The Yellow House

  From the time they were small boys, Michael and Darryl went around cursing. When this memory is revived today everyone laughs because, of course. When Simon Broom could no longer stand it, he decided Michael, as the older of the two, needed a spanking.

  Go cut a switch.

  Michael returned dangling a substandard twig.

  “Mr. Simon went out there and cut a branch off a tree and beat that negro with it,” Sam Davis Jr. recalls now. “What tripped me out, it wasn’t that he got beat with a switch, this dude got beat with a branch.”

  Everyone knew, too, the ferocity of Mr. Samuel, Sam and Walter’s dad. He had a reputation for slowly cueing up his punishments. He’d lean the weight of himself to one side of the doorsill and start to talking about what the Bible said.

  “Honor your father and mother …” Mr. Samuel always began.

  “I hate to do this to you, son. I really do.

  “So that your days may be long …

  “But after what you did. It just can’t be avoided.

  “So that all may be well with you …”

  It took him a long time to come round to the action. “When Dad whupped, he whupped the whole house, he whupped everything in the house,” says his son Walter Davis now.

  The older children lorded over the younger. Sam and Walter Davis were the elder by three and four years over Eddie and Michael.

  Sam often designed entire summer days, marching the Davis and Broom boys in single file like young army recruits all the way down the Old Road where Mount Pilgrim Church was, chanting military cadences as they went. Naturally, anyone who got out of line would be disciplined.

  Along the way, the smaller boys fished for crawfish in the ditches along Old Gentilly Road where, if you weren’t careful, one of your car tires might find itself. They’d drop nets into the ditch and pull up buckets and buckets of crawfish for boiling.

  Michael and Darryl would often break off along with JoJo, the Davises’ youngest boy, to climb over the railroad tracks into the woods where they wandered for hours, fishing and falling into bodies of water formed in the last rains. On the way back, they picked blueberries along the train tracks.

  There were ditches everywhere you looked. “It was like we were the rural part of New Orleans,” Walter Davis said. One fall, at the start of third grade, his teacher at his black elementary school, McDonogh 40, asked how many students had left town. One kid had gone to Los Angeles, another to Chicago. Walter raised his hand and said he’d traveled to Gentilly, referring to his family’s move to Wilson Avenue. “Boy, I said if anybody left town,” the teacher said.

  “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘We didn’t leave town?’” says Walter now. “That’s when I found out that the East was part of New Orleans.”

  The women stayed home while the men and boys worked, except for Mae Margaret, who worked small jobs without her husband, Samuel Davis, knowing, beating it back to home before him, ruffling her hair and slipping into a frock. Mr. Samuel worked close to the Industrial Canal at American Marine Shipyard, which in 1967 built the largest aluminum oceangoing commercial ship in world history. Two hundred twenty-six feet at a cost of $1.6 million, but still, Samuel Davis never earned enough to own a car. When he died it was on the job, pumping out a barge.

  Simon Broom had begun his work at NASA for the contractor Mason-Rust as a groundskeeper and maintenance man, which meant he tended the plant’s 832 acres, painting, grass cutting, and repairing whatever needed it. His niece Geneva, the daughter of his sister Corrine, worked at NASA, too, but in a lab. He could see her through the narrow window in the lab door wearing a white hazmat suit.

  The older boys mimicked the men and found work on the short end of the street or in its vicinity.

  Walter and Sam had as some of their hustles cutting grass, landscape design, and washing the trailers in Oak Haven, many of which, unlike the houses, had air-conditioning so that “when you opened the door that cold air would run out of there.” Walter knew because he’d gotten familiar; his employers would offer him Coca-Cola in six-ounce glass bottles. In time, he’d also clean the trailers’ insides, which is how he worked a vacuum for the first time. One tenant offered him corned beef with chowchow relish. He was thinking he had it going on and that life couldn’t get better.

  Sam Davis was on the way to Spee-D Super Market on Chef Menteur one day when a Gypsy family who were living across the highway on Chef next to a greenhouse stopped him. “They asked me to get something from the store for them. That was gonna be a nickel or a dime. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll get it.’ They said, ‘You wanna make some more?’ They had me cut the grass. Said, ‘You wanna make some more money?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ They had a chicken out there in the yard, they had a goose out there in the yard, they had a lamb out there in the yard. Look, everything that was in the yard died that day. They wanted me to kill it. Said, ‘Grab the chicken, kill the chicken.’ I tried. I was running around after that chicken. I did want to catch the chicken. I could not catch that chicken. Old lady ran over there, I don’t know how she got that chicken, grabbed that bad boy, swung it up, broke its neck, came down with it, took a hatchet, chop. This is all one move, martial arts stuff. I said, ‘I want my money.’ Well here’s how they paid me. All that stuff was walkin’ round out there in the yard, they gave me a big ole plate of all that stuff. That’s how they paid a brother. I went home. I was mad. I gave that plate to my mom. She didn’t have no problem with all that stuff dyin’. She was from the country. Mama tore that up.”

  This story sounds outrageous but around the same time an advertisement appeared in the Times-Picayune‘s Lost section: “ANYONE knowing the whereabouts of either Gypsy or Spanish people with a large tan-and-white collie, please call WH 5-3775.”

  The first year they lived in the not-yet-yellow house, Simon and Ivory Mae threw parties in the backyard for every holiday or birthday, or any other excuse. The liquor was stocked and stored in the shed at the back of the property. Simon would spend the entire morning cutting the grass, setting up tables and chairs. His friends from NASA would come and so would members of the various social and pleasure clubs to which he and Ivory belonged. All of the neighbors knew to appear.

  Ivory Mae loved entertaining. She prepared the food herself: stuffed eggs, potato salad, and fried catfish. Sometimes, she pulled vegetables from her small garden. They had begun growing tomatoes and okra on the land.

  Friday was a recurring holiday, too: Mom would either take the bus to meet Simon at Schwegmann’s Super Market across the Danziger Bridge on Gentilly Road, or he’d come to the house to retrieve her. They dressed nice to go to the store because chances are you’d run into people you knew. Inside, they’d start off holding hands, Simon’s entire salary balled up in his pocket. One full basket led easily to two. Simon knew everyone—if he didn’t know them he would soon—and was always stopped in the aisle having conversations. The ice cream and thing be melting in the cart he so busy talking.

  Simon Broom built a wooden bridge wide enough for the car tires to roll over the ditch into the land close to the side door of the house where the children would run out and unload the bags.

  From time to time, Simon set up a projector in the backyard, turning Fridays into movie night for anyone who wanted to come watch Hollywood fantasies—horrors like The Last Man on Earth, which the children loved, and Mary Poppins—the side of the house becoming, for a night, the greatest movie screen.

  VI

  Betsy

  “Look,” says Eddie. “It was like a movie, OK?” He was six then.

  “It was pitch-black, nighttime,” says Deborah, who was eleven.

  Nineteen sixty-five. Tail end of a notably mild hurricane season. It rained so hard the yards between the houses flooded—standing water for three days—but that was normal. This mid-September storm was erratic, busybodied; it seemed not to be able to make up its mind on where to go. “Wandering Hurricane Betsy, large and tempestuous,” the newspapers said.

  The hous
e was full of babies. Karen was not yet one; that birthday was two weeks away. Carl had just turned two. Michael was five. Darryl, four. Valeria, eight.

  Simon had been called by NASA to join the emergency crew piling sandbags, but that was just in case. He expected to get right back. And anyway, Uncle Joe was staying at the house then. He was in between loves. No one knew the details, but some woman had put him out, or he had left some woman. Neither scenario was unusual for him.

  “We all went to bed,” says Deborah.

  Last she knew, the hurricane had turned, was headed to coastal Florida.

  “All of a sudden I hear: ‘Get out the bed. Now, now, now.’”

  It was midnight.

  “We put our feet down on the floor.”

  Water.

  The house turned frantic.

  Miss Ivory said, “Get the baby bag.” Karen was the baby.

  Later, it was said that the water rose twenty feet in fifteen minutes.

  There was no attic to climb up into, no way to sit above it all to wait it out. When Uncle Joe opened the front door, water bum-rushed him. Deborah panicked: “We gon die, we gon die.”

  “She started screaming at the top of her lungs like a person going crazy,” says Uncle Joe.

  “She went into hysterics,” says Eddie. “And look, they couldn’t stop her.”

  “Yeah, cause it was black. It was …” says Deborah.

  “She wouldn’t move,” says Eddie. “She was stuck.”

  “So I slapped the piss out of her,” says Uncle Joe now. “Shut up,” he remembers saying. “This ain’t no damn movie.”

  The water was waist-deep on the two adults. They waded through snakes and downed wires toward the high ground of Chef Menteur Highway, which was, for once, carless, to shelter in Mr. LaNasa’s high-sitting trailer park business at the corner.

  Carl rode Uncle Joe’s back, Deborah his side, holding tight to the baby bag. Mom had Karen and Valeria, one on either hip.

  Eddie, Michael, and Darryl swam like fish.

  “I was a tiny boy,” says Michael. “Water was so high. I’m swimming, I’m swimming. The dogs, too. The water was moving through here like we was in a river.”

  He’s right. The water was sweeping us down the street.

  The water had in fact swept in like a river, its course and fury made possible by many things, most of them man-made. Poorly constructed levees, for one.

  And two: navigation canals touted as great economic engines that would raise the profile of a weakened Port of New Orleans by creating more efficient water routes that would, it was hoped, draw more commercial traffic. The Industrial Canal, dredged in 1923, physically separating New Orleans East from the rest of the city in order to link the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, was the first. Then in 1942, the Intracoastal Waterway was expanded through eastern New Orleans to connect with the Industrial Canal. But in 1958, construction began on one, more damaging than the rest: seventy federally funded miles of watery channel linking the Gulf of Mexico to the heart of New Orleans, shortening ocean vessels’ travel distance by sixty-three miles. It would officially be named the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, but everyone would call it MR-GO.

  As with much of New Orleans East’s development, in the early days of MR-GO only its positives were touted. In 1956, Louisiana governor Earl K. Long praised the “inestimable value to (1) the immediate area through which it passes, (2) the state of Louisiana and the city and port of New Orleans, (3) and the entire Mississippi Valley.” When construction began in 1958, the marshes lit up in a dynamite explosion that BOOM, BOOM, BOOMED, debris flying three hundred feet in the air, raining fragments and mud on the heads of scurrying city officials, “many of whom looked for cover that was nowhere to be found,” the local paper reported. Mayor Chep Morrison called it “one of the miracles of our time that will have the effect of bringing another Mississippi River to New Orleans.” He could not know just how true his prophecy would turn out to be.

  Soon after it was built, the environmental catastrophe MR-GO wrought would become evident. Ghost cypress tree trunks stood up everywhere in the water like witnesses, evidence of vanquished cypress forests. The now unrestrained salt water that flowed in from the Gulf would damage surrounding wetlands and lagoons, and erode the natural storm surge barrier protecting low-lying places like New Orleans East. This is what happened during Hurricane Betsy: one-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour winds blew in from the east, pushing swollen Gulf waters across Lake Borgne, a vast lagoon surrounded by marshes and open to the Gulf. Water entered the funnel formed by the Intracoastal Waterway and MR-GO. Within this network of man-made canals, the storm surge reached ten feet and topped the levees surrounding it, breaching some. This is how water came to be rushing in at the front door when Uncle Joe opened it; and how water came to flood more than 160,000 homes, rising to eaves height in some. At the same time, Lake Pontchartrain’s surge entered the Industrial Canal and ruptured adjacent levees, including those in the Lower Ninth Ward, topographically higher than the East, but equally vulnerable for how close it is to the canal.

  It was a flood so devastating that Walter Davis said, “I was thinking, ‘Man, I can tell my grandkids about this.’ That’s how awesome Betsy was.” So awesome was Betsy that her name was retired from the tropical cyclone naming list. Governor John McKeithen vowed on television and on the radio, in front of everybody, that “nothing like this will ever happen again.”

  President Lyndon B. Johnson flew into the Lower Ninth Ward the next day—the area, even then, was a drowned and abandoned symbol of water’s destructive power when facilitated by human error—declaring the city and surrounding areas a disaster zone and eventually pledging an $85 million protection plan that would rebuild levees and shore up flood protection systems, which would, in August 2005, forty years after Betsy, fail.

  Those who dared look close knew this would be so, just as they knew that many of the new houses built in the East, owing to slipshod construction, were already having major subsidence problems; this sinking would only worsen. They knew that sometimes after hard rains sewage from canals rose in people’s toilets and tubs like the devil’s bath, that the dream would not, could not hold, because the foundation was bad.

  In the days after Betsy, people tallied their losses. The damage exceeded $1.2 billion, a record for the time. There was mud everywhere. Drowned rats and dead cats floated. National Guard trucks drove around. Some people were arrested for looting.

  People in the deluged areas recalled hearing dynamite, an eruption in the middle of their scrambling. “The levees were blown on purpose,” my brother Michael says. Levees had been blown before by the federal government, during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to divert water away from more “valuable” neighborhoods. In New Orleans East, the marshes had been blown to dredge MR-GO. Everyone in the area heard. They knew the sound of dynamite. Thus Michael’s story was not entirely in the realm of fantasy. This story, that the levees were blown, the poorest used as sacrificial lambs, would survive and be revived through the generations.

  The city’s vulnerability to widespread flooding and the images of stranded poor people shocked the nation. HUNDREDS MAROONED ON ROOFS AS SWOLLEN WATERS RIP LEVEE. HURRICANE BETSY LEAVES NEW ORLEANS WITH 16-FOOT FLOOD, the Chicago Tribune’s front page blared. And: 70,000 LEFT HOMELESS AS WATER RISES.

  “Why weren’t the people of inundated areas evacuated?” asked Dr. Edward Teller, a Berkeley atomic scientist, during a speech in New Orleans before the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, weeks after the storm. “Your city had hours of warning,” he went on. “Why wasn’t it anticipated that the levee of the Industrial Canal might break … that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet might overflow?” City officials resisted his plain questions, attacking his integrity instead: “The uprooting of people is not as simple as Dr. Teller wants it to be … to evacuate a million people into the wilderness in the middle of the night would have resulted in more casualties.” But, Teller said, people h
ad only twenty minutes to evacuate between the time they knew water was rushing in and the time it had risen over their heads.

  “Who is this Teller who comes in here making unauthorized, ridiculous, and irresponsible statements?” asked newly elected mayor Victor Schiro, using his status as a native New Orleanian to deride the foreigner as an outsider, short of understanding, an interloper who could not possibly know.

  “He’s talking completely out of his field now,” said Louisiana Governor John McKeithen. “Why, he has probably never been to Louisiana before. He flew in here Tuesday night and damned us all and then flew back to Los Angeles the same night,” he said before quoting President Lyndon B. Johnson, who he claimed called Teller a “scientific nut.”

  More than seventy-five people died in Betsy. Most drowned. Or they died of heart attacks while waiting to drown. Fishing boats were overturned, people whipped to death by winds. Or their houses collapsed on top of them. A few people died while being evacuated, literally while walking from their house to the rescue boat.

  Even though expanses of New Orleans East Inc.’s property lay underwater, development surged on. Everyone vowed to rebuild higher, better. The feeling caught. New apartment houses went up everywhere on Chef Menteur Highway and elsewhere in the East, just as the interstate highway was expanded and the North Claiborne Overpass erected, decimating much of the cultural and economic life of historic black neighborhoods. It was still boom time; oil was cheap. NASA in Michoud had sustained superficial damage in Betsy—broken glass, peeled-off roofs—but the space vehicles were untouched, and the program eventually expanded, with work on the Saturn V (to this day the largest, most powerful rocket in NASA history) under way for rocketing into space thirty-two months later. Liftoff.

  MR-GO would become an expensive failure, eventually costing taxpayers $20,000 per boat that passed through. Rarely used, it would not usher in its projected revenue and jobs. But, post-Betsy, the levees would be shored up by the government just as Lyndon Johnson promised. New Orleans East Inc. and other eastern developers would use this fact in their advertisements to lure more and more people to the area. And in 1968, Congress would spur this repopulation along by creating the National Flood Insurance Program, which allowed people to buy flood insurance at low rates, even and especially in dangerous flood zones.