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nowhere. But look, you have a yard!” For some reason the streets in Eden Park were named
after cars: Jaguar Street. Ferrari Street. Honda Street. I don’t know if that was a coincidence
or not, but it’s funny because colored people in South Africa are known for loving fancy cars.
It was like living in a white neighborhood with all the streets named after varietals of fine
wine.
I remember moving out there in flashbacks, snippets, driving to a place I’d never seen,
seeing people I’d never seen. It was flat, not many trees, the same dusty red-clay dirt and
grass as Soweto but with proper houses and paved roads and a sense of suburbia to it. Ours
was a tiny house at the bend in the road right off Toyota Street. It was modest and cramped
inside, but walking in I thought, Wow. We are really living. It was crazy to have my own
room. I didn’t like it. My whole life I’d slept in a room with my mom or on the floor with my
cousins. I was used to having other human beings right next to me, so I slept in my mom’s
bed most nights.
There was no stepfather in the picture yet, no baby brother crying in the night. It was me
and her, alone. There was this sense of the two of us embarking on a grand adventure. She’d
say things to me like, “It’s you and me against the world.” I understood even from an early
age that we weren’t just mother and son. We were a team.
It was when we moved to Eden Park that we finally got a car, the beat-up, tangerine
Volkswagen my mother bought secondhand for next to nothing. One out of five times it
wouldn’t start. There was no AC. Anytime I made the mistake of turning on the fan the vent
would fart bits of leaves and dust all over me. Whenever it broke down we’d catch minibuses,
or sometimes we’d hitchhike. She’d make me hide in the bushes because she knew men
would stop for a woman but not a woman with a child. She’d stand by the road, the driver
would pull over, she’d open the door and then whistle, and I’d come running up to the car. I
would watch their faces drop as they realized they weren’t picking up an attractive single
woman but an attractive single woman with a fat little kid.
When the car did work, we had the windows down, sputtering along and baking in the
heat. For my entire life the dial on that car’s radio stayed on one station. It was called Radio
Pulpit, and as the name suggests it was nothing but preaching and praise. I wasn’t allowed to
touch that dial. Anytime the radio wasn’t getting reception, my mom would pop in a cassette
of Jimmy Swaggart sermons. (When we finally found out about the scandal? Oh, man. That
was rough.)
But as shitty as our car was, it was a car. It was freedom. We weren’t black people stuck
in the townships, waiting for public transport. We were black people who were out in the
world. We were black people who could wake up and say, “Where do we choose to go today?”
On the commute to work and school, there was a long stretch of the road into town that was
completely deserted. That’s where Mom would let me drive. On the highway. I was six. She’d
put me on her lap and let me steer and work the indicators while she worked the pedals and
the stick shift. After a few months of that, she taught me how to work the stick. She was still
working the clutch, but I’d climb onto her lap and take the stick, and she’d call out the gears
as we drove. There was this one part of the road that ran deep into a valley and then back up
the other side. We’d get up a head of speed, and we’d stick it into neutral and let go of the
brake and the clutch, and, woo-hoo!, we’d race down the hill and then, zoom!, we’d shoot up
the other side. We were flying.