The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  Victory’s language changed to include the following phrases: Holy Ghost Fire, Drunk in the Holy Spirit, and New Wine. My favorite visiting preacher was Rodney Howard Brown from South Africa, who was always yelling FIRE. “Fi-yuh,” he would say. When he was in town, services could last far past midnight.

  Inside the doors of Victory Fellowship people were laid out on the floor, laughing uproariously for hours, coming to church to get “drunk” in the spirit. One lady, a white-haired retired teacher, jumped up and began sprinting around the sanctuary in midsermon. Soon, there would be mobs of people running spontaneous marathons while Pastor Frank preached.

  I describe this without irony and without sarcasm for I was one of the drunk. This was the first drink, the first spirit, I’d ever had. I’d stand in the prayer line like everyone else, for the laying on of hands, all of us drawing an S through the church beginning at the altar and ending at the back near the exit doors.

  When Pastor Frank came to you in line, energized and speaking in tongues, laughing and praying, you would almost immediately fall down, just from the sounds he made—unless your mind and body were set on resisting. Sometimes you’d rock from side to side until exhausted by the struggle, or by Pastor Frank’s tenaciousness. He rarely moved on without a fall-down. Ushers also figured in your consideration of where to stand in the line: you always wanted to go where the strongest men were. Some, including my brother Troy, were notorious for letting supplicants fall too hard onto the thinly carpeted floor. Women ushers came behind the pastor throwing maroon blankets over the women who wore skirts or dresses or shorts. Those who seemed chilled and trembly got blankets, too.

  I could be laid out for hours and hours, my mother sitting alone in the back pew of the church waiting for me to arise, the building having emptied out. The sanctuary was empty; even the pastors had gone home. Troy paced outdoors. I know for certain that I felt something, down on the ground, but what? That was so long ago I cannot say now whether I was taking a sanctioned nap or undergoing quiet transformation. The peace did not last long. Troy could always break my trance, afterward, in the car riding home when he insisted we stop at 7-Eleven for a Coca-Cola Icee and chips, an activity so banal it settled me firmly back in my reality, sitting in the back seat next to Troy’s crunching and slurping and Karen’s two sleeping children.

  Word got around that I had been “touched.” My spiritual drunkenness made me well known around the church. When I arrived in the building, at the sight of me filing into the pew, Pastor Frank would light up, I felt. Therefore, what came after will not surprise.

  I got drunk on the Holy Spirit one day at Word of Faith Academy, in Mr. Chris’s history class, while he was shake-writing on the board. The fact of my having done this outside Victory’s four walls made me insane to Word of Faith’s church members, an example of the vastness of God to those from Victory. Word of Faith had vehemently resisted the Movement, but it had come to them wearing a uniform skirt and red vest. Whatever came over me that day led me to appear drunk, my eyes squinted. I may have been laughing. I was carried off to the principal’s office by both arms, past classroom doors, looking ill. Mom was called to come retrieve me. The principal called Pastor Frank to find out what exactly I had been drinking. He likely told the principal no, it wasn’t drugs or beer, it was that Holy Ghost “Fi-yuh.” I made it into Pastor Frank’s Sunday sermons for a long while after that, as a shining example of God’s grace—“the high schooler who …”

  But nothing of our circumstances had changed beyond Victory’s walls. And even more, and this is really the point, no one in the church knew where we lived. No one had ever been to our home, as much as my mother showed up, in the years I was there, those years I am speaking about now and the many years afterward; no one had any interest in the condition of our life. It was not entirely their fault. By avoiding showing people the place where we lived, we unmoored ourselves. No one did this to us.

  By the middle of 1996, the Revival bore on. One day in church, after the prayer line, I met a bass player named Roy in the pews. He was the first man I felt lust for; I became infatuated with him. We hung out. No one in my house used the word “dating,” but that was the idea. Roy happened to live in New Orleans East, just down Chef Menteur, not five minutes from the Yellow House. My interest in this bass player grew to take precedence over Holy Ghost Fi-yuh.

  I was sixteen, but I lied and told Roy I was nineteen, like him. I had evolved from hiding the house to hiding the house of myself, obscuring details; secrets were cherished, earned possessions. I thought of it then as keeping some of myself for myself. I wanted to be old enough—if only in mind—to leave home. I had been taking correspondence courses in anthropology at Louisiana State University and this fact emboldened me to tell Roy that I was at a local college, a lie that I then had to support. Now, whenever I got off the bus and stood on Chef Menteur’s neutral ground in my Word of Faith uniform, waiting to cross the street to home, I’d train my eyes above the cars passing by me, just in case Roy’s was one of them, as if looking above, and not directly at, made me invisible.

  Michael moved back into the Yellow House during this time, after his marriage ended. He carried little with him to the Yellow House except for a king-size four-poster bed that he let me have. The bed outshone everything else in my bedroom, and this I loved, mostly for how high it elevated me, far above the floor.

  Michael came in from his work as a chef late at night. He had to pass through my bedroom to the upstairs crown where he slept. “Hey, baby girl,” he’d say, plopping into the green velvet chair that sat against the corner wall. From where I lay in bed, I could see one side of Michael’s drooping shoulder.

  He spoke on and on. About the planets and the universe, about good and evil, about human failings. “Some people mind don’t go all the way up,” he said once. He recounted visions of black angels he’d seen in the upstairs window of the Yellow House many years ago, back when he was young, wearing a body brace, and tripping on LSD.

  “Throw my ashes in Lake Pontchartrain, somewhere, or in the Mississippi … I wonder if you have memory when you die … I don’t think you ever forget nothing. You might go blank if you lived a badass life. The whole world is about energy.” He’d say these kinds of things; the next morning I’d write them in my notebook.

  He spun tales, stories of his own life, how he became a chef: “Wilbur Bartholemy, he was a sous chef, real, real good chef, if it wasn’t for that dranking and shit … He could cook his ass off. I used to be following his ass around … When I cook, I’m gone cook like my mama cook, the food I grew up on … I was a dishwasher at Shoney’s at first, me and Darryl, everywhere I go and get a job, he’d come work with me. I love cooking. The thing is you get a high, say like if you putting out food, everything is clicking, the people outside is loving it, you start to feel invincible, whooping they ass, you have a rush, whoo.”

  Sometimes I spoke, too. Of private school and Birmingham, England, where I wanted to go and study for the summer. I had discovered Birmingham in a study-abroad catalog that came in the mail. In those days, the mailman delivered my dreams—shiny pictures in magazines and catalogs, Fingerhut and Spiegel. I’d call 1-800 numbers announced on television—“for more information,” I would tell the operator—just to receive an envelope addressed to me. At least the postman knew that we, in fact, existed, situated as we were on the short end of a long street, some miles away from where tourists slept the night.

  Birmingham was a picture of a castle with a price tag underneath. Birmingham, England, not Birmingham, Alabama, I explained to my family, from whom I hoped to raise money for travel. When I told Michael about it one late night, he pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to me, but that was the first and last donation. Getting to Birmingham required more hustling and explaining than I was willing to do. Still, Mom paid the application fee for my first passport. It would never gain a single stamp.

  Around this time, I was discovering James Bald
win. I spoke of him to Michael. Michael and James Baldwin taught me to follow a crooked line of thought. Our conversations, more like philosophical meanderings, were, for me, a release from a great loneliness Michael did not know I felt.

  “The world change every day,” Michael would say. “Nothing stays the same. We all have to change. If we don’t change, we perish.”

  “Right,” I would say from time to time, middoze, so that Michael would carry on telling. Sometimes, I’d change it up, ask: “Why you say that, Mike?”

  For a long time, I fell asleep to Michael’s voice.

  Michael would wake me in the wee hours of the morning—as Simon Broom once woke him—to drop him off at work in the French Quarter.

  There he would be, standing by my bed in his black-and-white-checkered chef pants. In the car, he kept clearing phlegm, in between doses of Goody headache powders. I drove; Michael directed and critiqued. “Over here … Slow down some … Get in this lane … Watch yourself now.”

  We always entered the French Quarter by way of Esplanade Avenue, which felt like another world, the great oaks framing the mansions on either side of the neutral ground. Most of the drivers in the French Quarter this early in the morning were, like me, dropping workers off. I’d pull up in front of K-Paul’s Restaurant on Chartres Street where Michael worked with Chef Paul Prudhomme, with whom he sometimes appeared in a chef’s white coat on the morning news. When Michael opened the door, he’d grab the top of the car to lift himself out. AGHHHHH, he always moaned.

  He’d wave me off and alone I took Canal Street to Claiborne to the interstate to the Yellow House.

  Having Michael in the house did not stop Darryl from robbing us. He kept at it, brazenly stealing “every fucking thing that wasn’t tied down” he’d later admit. This included Michael’s large-screen TV and VCR, which we discovered one late night after church when we pulled into the drive, the headlights shining on Michael’s things stashed alongside my blue Tercel that would never run, as if Darryl couldn’t lift them all at once.

  IX

  Distances

  By the start of 1997, I had sworn off church. They called it backsliding. There was a special prayer and altar call for backsliders like me who had tasted of the divine but shunned it for the pleasures of the world, which for me were the enticements of living in my head, thinking about men and cities in countries I had never seen, things that lay not in the present but far ahead.

  Not yet seventeen, I had been building toward my departure, graduating high school with a nearly 4.0 grade point average. As yearbook editor senior year, I wrote in terrible clichés about how we should remember our “special moments in time.” Of those special moments I cannot now recall a single one, except to say that my senior year was a long yearning for elsewhere. I did go to the prom that year, alone; the photograph exists to prove it to me. There I am posing with the three other black girls in a red satin peplum dress with an outsize white boat collar that Mom had sewn for a church event a year before. It no longer fit; it rode up my thighs the entire night.

  I had chosen the University of North Texas, following behind Roy the bass player, who was attending the music program there. When he mentioned the school to me, it was the only university outside Louisiana that I had heard of. Even though I had been taking college-level correspondence courses and excelling academically, no one at the Christian school had ever mentioned the kinds of universities where I likely could have been accepted. I never heard the names Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, or Yale—or even Tulane, Loyola, or Xavier, which were only a few miles, a public bus ride, away. I do not recall ever sitting with a guidance counselor to discuss life beyond high school. It was as if life stopped there—for me.

  I was not the first in my family to go to college though I am sure I wrote that I was on the college essay application. Karen had graduated from Southern University of New Orleans, but I had not asked her a single question about going there. My brother Simon Jr. and sister Deborah, who were living in North Carolina and Atlanta, he running his own business and she teaching, had gone to college, but when I was applying I had not known that; they were decades older than me. I saw Simon Jr. periodically when he visited us in the Yellow House at Christmastime, but I took him as I took Eddie—a disciplinarian you escaped and survived. Simon Jr. and I barely spoke. It felt unnatural to call and ask him a question.

  Roy was not a full-on boyfriend, though I imagined him to be, at the time. We were affecting togetherness. Writing letters and speaking on the phone sometimes. Wishy-washy. Kissing and making out sometimes after church. He was trying to be a jazzman. I did not love him, but I loved the texture of his fingertip calluses and the musical props surrounding him in his basement room, loved how his face contorted—ecstatic!—while he was playing. I still went to Victory sometimes, but for the wrong reason, to watch Roy run his fingers along his bass while playing in the church band.

  Roy could not love me either, not even if he’d wanted to. There were those lies of mine between us.

  Carl and Michael drove me to Texas in Eddie’s small pickup truck. I sat squeezed between my brothers even though my legs were longer than Michael’s.

  “Just hold down, Mo,” Carl said, accelerating into fifth gear for the long stretch of highway. I contorted my body out of the gearshift’s way.

  My possessions rode behind us in the truck bed, covered by heavy black industrial-size bags from NASA, what Carl called body bags, that made a snapping turtle sound against the wind for the entire eight-hour drive. But Carl’s cassette tapes, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Tyrene Davis, and Rod Stewart playing inside on rotation, buried the noise. Carl sang along in a bored voice, without lift. “Tonight’s the night …”

  He was against stopping for any reason whatsoever.

  “Let’s roll, we can hit this highway straight,” he was constantly saying. He ate sunflower seeds the whole time, flicking their empty carcasses out the window.

  From time to time, Carl made a noise that was not him singing and was not him talking: “Uhn, uhn, hn,” he would go. It was the sound of making mental calculations. The three of us settled into what felt like separate universes on that one seat. Carl’s conquering of the road seemed, for him, more than just operating a pickup. I felt he needed buttons to push, that with his abilities of concentration he could lift us off to someplace even beyond Louisiana road. He appeared in perfect control; in his company, I felt safe.

  But Carl’s agitation grew the farther away from New Orleans East we went. We crossed into Texas. Shortly after we passed the welcome sign, cops pulled us over, asking for all three of our licenses even though only Carl drove. Because I was in the middle and holding things in my lap, Michael and I were required to get out of the car so that I could move my arms enough to dig for identification. My brothers were stone silent, compliant, obedient men. Not themselves.

  “Don’t say shit,” Michael whispered to my annoyed face.

  Carl was ticketed for speeding.

  Once we took off again, the bags flapping their noise, we complained bitterly the entire rest of the trip to relieve Carl of any bad feeling. He was just going with the flow of traffic, we said. Look at all those people speeding. It was my few things in the back, the black bag covering them, that alerted the police to us, I insisted. My things consisted of a word processor (an expensive good-bye gift from Mom), Dean Koontz novels, James Baldwin books, clothes with Ivory’s Creations tags, a plastic see-through telephone, and not much else.

  In Denton, Carl pulled up to West Hall, which lay at the edge of campus near the football stadium. We were either too early or too late; the place was deserted. We entered the dorm room I was to share with two women who had not yet arrived. It was a cement block. There was a single bed close by the door, which I immediately took, and bunk beds pushed against the far wall.

  “We got to hit that highway,” Carl announced just minutes after we’d arrived, my things deposited on the bed.

  “Man, you d
on’t want to stay a lil while longer?” Michael said. “Help Mo get settled?”

  “For what? Let’s hit that highway, bruh.”

  “Chill out for a second, man.”

  Michael thought they could drive me to Walmart where he would buy me a set of sheets and the small fridge I needed, but Carl fidgeted and flapped so much that I was glad to see him go. We patted each other on the back, our bodies side by side. I kept saying, “Thank you so much, Carl. Thanks bro.”

  “Not a thing, bey,” he said.

  Michael was affectionate in the best way, calling me baby girl, telling me how he loved me and how he was proud of me, but I felt melancholy all the many times I thought about Mom, who I had left behind at the Yellow House, how we had not said good-bye. Seeing a person off had become, post-Webb, post-Simon, her least favorite thing in the world. She said, “I love you” before I left the house as if I were going to the corner store and coming right back.

  The cost of my ignorance about college was high. I took out student loans to pay the astronomical out-of-state tuition my first year there, which I had not known existed until the bill came due. Because my high school was not ranked, not an “official” high school (I had not known this, either), I was forced to take a remedial study skills class, which I did not particularly need. From day one of class, I was ravenous about learning, nearly living in Willis Library, where I spent seven or eight hours at a time hunched in a cubicle reading books about subjects fellow students seemed already to know. I took up anthropology, drawn to ethnography and archaeology—cultural histories and artifacts—with a minor in journalism. When I finished the first semester with a 3.923 grade point average, I noted in a journal that I was disappointed with myself. “Good,” I wrote, “but not good enough.” I typed trite motivations—“Hard work pays off, remember that, Sarah!”—and hung them on the dorm room walls.