The Yellow House

  But still, Mom made notes describing the house she aspired to. “Living room, spacious dining room, two bedrooms, spacious den, kitchen, garage, sewing room, nice front and back yard, good location, preferably in the city, air central and heating central,” she wrote in a notebook. “Ground level, lots of space for flowers and shrubbery. Brick and wood. Nice windows.”

  During her time back in the Yellow House, Lynette wrote a resolution called S*A*V*E: Mom’s House Plan. From July through November, Ivory Mae’s children would contribute monthly to a new house fund. Lynette laminated this document and hung it up so that it looked at us every day. Checks trickled in, but these did not add up to enough for Yellow House repairs or a new house. The plan needed a project manager, and Lynette was not that. We all felt guilt when the plan didn’t come together, the laminated paper yellowing on the wall. We eventually took the paper down, but it has survived the years. House hunting would stop—for a time—but then revive, this load-bearing dream spurring on highlighting and drive-by house touring, again.

  The one sign of progress on the short end of Wilson was the construction of a brick house just across the street from Ms. Octavia’s—next door to the junk business. The sight of the house being built was mesmerizing, all of the hammering and lifting and comings and goings of the work crew. Wider than all three of the houses on our side of the street, it had two separate entrances in front framed by redbrick arches cut out of a brick wall tall enough to hide the house’s occupants who could sit behind it, on the porch, undetected. The attic had a small window from which someone could look onto us. These details lent the lone house on that side of the street an air of mystery. Because I never quite knew who stayed there, never saw them moving about on the street, I put the owners on a pedestal: They of the Misplaced Brick House. There would come a time when I would know very well the man who would stay in that house long after its charm had faded. Everything that I am writing here now leads to that.

  During her year in New York City, Lynette had met and befriended Deirdre, an aspiring model from Florida, whom she now wanted to invite home.

  Lynette had left the Yellow House and had perhaps forgotten that we did not bring people over, or she had seen the folly of that and felt it was time for a new way of doing things. My mother said what she always said.

  Now, girl, you know this house …

  But Lynette rallied and changed Mom’s mind, which surprised me and sent Mom into overdrive, doing all she could to the house except remaking it from the foundation up, which was the only important thing to do, the only way to hold the thing up, but we did not have the means for that.

  For Deirdre’s arrival, Mom changed curtains, cleaned the chandelier with its faux crystal teardrops, spray-painted the frame of the front room mirror gold again, polished the tables, Sure Cleaned the house with bleach so that we could barely breathe. The house just stood there, a belligerent unyielding child.

  Lynette’s friend Deirdre came one summer day. From where I sat inside the kitchen, just by the side door, I heard her tires roll onto our shelled drive. She was in a red Jeep Wrangler with a tan soft top. The moment I saw her car, I instantly longed for one of my own.

  “The first day she came, she was overwhelmingly hot,” Lynette says. “I should have told her: ‘Listen, we live in a shack. Our house is completely dilapidated.’”

  Deirdre came inside. Our welcoming her required that we move against everything we had practiced up until that moment. She confirmed for us, without knowing it, what we saw with our own eyes. She was deeply uncomfortable, complaining bitterly about those things that we ourselves hated most: heat, rats, and the bathroom.

  It was our life. We felt judged, but we did not say so.

  Deirdre stayed a few weeks, I think. She left just as she had come, backing out of the drive in her Wrangler. At the stoplight, she turned right, heading eastward on Chef Menteur to her own mother’s home in Florida. She left, I think, not knowing in the slightest, owing to youth or personality, the gift of ourselves we had been desperate to give.

  Deirdre confirmed what Mom had already known. You know this house not all that comfortable for other people. The house was not all that comfortable for us, either. The evidence stared back at us. We became more private then. In a way, you could say we became the Yellow House. Here is a riddle: What was worse? The house or hiding the house?

  Shame is a slow creeping at first, a violent implosion later.

  By the near-to-end, Sure Clean could offer no assurances. It was sure of nothing whatsoever. It was outdone by the house’s need and so was my mother, Ivory Mae, who as Lynette put it “could save a rock.”

  I cannot recall another friend visiting the house again.

  Just at the moment when Lynette was hired at the Court of Two Sisters restaurant on Royal Street, she was accepted into Parsons School of Design and left for New York City for the second and final time, never returning to live in New Orleans or to visit for longer than two weeks at a time. Weeks after she left, Officer Antoinette Frank robbed a Vietnamese restaurant on Chef Menteur that she guarded as a side job, killing another police officer and a brother and sister who worked there. This happened in March 1995, in springtime. I was fifteen.

  I had just learned to drive. Carl taught me, taking me once on Old Gentilly Road, too narrow for two cars to pass at the same time. My second and final lesson was on the High Rise where I had to merge into speeding cars. “Drive, girl. Just drive,” an unfazed Carl told me. I had no choice.

  I had inherited Karen’s former car, a blue Toyota Tercel parked in the yard between our house and Ms. Octavia’s. I could peer at it from my bedroom window. It was the first thing I owned that I could make dreams for. But it never did run. Or even turn on. Still, I’d hung an air freshener from the rearview mirror, was readying a car that would never go, the grass underneath it dying, decaying, blocked from sun. I loved the smell of the fabric in the heat, newly conditioned by me, and the shut-in quality of it. Sometimes, I would close its doors, roll the windows all the way up, and sit inside until I lost my breath.

  My siblings were all grown, most of them married, returning to the Yellow House for visits and for the lows, the in-between times natural to every life. Troy had left for marriage and had three children, but he, too, had come back after divorce and was living again in the crown of the house where he had grown up.

  Darryl’s return always began with him in the space of yard between the Yellow House and Ms. Octavia’s, just behind my blue Tercel.

  Watching from the kitchen window, I’d see Darryl’s clothes on the ground, but no, the clothes were actually him lying down there, a ball of bones in fabric, knees huddled to his face, T-shirt tented, his head disappeared inside. Carl and Michael and Eddie’s anger would fill the yard, their long legs moving in and out, a springy motion, Carl gnawing at the knuckles of his balled fist.

  This beating belonged inside, but bringing Darryl in was dangerous now. The fury of the brothers made the neighbors disappear; no one was outside except for the fighting men and their cowering brother. All curtains were pulled tight except for a peeking hole in Ms. Octavia’s bedroom window. I never watched for long. It is a terrible thing to see love misfire in a million different directions: we are beating you because you did a wrong thing as a grown man, because you hurt our mother who we love more than anything, because we can beat sense into you and addiction out of you even though of course we cannot, because if we do not beat you someone else will beat you to death and this will destroy us, too.

  Mom would run outside each and every time in slippered feet yelling at the boys to stop—Michael, Carl, Eddie, y’all going too far now—her voice high-pitched and girl-like. Let him be now. She was thin, but curvy, many inches shorter than her sons, but she’d push her hips and legs against their bulk. When they backed away, Darryl was left lying on the grass. I’d stand there at the window watching him not move for the longest time. I never saw him stand up and walk away, but suddenly I’d turn back to
look and find him gone.

  Days later, he’d call collect from a drug treatment program.

  “Hey Mo, Mama there?”

  “Hold on. Mamaaaaaaaa.”

  What is it, girl, why are you yelling?

  “Darryl want you.”

  And then the exact same thing would happen time and time again. This pattern—scheme, make amends, relapse, scheme—was who Darryl was to me for all of my childhood and teenagehood and for most of my adult years.

  He stole our things to pawn for drugs: Mom’s wedding ring from Simon Broom that she stored in her bedroom drawer. Dad’s set of golf clubs. The banjo? He became responsible for any and all disappearances, whether he was the culprit or not.

  We woke some mornings to find Mom’s car missing, which forced her to walk the half mile down Chef Menteur to her job at the nursing home. In the days following, we’d hear stories about how someone else was spotted riding in our car. We understood the danger of this. Whatever slight was committed by whoever “rented” Mom’s car from Darryl in exchange for drug money was also being committed by us. When the car came back to us and if Mom happened to be driving me to school, someone could mistake us for Darryl or for one of his drug friends and unload a round. I became terrified then of being shot, especially in the head. For many years, in many different places, including my dreams, I nursed this fear.

  When Mom worked overnight, the entire length of the Yellow House was empty except for me in the middle, in my bedroom. Those nights, when she was away, I’d lie in bed straining my ears toward the three entrances. The stranger I feared was my brother Darryl and whoever else might accompany him into the house to steal for drugs.

  The farthest door in the living room was three rooms away. It had a sturdy lock, or maybe the door was nailed shut. The two states have merged in my mind.

  The kitchen door, next to my room, was industrial size and too heavy for the frame. Procured by Carl—who, like his father, had a way of finding things—it poked out, its raw edges causing splinters when you grabbed it wrong. Because of its size, and especially because we used it most, locks always seemed to break off.

  I lived those early hours of the night supremely aware, examining every sound, like someone walking in a strange forest for the first time.

  As if to compensate for this attentive work, when I finally allowed my body and mind to rest, after a certain point in the night, 2 a.m. say, when I had reasoned that whatever could have happened already would have, I descended into a sleep so deep that nothing could wake me. I consider this type of sleep another self-defense. If you are sleeping this deeply, then whatever befalls you will overtake you without your knowing it. Sleep became for me the ultimate resignation.

  One night I lay in bed. All about me were the circumstances of my life. The only light came from the kitchen, the next room over. The oven was on for heat. A dining chair leaned up against the heavy side door, serving as its lock. It took a tremendous suspension of disbelief for me to believe I was safe from anything whatsoever. I was fighting sleep, which meant that it was early into the morning of the next day, when I half noticed a limb moving out from underneath my bed. Then part of a male torso appeared. Was I dreaming?

  He swung his body into the next room.

  I closed my eyes. It was wintertime; my skin felt cold against the sheets.

  I heard a familiar groan. My brother Darryl groaned.

  The chair at the door fell across the floor.

  I lay in bed for a long while, feeling the chill from the dark night.

  When I finally stood up from bed, my arms wrapped about me, I pulled back the black curtain that separated my bedroom from the kitchen. The side door was wide open. The chair lay on its side.

  Mom came home around six in the morning and discovered the trespass before I could wake to tell the story: Darryl had sneaked into the house and hidden underneath my bed until Mom left for work in order to steal the microwave, which was our last household appliance.

  Darryl awoke in me a new fear, not of strangers whose faces I did not know but of those things, people, scenarios that were most intimate, most known. But I didn’t really know Darryl, did I? He was my older brother. That was the fact, but facts are not the story.

  I was afraid to look at Darryl in his possession, which is how I thought of his addiction. I did not look at him, had never truly seen his eyes. When I did, many years later, his was a face I had never seen before.

  For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.

  Darryl became “Praise the Lord” man whenever he was in recovery, saying “Praise the Lord” like a tic after every single sentence no matter its relevance. After rehab, trust regained, he would reenter the Yellow House and find temporary work—at a candy factory, say. He’d work until his second paycheck, then start back on drugs. I always knew when he was using because he was moody and jumpy, sleeping for too long on the couch. Sometimes, when I tried to wake him, afraid that he was dead, he’d call me Fatso. I had wide shoulders and big thighs.

  “Who even uses that word?” I’d say to him.

  The Darryl we loved, but rarely saw now, was extremely funny, a wordsmith, teller of the best tales. It was less what he said, more how he said it. He had a comedian’s timing. He told tongue twisters using a lot of curse words, which made me crack up laughing, especially in those years when I could hear better than I could see. Sometimes, when we were younger, all of us who were in the house at any given time would end up in Mom’s pink-painted bedroom while Darryl regaled us with ordinary stories made to sound fantastical. How a bullet grazed his face during a fight over a girl at a middle school dance, leaving a scar under his eye that looks like a folded leaf. “I just kept dancing, you know, baby, those legs kept moving. Ain’t no thing,” Darryl claimed. Sometimes we’d feel so free in our togetherness that we’d have the nerve to jump on Mom’s bed. It would be all laughs and smiles and sometimes jabs and light wrestling when Darryl would interrupt with what we thought was yet another wry story. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” he would say to ruin everyone’s mood.

  VIII

  Tongues

  By the time I was a junior at Word of Faith, I had gained an interiority, a place without strictures where I could live, and that inside space was the room I loved best. High school, for me, boiled down to my desire to leave it for an elsewhere that I did not yet know. I had adjusted, somewhat. Was by junior year part of the yearbook staff and had come to admire its leader, Mrs. Grace, a shiny-faced English teacher who spoke softly, pursed lipped, enunciating every syllable. My mother reading words aloud was my first memory of the pleasure I felt whenever care was taken with words; Mrs. Grace was the second. Writing, I found, was interiority, and so was God.

  Church had become our main outing, a second home where we could make new selves. Now we went to Victory Fellowship in Metairie, a megachurch thirty minutes from home, which required driving over the High Rise, a great change from Pastor Simmons’s tiny house-church just off Chef. We were at church twice on Sundays, in the morning and again at night, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays for prayer group, concerts, and guest ministers.

  Pastor Simmons had baptized us in the Mississippi; we wore all white. At Victory Fellowship, I was baptized again by Pastor Frank while wearing an oversize T-shirt and school gym shorts in a whirlpool tub off to the side of the stage.

  Victory, a salmon-colored monstrosity, called itself nondenominational. My mother was, I think, first drawn to the church’s story, the absence of stark ritual and boundaries. The congregation called itself Victory Assembly at first, reflecting its founding by Frank and Paris Bailey, two former hippies whose testimony included living in a trailer park, roaming the French Quarter high on drugs, and stumbling into a performa
nce of Jesus Christ Superstar, happenstance that transformed them into the sanctified. Their calling, as they saw it, was to find those who were lost, just as they had once been.

  Spirit-filled, Victory’s congregants spoke in tongues, a private language accessible only to God. I spoke in tongues as did my mother and sister Karen. Although I have not tried, I can, theoretically, still speak in tongues, as can they.

  Tongues was interiority writ large. You had to do it without shame, with no self-consciousness whatsoever. The only control was in letting go. When you gave yourself over to it, it came bubbling out from you, this foreign language you did not need to study for, that was specific to you and your tongue, and that you did not know you spoke—until you did.

  Shortly after receiving tongues, I joined Teen Bible Quiz, mostly for the out-of-town trips along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Back in the Yellow House, I wrote scriptures on note cards, learning all of the New Testament and some of the Old Testament by heart. I became so good at memorizing these scriptures, taking these words inside me, that I was called up in front of the church to recite several chapters, which I did, the lights shining brightly, my mouth spitting the words like they were on a speedway, racing each other. “God is not unjust,” my mouth was saying. I was a machine, afraid that if I slowed I would forget. The crowd cheered me anyway and the bright lights shone.

  By the winter of 1995, the Movement began. That is what we called it, or else the Revival. The roots of this “once-in-a-lifetime Pentecostal outpouring” were in the distant past, Pastor Frank preached. He and his wife, who bragged about their former life as hippies, seemed suddenly academic, their sermons lectures on historical religious moments. They spoke of the First Great Awakening’s heroes—eighteenth-century Calvinist Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, who preached nineteen times in four days until blood came out of his mouth. During the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, Pastor Frank told us, congregants made noises like Niagara—people jerking, laughing, rolling like wheels, crying, barking. I made these notes in a black leather journal Michael had given me. By writing things down, I had discovered, I could remove myself from whatever physical plane I was on and go to the room I loved best.