The Yellow House

  Daily, the school hallways hold contests of a lurid sort. Mobs of schoolchildren form concentric circles that pulse and grow, a boxing match under way in the inner ring. When the brawl is most dangerous, someone runs down the hall, yells “Fight, fight, fight,” and all of us run toward, not away. We stand there believing that we want to see two people destroy each other. This is, for us, educational, entertainment, a break in the monotony of our day. “Fight, fight, fight,” we call, revved up. A slight as simple as stepping on another’s foot by mistake could put you in the ring just as fast. You have to be careful.

  Some days we have substitute teachers who seem called in from off the street. Many times, the substitute puts a movie into the VCR that has nothing to do with the subject matter or with learning. Everything in the world feels stupid then. School feels to me like an unpredictable, malfunctioning parts factory. You can never tell when a piece will fly off, hitting you in the face, possibly blinding you for life. You fall in with the crowd or you stand out. Standing out, being recognized as I was in sixth grade as an Eagle Scholar, can get you destroyed. Everyone knows the verbal beatings are worse than the physical kind. It’s hard to heal from scorn.

  I begin disliking school, bored by its monotony, the way every class, even the one memorable math class taught by the bald Mr. Nero who had high expectations for us, devolved into a corralling of wayward students.

  We had become a horde, to be gathered and made to “act right,” indistinguishable from one another.

  I develop mental crushes on hard, light-skinned boys, those seemingly impossible to get, to whom I was invisible, the boys who were now Alvin’s friends. After school, I see Alvin with his crew but only for split seconds before he disappears into worlds I will never know. Alvin and I speak little now. He is never alone, and when we are back on the short end of Wilson, we act too old for games. I mostly stay inside, peering at Alvin from the kitchen window.

  In the fall of 1993, Lynette leaves for New York City’s Pratt Institute of Technology to study fashion design, and I inherit, for the first time, at fourteen, a room of my own.

  My school attendance drops. Our crew of girl-women enters the school doors in the morning and walks straight out through the back, escaping Livingston through a hole in the schoolyard’s wire fence. Sometimes, patrolling truancy guards see us and give chase. This evasion becomes the highlight and lesson of our day. While Alvin and James are in class, I lie watching soap operas at Red’s townhouse, her mom away at work. My friends are with their boyfriends many of these days; they are becoming pregnant in the other room while I watch the television.

  Sometimes when I am dawdling at the corner store close to Livingston, my sister Valeria, James’s mother, drives by. “Get your black behind back across that highway,” she says, taking off one of her flip-flops and wagging it in the direction of me and the short end of Wilson.

  We don’t cut school on assembly days when talent shows or subpar Shakespearean productions are performed in the auditorium with its flitting fluorescent lights shining on an awful art deco scheme of faded rectangular soundproofing panels around the walls. The wooden folding seats slam against the backs of our legs when we stand. “Ouch, dammit,” everyone is always saying. The stage, dark even when lit, rises higher than normal, forcing us to tilt our heads back in order to see. When the entire school gathers in the auditorium it is guaranteed that a fight will break out. I never fight though. I like words but not the way my body feels when it is moving through space.

  One day, midway through eighth grade, after I’ve missed an alarming number of school days, I walk the long side of Wilson toward home, past my former elementary school, Jefferson Davis. It is likely that I’m eating junk food, a kosher dill pickle and a bag of Elmer’s Chee Wees. Whenever I am eating, I am happy; when I am happy, I haven’t a care. I walk as slow as possible, trying to disappear my snack before arriving home where I would have to share. I saunter past houses with people sitting on porches and wave; pass the mobile home dealership hidden behind a high corrugated wall; speed up my pace to go by the Ratville, boarded up and abandoned now, before crossing Chef Menteur. When I make it to 4121 Wilson, my mother is there in her work uniform, sweeping the kitchen floor, which seems an ordinary task. She sees me and raises the broom, wielding it like a sword against my backside. Vagrant, truant me cries aloud, “No Mah, no Mah,” running and carrying on, begging her for mercy. I cannot run far. The end of the house seems also its beginning. I have to crouch down where I am, long limbs and all, and take my punishment.

  “You want to be so grown,” my mother says afterward, pitying me.

  The next day, certain things change. For one, when I wake, oil is dripping down from my forehead. Mom has anointed my head overnight with cooking oil as if to cast out whatever rebellious spirit was in me.

  Mom always thought words had enormous power, was always saying, You have what you say. In our house, “I’m dying” and especially “My head is killing me” were forbidden figures of speech. She’d interrupt you midword. You’ll have what you say. To demonstrate this, each morning, from then on, I was to sit down with her at the kitchen table to read aloud from the Book of Proverbs, which, Mom reasoned, would grant me wisdom I didn’t yet have. Proverbs has thirty-one chapters; we read a chapter every morning of each day, beginning again every month, for a year.

  “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding,” I mumble, always furious at first. My mother sits across from me, drinks her cup of coffee. I slur the words, drag them, cough my way along. My mother never reacts. “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? And the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?”

  Mom summons her firstborn, Eddie, to fix me—she always calls him for the seemingly impossible tasks—and he appears in the church aisles from his house in suburban LaPlace to talk sense into me. He walks like his feet hurt. He seems here against his will. His face tenses. He spoke then as he speaks now, always threatening a depth that rarely arrives. “I know I’m getting deep now,” he is always saying. “Now look at this, what do you think you’re going to achieve running around here with these knuckleheads? Now I know I’m getting deep, I know this is hard to see, but … they’re not going to ever be anything,” he says. Eddie is not part of my normal world. I barely know him. There are twenty years between us. I stare hard at him, admiring his golden skin, which sweats and glistens under the sanctuary’s lights. I nod, dead eyed, a look that to this day scares Eddie when he sees it on my adult face. “You’ve had that look since you were a little girl,” he will say when he sees it. “It means you’re lying.”

  Mom begins driving me to Livingston’s doors and waiting to see that I do not escape. She returns long before the afternoon bell rings out our freedom at three thirty and waits, parked across the street, her car’s headlights facing the dingy school.

  This doesn’t last long, because next I know, she has enrolled me in private school at Word of Faith Academy, part of a megachurch. In the weeks leading up to this, I sense change is coming. Mom is on the phone even more, whispering about me to Lynette in New York City.

  Where before my universe had consisted of a few square blocks of New Orleans East, getting to the new school requires that I travel farther east through Bullard, one of the area’s wealthier suburbs, which includes a black upper class living in Eastover, a gated community with two-story homes built around a man-made pond and golf course. Passing through Bullard on the way to school makes me think that we had not settled eastward enough.

  New Orleans East was no longer majority white as it had been a decade before. Everything in the East slipped—into stasis, entropy, full-blown disrepair. The oil bust in the late 1980s led to a surplus of empty apartment buildings meant for employees who would work for booming industries that never materialized. Those became subsidized housing for poor black people pushed from the city’s center, where real estate was more valuable, to its “eastern frontier.”
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br />   My classmates at Word of Faith Academy are no one I know from before, girls named after Christian values—Faith and Charity and Hope. I am one of five black students. Word of Faith kids are popular not for their name-calling skills, but for how highly ranked their fathers are in the church. The teachers are the spouses of church ministers, which means the learning is spotty. Our Spanish teacher, the principal’s wife, knows Spanish from a study-abroad session taken four decades before, in her youth. You don’t need to know Spanish to know that she teaches it badly, enunciating every syllable with a Southern twang, her sharply bobbed hair moving into the side of her mouth as she speaks.

  Mr. Chris is part of Word of Faith’s church choir. He also teaches gym and history. When he writes on the chalkboard his whole body quivers as if the board is emitting shock waves. These are the things Livingston has trained me to notice. Writing on the board takes him forever. Once a week, in the mushroom-shaped megachurch, Mr. Chris holds chapel, leading us in goofy a cappella songs and too-earnest prayer.

  At Word of Faith, I wear a red-white-and-blue plaid skirt with either a red vest or a navy-blue sweater over a white button-down. For my first year, ninth grade, I roll my skirt up three inches higher than the rules and speak in clipped sentences to kids who appear afraid of me. And this detail cannot be avoided: I wear a plastic rat-tail comb lodged in my hair. I had been doing that at Livingston. It is one way I pretend that nothing has really changed, yet the lodged comb also makes clear that I have arrived in this new context from a distinct elsewhere and this perception of myself—that I am misplaced at Word of Faith—takes hold of me in a way so impossible to shake that I am writing about it now.

  I cannot walk to school. Getting to Word of Faith requires my catching the city bus; I lose physical contact with the streets. When Mom drops me off at school some mornings in her new Chevy Nova, I insist she not drive too close to the archway of campus where fancier cars idle, letting students out to mill about before the bell rings.

  “Just let me out here,” I say the moment we enter the parking lot.

  I am ashamed of our car even though it is brand-new. I am ashamed if Mom wears rollers in her hair. She is gentle and kind and gorgeous, and she loves me. Sacrifices basic necessities to put me in this private school we cannot afford. I understand those things. I know. But my feelings … We seem, in our car and in our lot, not to match the school to which I now belong.

  I never again lay eyes on any of my friends from Livingston. My time there has come to an abrupt end. I lose track of Alvin and James, too, the two people who always know which name of mine to call, who have come into the house where I live and seen me there, the two men from whom I once could not hide. Alvin was, by then, in high school at Abramson on Read Road, which was the normal trajectory for all of my siblings and everyone on the street up until me.

  VII

  Interiors

  Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water.

  I cannot pinpoint the precise moment when I came to understand that no one outside our family was ever to come inside the Yellow House. During the Livingston days my mother started saying, You know this house not all that comfortable for other people. And that line seemed after a time unending, a verbal tic so at home with us that she need not ever complete the sentence.

  You know this house …

  Because Lynette was five years older than I and far more outgoing, and because she had a social life beyond the short end of the street, this mattered much more to her, at first. One time, in her middle school days, Lynette dared ask anyway. She wanted Kristie Lee to come over. All of her friends had been hosting slumber parties and now it was Lynette’s turn.

  You know this house not …

  “I knew what would happen if you made friends,” Lynette says, thirty-five years after the fact. “So I stopped making them. It meant that people were going to want to come into your life, and they weren’t going to come nowhere near that house. Not even if it took everything in me.”

  Kristie Lee never came over.

  In this way, we stayed closed, clutched inside. Without knowing how it came to be, we left every person in our world who was not family outside, unable to cross the threshold to enter in and see the place where we lived, which was still my mother’s pride and joy. The house was my beginnings. It was the only house I ever knew.

  We love interiors. My mother was raised by my grandmother Lolo to make a beautiful home; I love to make beauty out of ordinary spaces. I had not known this back when I was living inside the Yellow House, but I knew it in my adult years when I created rooms that people gravitated to, the kind generally described as warm. Once, a friend came to one of these made places, an apartment in Harlem, and sat in the parlor looking around. The room had made him feel alive, even happy to be alive, he said. And then, “You have things to make a home with.” People are always telling me this. I was the same person when I lived in the Yellow House. I had those qualities that drew me to want to be in a beautiful place surrounded by people I loved, and what this is building to, what I am trying to describe, is the gut-wrenching fact, the discovery even, that by not inviting people in, we were going against our natures.

  That is shame. A warring within, a revolt against oneself. It can bury you standing if you let it. Those convoluted feelings manifesting as an adrenaline rush, when I narrowly avoided letting someone see the place where I lived. By the time I was fourteen, the possibility of anyone nonfamily seeing our house was imbued with fantastical power, the anxiety sending my heart to racing, even now, thumping these words out across the page.

  My fear at the mere thought of someone seeing the Yellow House (my home, the place where I lived and belonged) drove me to do frantic things. If a classmate was dropping me home from Word of Faith Academy, I kept them away from the short end of Wilson Avenue. I’d lie, say I needed to pick up something from the store first. Even in sopping rain, I’d rather walk home in the wet. From the inside of Natal’s where I perused the shelves, having no money to buy, I’d watch until their car backed out of the drive, until their car was out of sight, then walk Chef Menteur, to where the people I loved, my mother and siblings, lived, the whole while wearing the scent of deceit and wishing I were invisible.

  One time, when Lynette was eleven years old she spent a wonderful weekend among nice things in her godmother Bonnie’s uptown house. That weekend, Bonnie, an ex-girlfriend of Uncle Joe, had other relatives over. “They had been so impressed with me,” Lynette remembers. Those impressed people dropped Lynette off at home. Another kid, along for the ride, needed to use the bathroom. “What was I gonna say?” asks Lynette. “I’m imagining these people in Aunt Bonnie’s lovely home. The nightmare! Of somebody seeing our house falling apart and people like us lived there! I kept insisting, panicking, crazy like a maniac, ‘I’m gonna go to the store and walk home from there.’ But they were adults, they knew.” When you are frantic, your behavior is more obvious than you think.

  Lynette’s godmother called Mom to tell of Lynette’s fiasco, which led my mother to ask Lynette whether she felt ashamed of the place where we lived. Lynette had a hard time finding the words. She just said the obvious: “They were gonna come in to use the bathroom.” Mom had to understand. She let it go.

  “The kind of people that we were made it worse,” says Lynette. “Because of the way Mama made us look, people began to have expectations. It’s better to look homely if you live in a house like that.”

  We were composed children; my mother was a composed child. We looked like people who had money. In how we dressed but more than that, in the way we carried ourselves. We walked upright, possibly with airs, expecting great things of ourselves and everyone around us. Like her mother, my mother buried her rage and despair deep within, underneath layers and layers of poise. America required these dualities anyway and we were good at presenting our double selves. The house, unlike the clothes our mother had tailored to us, was an ungainly fit
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  My mother rarely ever sat. She was always go, go, go. Except for sometimes after school when I’d do my Spanish homework on her bed. Mom, who was hungry to know foreign things, wanted to learn a second language too. Sometimes when she was reclining on her bed, her legs crossed at the ankle, I would lay my head on her stomach and listen to the sounds it made. Her interior sounds could become so loud. She would rub my forehead—her hands are unusually soft—and that particular memory is to me an airlift, transporting me even now to a far less exposed feeling.

  My mother was, I can see now, the house that was safe. But even still, we carried the weight of the actual house around in our bodies.

  In high school, I did not make close friends. No one came over to the house. In high school, I was the same person I am now: sociable and interested in receiving people. I did not make friends. I was acting against my nature.

  I lost my best friend from church, Tiffany Cage, who couldn’t understand why she was never invited over when I was at her apartment at least two Sundays a month. Her family of three lived in a small apartment. It wasn’t lavish, but it wasn’t falling apart, either. When she started demanding visits, I’d lie: “You will come” or “We have company now” or, again, “You will come.”

  When Tiffany persisted, I wrote in a notebook (my writing everything down having become, by then, habit): “All she cares about is coming to my house. How petty.” After mellowing, I wrote the truth: “Tiffany was exactly right. She has gotten too close. Now it’s time for our relationship to end.”