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In every nice neighborhood there’s one white family that Does Not Give a Fuck. You know the family I’m
talking about. They don’t do their lawn, don’t paint the fence, don’t fix the roof. Their house is shit. My mom
found that house and bought it, which is how she snuck a black family into a place as white as Highlands
North.
Most black people integrating into white suburbs were moving to places like Bramley and Lombardy East.
But for some reason my mom chose Highlands North. It was a suburban area, lots of shopping. Working
people, mostly. Not wealthy but stable and middle-class. Older houses, but still a nice place to live. In Soweto I
was the only white kid in the black township. In Eden Park I was the only mixed kid in the colored area. In
Highlands North I was the only black kid in the white suburb—and by “only” I mean only. In Highlands North
the white never took flight. It was a largely Jewish neighborhood, and Jewish people don’t flee. They’re done
fleeing. They’ve already fled. They get to a place, build their shul, and hold it down. Since the white people
around us weren’t leaving, there weren’t a lot of families like ours moving in behind us.
I didn’t make any friends in Highlands North for the longest time. I had an easier time making friends in
Eden Park, to be honest. In the suburbs, everyone lived behind walls. The white neighborhoods of
Johannesburg were built on white fear—fear of black crime, fear of black uprisings and reprisals—and as a
result virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, and on top of that wall is electric wire. Everyone lives in
a plush, fancy maximum-security prison. There is no sitting on the front porch, no saying hi to the neighbors,
no kids running back and forth between houses. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood for hours without
seeing a single kid. I’d hear them, though. They were all meeting up behind brick walls for playdates I wasn’t
invited to. I’d hear people laughing and playing and I’d get off my bike and creep up and peek over the wall
and see a bunch of white kids splashing around in someone’s swimming pool. I was like a Peeping Tom, but for
friendship.
It was only after a year or so that I figured out the key to making black friends in the suburbs: the
children of domestics. Many domestic workers in South Africa, when they get pregnant they get fired. Or, if
they’re lucky, the family they work for lets them stay on and they can have the baby, but then the baby goes to
live with relatives in the homelands. Then the black mother raises the white children, seeing her own child
only once a year at the holidays. But a handful of families would let their domestics keep their children with
them, living in little maids’ quarters or flatlets in the backyard.
For a long time, those kids were my only friends.