a voluble, appearance-conscious group.

6A8 was the smallest of my English classes, and the easiest to teach. Meryl called them "mature." They were a brainy, cheerful,

well-behaved group who seemed as if they had been together for years rather than weeks, they were so close. When one of their classmates landed in the hospital with an infected leg, I ferried the whole class over to see him in my car, ten or twelve at a time, on different afternoons, and each time I was amazed anew at the way they collected around his bed, chattering and laughing, showering the boy with sweets and fruit and visibly raising his spirits. 6A8 had its share of cutups and screw-ups, but it had a rock-solid center. There were several quiet, precocious girls, who at fourteen seemed to have the poise and judgment of grown women. These included Amy, a broad-faced, light-skinned, top student with a lovely, gentle sense of humor, and Shireen, a stocky, beautiful girl who always wore an ancient black school blazer. There were also a couple of brilliant boys—Malcolm, who got by far the highest marks in all my English classes, and Josef, who had just turned thirteen and consistently beat matrics at chess.

But it was a stolid, drawling boy named Oscar who really emblemized 6A8 for me. Oscar's father was a fruit seller who was causing his son to miss whole weeks of school by taking him off to Pretoria to help him peddle Cape produce. Oscar was struggling to stay in school, and I tried to help him by giving him his assignments ahead of time. Oscar's composition book was battered and stained from life on the road; his exercise papers were often smeared with dried citrus slime; but he kept up with the rest of his class, at least through the first term.

7E1 was a big, noisy group that was also self-conscious and easily intimidated. Perhaps it was only because their first language was English, but both my geography classes reminded me more of American schoolchildren than any of the others I taught did. 7E1 contained a number of goody-goodies, most but not all of them girls, whose dedication to behaving properly often lured them to the edge of what was considered ludicrous at Grassy Park High—mincing to the front of the classroom to pick up a praised assignment, standing too primly to answer a question. The class as a whole seemed somehow more "middle-class" than the others I taught. The children in 7E1 loved an uproar—they had created the human orrery that was quelled by Napoleon and Africa—but they always seemed aware of themselves as being uproarious, and they could be brought to order in an instant. 7E1 had been together for a year, but they lacked the kind of "class" (in the Marxian sense) cohesion that helped to mute overt competitiveness among my other classes. They responded more readily to both the carrot of teacher's approval and the stick of teacher's irritation.

7E2 was exactly the opposite. They were rowdy and reprobate. They were clearly the bottom half of the English-medium Standard Sevens. Nearly all of them had failed at least one year; some had failed several. The boys were tough guys, the girls were permanently auditioning for roles as gangster molls, and they all seemed to take a sort of battered pride in being a notorious troop whom teachers were never pleased to see. The size of 7E2 shrank steadily, because of fresh dropouts, but the improving teacher-student ratio did not seem to improve the remaining students' ability to concentrate. They exhausted me, especially on the days when I saw them in the late afternoon. And yet I got a kick out of 7E2. Their jaunty, stylized roguery reminded me of home even more than 7E1's individualism did. And 7E2's dead-end teen-rebel attitude provided a strange sort of relief from the smothering sense of responsibility that many of my other students caused me to feel.

I tried to uncover some of my students' sense of their larger situation—to clean off the connection, as it were, between the Cape Flats quotidian and its national context—by assigning essays to my English classes about their family histories. To one group, I even suggested that they use factors like the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act^[*] as specific points of reference.

This assignment got abysmal results. I had guessed that there might be some strong traditions of oral history within my students' families, explaining how they came to be where they were, and I was not wrong. An English composition for school, however, was just about the last place in which these personal, usually very bitter histories would ever normally—or prudently, or indeed decently—be shared. Neither was I the most reassuring solicitor of such volatile material. Because who was I really, and what were my motives for gathering information about my students' families, their experiences with government policy, and, by implication, their thoughts and feelings about such things? Had I not discovered already how trusted I wasn't? Did I not realize that we were in a country where a teenage boy had recently been convicted of "terrorism" for writing an anti-white poem?

In Grassy Park, moreover, the question of ancestry was a vexed one. In the handful of essays that arrived on the date they were due,

* The Population Registration Act (1950) requires that every South African be classified racially.

I found several that seemed to struggle to underline the "European" relatives in the writer's family tree. There were others, from Muslim children, that emphasized the exclusively "Malay" character of the students' backgrounds. I was struck by the high percentage of those compositions I got that mentioned families' having moved to Grassy Park from District Six—this was the sort of information I was actually looking for—but the unwisdom of the whole assignment was already so obvious that I abandoned it then and there, without ever seeing anything on the subject from most of my students.

Informal discussions, especially some that took place during the lunch period and after school, were far more successful. There were a number of students who had taken to hanging around New Room 16 after class on occasion. Among these were an inseparable three-some from 7E1—Wayne, Nico, and Shaun. Nico was short and slim, with long straight hair and huge, dark, serious eyes. Wayne was tall, light-skinned, and goofy, with wavy reddish hair. Shaun, the leader of the group, was small, dark, thin, and officious, with watchful yellow eyes and terribly stiff posture. These three all owned skateboards and said they were interested in surfing. Shaun seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of questions; I soon figured out that most of these were prepared beforehand and represented the trio's pooled curiosity. I had a lot of questions myself, and as we grew more comfortable with one another, the boys from 7E1, as well as other students, slowly opened up and told me some of what they thought and felt and knew.

"Some people call this 'the wilderness,'" Shaun said once, when I had asked how he and his friends liked living in Grassy Park. "They would prefer that they still lived in town. But we're used to this here. We don't mind it."

"My mommy calls it 'the desert,'" Wayne said. "She says she can't hang out the washing because of the blowing sand."

"'Siberia,' that's what my father calls it," Nico said. "He hates it out here. He's always telling about how life was better when we lived in town."

"Lots of old people say that," Shaun said. "They say they miss their friends, and the neighborhoods they lived in. Most of the houses in Mowbray^[*] had stoeps [front porches] where people used to sit. In District Six, they had balconies. So the roads were much livelier."

"Some people committed suicide after they got their so-called 'love letters,'" Nico said, suddenly speaking with vehemence. "And

* A Cape Town neighborhood that was decimated by Group Areas removals.

some old people they just climbed in their beds, and they wouldn't get up, and they just died there. They didn't want to live anymore."

Shaun: "The old people, when they first came out here, they used to get lost. They couldn't find their own houses."

Wayne laughed. "You might find some old toppie just sitting there in the road crying. He had taken some drinks, you know, and now he couldn't find his house!"

"They're still removing people, to this very day," Nico said darkly. "Sometimes one part of a family must go one place, and the other part some other place, and they lose contact with one another."

"The same thing happened when they brought us 'population registration,'" Shaun said. "Some family members might have straight hair and fair skin and be classified so-called white, while others may be darker, and classified so-called colored. These are brothers and sisters I'm talking about! They must live apart. It's the law."

"They put a pencil in your hair," Wayne said. "If it falls out you're white, if it stays there you're colored."

Nico: "In Mowbray, die boere was staying out of the sun, and the whole family getting crew cuts, just to be safe!"

My students sometimes distinguished between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites. They called Afrikaners die boere , and used the term to mean both the Afrikaner people and the authorities in general, particularly the police and the government. When I asked who it was that stuck pencils in one's hair to determine one's race, they answered, "Die boere." "The English" were a more distant group—they lived in big houses and owned businesses.

Most of the time, though, my students simply spoke of "the whites," as in "The whites drive some lekker [literally, "tasty"] cars" or "The whites don't like to see black faces on TV." At first, they were tentative around me when mentioning "whites" at all, and I was quite sure that they never showed me anything like the real extent of their resentments. Yet they slowly relaxed, and I was eventually able to make a few observations—notably, that my students seemed to know few if any white people personally. Collectively, of course, in some deep sense, they knew whites intimately, in the way that servants always know their masters, employees their bosses, the exploited their exploiters: from long and careful observation. But in my students that knowledge all seemed to be secondhand, as if gleaned entirely from friends and relatives who worked with whites, from popular mythology, and from ideas gathered at a great distance.

"Apartheid" means "apartness," and I became convinced that grand apartheid, particularly the Group Areas Act, had succeeded, at least in Cape Town, in digging great new abysses of ignorance between the various "population groups."

The range of attitudes held by Shaun, Wayne, and Nico toward apartheid and removals seemed to have its origins in their families' different experiences. Wayne was by far the mildest when the subject was the government and the destruction of District Six, and the least sympathetic toward the suffering of the poor and uprooted. "Have you seen Cafda, sir?" he once asked me, snickering. "It's a terrible place. We never go in there. Cafda is worse than the estates. We don't like those subeconomic people. They don't even have proper toilets!" Another time, while we were talking again about forced removals, Wayne said, "People complain, but most people like it better here than in town. Out here, they own a house, and the houses are new, a lot of them, not all falling down and old like you had in town."

"How should you know?" Shaun asked suddenly. "You don't remember any place in town. And has sir seen the pondok this boy lives in? His mommy don't own it, she rents it. And they better watch out it don't get bulldozed! That's how new it is."

"We're not council renters, we're private renters," Wayne said in a crushed voice. I later saw his house, where he lived with his mother and several sisters—it was a two-room tin-walled shack—and thereafter understood some of Wayne's compulsion to distinguish himself from "subeconomic people." At the time, noting his misery, I lamely tried to change the subject.

"They don't bulldoze in Grassy Park, do they?"

"Yes, sir, they do," Shaun said. "In Klip Road a couple of years ago, they knocked down a lot of pondoks. And the people put them up again, but die boere just knocked them down again."

"When did that happen, exactly?"

"We was in Standard Four. Remember, we went to watch?" Shaun said to Wayne. Wayne nodded, but he did not, I noticed, laugh in his usual brainless way about how funny the people looked, standing around crying while the government bulldozers turned their homes into rubble. Fourteen-year-olds are not known for their compassion—at least my schoolmates at that age found nothing more amusing than the plight of the rejected and degraded—but one's own shame can be sobering, at least temporarily.

Nico displayed more political awareness than his friends, and he obviously got much of that from his father. Nico's father was a bricklayer who made sure his children understood the bitterness of his own

experience. "When my father answers an advert for a bricklayer, there might be ten okes [guys] show up for one job, but if one of the guys is white, he gets it. They don't ask him his qualifications. He is hired for the color of his skin, not for his skills, that's what my father says. Once, he had a job as a messenger in an office, when he couldn't find building work. That was the worst, he says. He was the only so-called non-white in that office. They wouldn't let him use the same teacups as everyone else. He had to take his own teacup to work. My father says we mustn't hate the whites, but we must turn our backs on them. He calls himself a black man, and he says our future is with the Africans, not the whites."

Although he had been too young himself at the time to remember it, Nico knew by heart the story of his family's forced removal from Mowbray. "This Boer came in our house, one of the department inspectors, and he started looking around the place, taking note of everything, you know, all the improvements my father had made, and he was very rude to my mother. Then he went outside and we heard him talking with one of his boets [mates], another inspector, and saying how he liked our place, and thought he might just buy it for himself. Because they could get our places very, very cheap, you see, because we were forced to sell. And he didn't actually buy our place, but some other people on our road did sell their places to the very same inspectors who threw them out. It was an architect that bought our house. And he turned it into one of these so-called Chelsea cottages, with the dingus [whatchamacallit], the carriage lamp, beside the front door. My father says they built a swimming pool as well, but we only saw what they did to the front. We used to go there sometimes on our way into town, just to look."

Many Grassy Park families apparently went back on occasion to their old neighborhoods in the city center, even when those neighborhoods no longer existed. A Standard Nine girl named Annette told me, "On Sundays, we go to the cemetery where our granny is, there by our old place. All the shops and houses in that area have been knocked down. It's mostly all rubbish, and what a lot of rats . Just a few churches and mosques are still there. But now they say they want to move the cemetery. It's been declared 'white' as well. They want to dig up the people and move them, and if we won't agree, we just won't be allowed to visit our granny no more. My mommy is very upset about that. Already her losie [funeral society] is in trouble because of the removals, with the members scattered all over now, in Bonteheuwel and Athlone and everywhere. Now she doesn't know where she will be buried."

The Group Areas Act had virtually created Grassy Park. Whether people wanted to talk to me about it or not, it did not take me long to understand what a bitter, bitter foundation that was. Sometimes the easygoing, laugh-a-minute atmosphere at Grassy Park High would seem to dissolve before my eyes and reveal a sea of pain and anger so terrible that I simply had to look away. At such times, the fine gradations of "political awareness" suddenly seemed unimportant. Even the most unconscious children could not help but understand their basic situation. The school itself sent an unambiguous message: this government considers these children to be of inferior material. That message was so clear and harsh that I thought it rang in the air like a broken alarm all day every day at Grassy Park High. The fact of exclusion from the city's best facilities—schools, cinemas, restaurants, neighborhoods—was certainly not something that anyone needed to have pointed out. Even Wayne, when we talked about surfing, told me, "The whites keep all the best beaches for themselves. We are only allowed to go where the waves are dangerous and the sand is not nice and the sharks come. There are no facilities for us. We must kak in die bundu [shit in the bushes] like animals."

Aubrey September saw Cape Town differently from most of his classmates. To Aubrey, newly arrived from the Boland—the farmlands of the Western Cape—the city was one vast, if intimidating, field of opportunity. He rode the train into town on a Saturday not to see what the whites were doing to the old neighborhood, but to walk through the open-air market on the Grand Parade, or to gawk at the great modern shopping mall known as the Golden Acre. I asked Aubrey to tell me about going shopping where he had lived before—simply getting him to speak in English had already become the main part of our after-school tutoring sessions.

"There was just the one shop, sir," he said. "On the farm itself. It gave not much things. Only bread, paraffin, sugar, soap. But there was no bus to some other shop. Prices was high, sir, but we must buy there. The baas gives credit, so the people borrow. But they must not leave the farm when they are borrowed. People, they want to leave. But they must not. The baas , he will send the police after them."

I enjoyed our tutoring sessions far more than Aubrey did, I think. I was fascinated by his descriptions of life on a farm. When I asked about the primary school he had attended, he said, "The school is small, with only few teachers, and few books. All the standards go together, up to Standard Five only. For high school, we must go to

boarding school. But only few children finish Standard Five. Most, their parents tell them they must stop, and go to work on the farm, to earn them money. They cannot afford them still in school. They say, 'Why must a big child who can read and write still be at school?' The old people, they can't read and write."

Aubrey's own parents were literate, he said. His father had been a foreman on the farm, and his mother came from the country town of Oudtshoorn. They had moved to the city mainly so that he and his brothers and sisters could get a better education. "But everything is better here," Aubrey said. "The food, the houses, the clinic. Over there, when a person gets sick, they must just lie in their house. Maybe the baas comes, or his wife. But they only go to doctor when they is very, very sick. Over there, in winter, so many children is sick in the lungs, sometimes there is not one in the school. Also the people got rickets, and tuberculosis. Here you can just go to clinic every time."

I asked Aubrey what farm workers ate. "Bread," he said. "And soup for supper, in the wintertime. The people cannot afford meat and vegetables and fruit, like we have here in Cape Town."

I asked about drinking, and Aubrey looked uncomfortable. "On Saturdays, some people are drinking. Even on Sundays. The wine is very cheap on the farm. The young wine. The men who are working in the fields are drinking wine all day while they work as well. They must have a dop in the morning, first thing, before they will start. And another one at supper, and another at teatime. That is how they work on a farm. My daddy says it is bad, but even the children who start working must have their wine, or they won't work." This was the infamous dop system, by which Cape farmworkers were partly paid in drink, and as a result kept hopelessly alcoholic, unhealthy, and docile.

Although he claimed to be pleased in every way to be living in Cape Town, the only times I saw Aubrey really animated were when he spoke about his playmates in the Boland, about hunting birds with slingshots, trapping hares, and diving from a high rock into a pond. Once, he told me about how his father had used to catch baboons that were raiding the farmer's crop, and Aubrey's eyes grew wide and his words tumbled over one another in his eagerness to tell the story.

There was something I began to notice about Aubrey: he was always alone outside class. The idyll of my first weeks at Grassy Park High was passing, and exceptions to the rule of mass fellowship had begun to appear as the multitude of my students continued to in-

dividuate. Aubrey, the impassive little country boy, was clearly one of them. Wayan, whose long thin limbs seemed to grow at least an inch a week and who seemed to be in a permanent state of mild shock as a result, was another. After our tutoring sessions, I would watch Aubrey walking across the field beyond the new building from my classroom window, with his green canvas book bag slung over the shoulder of his ill-fitting blazer, and I would find myself aching at the thought of the universal hardship of a lonely adolescence.