The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  I had two roommates, but I only remember one: Bonnie was a short woman with hair nearly her length and feet that turned outward as if in a perpetual plié. She danced and, as proof, always wore a faded pink bodysuit underneath tights. She was a born-again Christian and was constantly praying for me, hoping I would “come back to the Lord.” When it came to me, she seemed always to be shaking her head in disbelief. I was difficult to talk with, she said. I had moved on from Roy, found a Russian boyfriend, Sasha. I was obsessed with the library, with bills, with achievement, with coffee, those “things of the world,” Bonnie called them. When I was not at my work-study job as a secretary in the School of Community Service or donating blood and plasma for money, I was collecting friends at Kharma Café, mostly men who reminded me of my brothers, friends from Los Angeles and Morocco and Congo and Indiana and Chicago. They were called Eric and Marcus and Muyumba and Khalil and D-Y. Samia Soodi was the one girl.

  Partway through the second semester, my grinding ways drove Bonnie to flee. The other roommate had left early on, under forgettable circumstance, which meant I inherited the entire three-bed room. I opened the space to friends who came there to study while Billie Holiday CDs played on the stereo, affecting a sorrow not all the way felt, but I was perfecting an aura about myself. I was, for the first time in my life thus far, inviting people into my space without bad feelings or trepidation of any kind. I spread my things out, wallpapered the closet doors with magazine images (just as Lynette had done in our lavender room), laid a crocheted spread Mom made—burgundy, green, and red in an African motif—on one of the bunks. I hung a window-size Bob Marley poster on the wall near to where Bonnie had slept. I was glad she was gone. I set up my coffeepot on her former desk. A love interest wooed me by leaving coffee beans outside the dorm room door. Wilson Avenue was the furthest thing from my mind.

  Until the summer of 1998, when I returned home to the Yellow House after that first year of college, determined, even at the outset, to spend future summers elsewhere.

  “When I’m in New Orleans,” I wrote in a notebook, “I feel like Monique. At UNT, I was Sarah.”

  Sarah and Monique, such different titles, in sound, in length, and in feel. I have felt for so long that those two names did not like each other, that each had conspired, somehow, against the other. That the contained, proper one, Sarah, told the raw, lots-of-space-to-move-around-in Monique that it was better than she. The names allowed me to split myself in two, in a way, as a decisive gesture. In its formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions and could show up as a presence in someone’s mind long before I did. My mother, understanding the politics of naming in a racially divided city, knew this back in the parking lot of Jefferson Davis Elementary.

  I reclaimed Lynette’s and my lavender room and hung heavy black curtains at the doors for privacy. Someone had installed an air conditioner in the bedroom window that did nothing to lessen the humidity and the heat. There is nothing worse than a trying-but-not-succeeding household appliance.

  My college friends wrote letters to me at the Yellow House from their elsewheres, letters that I saved and stacked like paper chips. “Great that you got a camera,” D-Y wrote from Los Angeles. “I hope you get snap-happy and take a lot of pictures. I would love to see your view of New Orleans! It might allow me to get to know you better. N-E-Way …” In letters back, I drew anecdotes not from my familial life on the short end of Wilson, but from my life at work.

  At first, I waitressed at a truck stop restaurant in the East, near to Schwegmann’s Super Market, landmark of my childhood antics, which by then had shut its doors. The restaurant’s $19.95 all-you-can-eat seafood special seemed to draw every trucker in the South. I ran around refilling platters overflowing with crawfish and shrimp, the juices running down my arm and the side of my leg. That special—but mostly the appetites of the customers—eventually drove the place out of business and drove me out of its doors long before.

  That is how I came to be working in the French Quarter. When I began my barista job at CC’s Coffee House, Michael, a veteran employee of the French Quarter, explained which streets I was to avoid on the way to the bus stop at night and demonstrated the forward posture in which I was to hold myself in order to appear most threatening. Every day, Michael broke away from his own work at K-Paul’s Restaurant on Chartres to walk the few blocks to where I worked on Royal Street. I fed him dark chocolate–covered espresso beans and a frozen drink called the Mochassippi.

  From time to time, he’d look at me and say: “What, you don’t like to do nothing to your hair?”

  My brothers were always asking me this about my hair, an unregulated mass standing up and pointing whichever way. I was not interested in hair, especially not in taming it. I wanted my hair to project a freedom I did not feel. My brothers were vain men, all of them, starched like my grandmother and her offspring: Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory. “Have you seen Einstein’s hair?” I had the nerve to say back.

  Coffee orders at CC’s generally came with a question, most reliably: “Where is Bourbon Street?” On fifteen-minute breaks, I sat staring through the window at passersby. During lunch breaks, I wandered the streets with my camera, a good excuse to look. I froze the following scenes: a man playing a horn along the Mississippi; a man wearing tight burgundy pants, twirling and dancing and Bible toting on Canal Street, an umbrella affixed to his hat; random street signs; and a crooked lamp in front of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, the symbolism of which eludes me. I took photographs of Café du Monde and of a juggler on stilts leaning against the street sign at the corner of Royal and St. Peter streets. These signs and symbols were taken back to Texas with me as representations of the place from where I had come. Also photographed, but not shown: me in my barista uniform sweaty and gross, posing at the back of Carl’s pickup truck, his arm around my shoulder; my cousin Edward, Auntie Elaine’s son, there, too, cheesing to show all of his teeth.

  I took no photos of New Orleans East, whose landscape I told myself was not what D-Y had imagined when he asked to see “New Orleans.” Nothing in the landscape of New Orleans East signaled the New Orleans of most people’s imaginations. No iconic streetlamps lighting blocks of brightly painted shotgun houses. No street musicians playing in the flat industrial landscape that contains very little arresting detail, being littered with motels, RV camps, and auto shops. No streetcars running, no joggers alongside them. Walkers here did not stroll. They walked out of necessity. There were few restaurants, no cafés to pass by or stop in. But none of those details made New Orleans East any less of a place. For the me of then, the City of New Orleans consisted of the French Quarter as its nucleus and then all else. It was clear that the French Quarter and its surrounds was the epicenter. In a city that care supposedly forgot, it was one of the spots where care had been taken, where the money was spent. Those tourists passing through were the people and the stories deemed to matter. Those of us who worked in the service industry all converged on this one place, parts of the machinery that maintained the city’s facade, which did not seem like a ruse to me then. I found the French Quarter beautiful, its performed liveliness an escape from the East and where I lived on the short end of Wilson.

  My summer at CC’s was the first time in my life that I spent consecutive days in the French Quarter. The experience took on the boundlessness of all discoveries. On that one summer I based entire narratives about my growing-up years in New Orleans that played to the non-natives’ imagination. I wrote scholarship essays and told stories about boys tap-dancing with Coca-Cola bottle tops on bottoms of sneakers and about how my mother shopped at the French market, which was a tourist market filled with baubles and very little food. Still. I came to lay much of what was wayward and backward about myself on New Orleans: I can cook and hold my liquor because … I love jazz because … I am therefore interesting, because … Defining myself almost exclusively by a mythology, allowing the city to do what it does best and for so many: act as a cipher, tr
ansfiguring into whatever I needed it to be. I did not yet understand the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from.

  By evening, all of us who had traveled to the French Quarter for work from elsewhere wore the day’s labor on our bodies. We could place each other instantly by our uniforms: Napoleon House workers wore all black with white lettering on the breast pocket; women in black dresses with white aprons and scalloped hats were cleaning women at one of the hotels. If you wore a grass-green outfit, the ugliest of them all, you worked at the Monteleone Hotel. Black-and-white-checkered pants like those Michael wore with clog shoes meant you belonged to the kitchen of any one of the restaurants. My uniform was khaki pants, a burgundy cap, and a matching polo shirt with a CC’s emblem.

  The malicious New Orleans heat could seem to crawl inside, affecting your brain so that walking felt like fighting air. New Orleans humidity is a mood. To say to someone “It’s humid today” is to comment on the mind-set. The air worsened the closer you came to the Mississippi River and wet you entirely so that by day’s end my hair was zapped of all its sheen and my clothes stuck to the body in all the wrong places. I needed a bathtub by the time I made it to work, so imagine how I looked at the end of the day, for travel home.

  We workers collected together on the bus ride home, our facial expressions daring anyone to disturb our tranquillity, returning to where we lived and belonged. I was deposited at the corner of Downman and Chef Menteur where I waited to transfer to another bus. The stop, an uncovered bench the size of a love seat, was just in front of Banner Chevrolet car dealership’s lot full of cars buffed to shining, prices on yellow bubble numbers plastered to windshields, deals none of us could afford. We who were waiting for the always-late bus stood still in our places while others flew by—off the Danziger Bridge, off the interstate onto Chef Menteur, heightening the reality of our immobility.

  Sometimes I traveled to the French Quarter, not for work but because the lights in our house had been turned off for nonpayment and I needed to escape that scene for another, well-lit one. On one of these occasions, I wrote in my notebook: “I am home, this is my home, there is nowhere else for me to go if I want to see Mom. My times in New Orleans are loneliest and saddest maybe because I actually have to face reality, it’s more difficult to hide without the fifteen-pound textbooks.”

  At the end of the summer, my mother, Ivory Mae, still a nurse’s aide, graduated with a commercial sewing degree from Louisiana Technical College. She was one of six people to do so. “Success Is Earned” was the theme of the ceremony, held at Dillard University. Seeing Mom accept her certificate on a college campus, I thought about how she was such a natural at achievement. Afterward, Mom posed for photographs, smiling on the living room perch where the carpet was more threadbare than ever before.

  High on pride, I spent that evening on the front step of the Yellow House waiting a long time to see Alvin, but he never came around. He had a girlfriend, his sister Rachelle had said as explanation. I didn’t see him at all that summer. But I also didn’t travel beyond the street to seek him out.

  I still could not fall asleep many nights in the Yellow House. It was as if the collective heat of the house had converged in the very room where I lay. The window unit groaned its futile laboring, the temperature static.

  X

  1999

  Zora Neale Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Nineteen ninety-nine did both.

  I returned home to the Yellow House again, briefly, in the summer of 1999, between the ending of a summer school session and the beginning of my third year of college. I had spent all of my sophomore year in a student exchange program, attending school for a semester at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where I had gone because I heard James Baldwin taught there in his later years. I was still, in a way, following behind elusive men. I spent the spring semester as a visiting student at William Paterson University in New Jersey where I became a staff photographer at the school newspaper, taking bad photographs that paid little mind to composition or mood. I went from not having gone anywhere outside Louisiana to visiting eight different cities in the fall and spring of 1998 and 1999.

  In this way, I came to know New York City, spending weekends with Lynette who lived with Deirdre on the Upper East Side. I thought of returning home then as returning back “to face poverty for the last time in my life,” I wrote in a notebook. Home was a regression. New Orleans East without a car was stuck.

  I had, by then, acquired a computer to replace the two-piece word processor. That laptop came under scrutiny one afternoon when two officers arrived at the front door of the Yellow House where I was working on a college assignment.

  “Ma’am, where did you get the computer?” they wanted to know.

  I explained that I was a college student; I’d bought it with student loans.

  “Have you received any gifts of any kind, ma’am?”

  I had not.

  They asked questions about my nephew James, my sister Valeria’s son.

  I told them I hadn’t seen James. I had not seen him for a long time. I could not recall the last time I saw James.

  They left.

  James arrived not a half hour later.

  He drove a Burgundy Ford LT. I had heard talk about James’s gift to Alvin, a matching Ford LT in silver.

  That summer when James pulled into the drive, I did not tell him right away that he was wanted. He asked that I talk with him inside his car. He pulled into the long space of grass between the houses, almost near to the back door of the Yellow House, where we used to play hide-and-go-seek. With the doors closed, we sat inside. James smoked a joint. I had no worries, the car full of smoke. I had, by then, smoked weed in college. Knowing me, I am sure I mentioned having done this in order to equal things out. I would have cared what James thought of me. I would not have wanted to seem forgetful of who I really was.

  “The cops are looking for you,” I said. I was out of the car when I said it.

  His eyes widened. He jolted alive.

  He said something about tell Grandma (which he pronounced Grummow) bye.

  He went from lurking to screeching toward Chef Menteur.

  He had to go. I cannot recall whether we hugged. This was not a film. Nothing was going according to anyone’s plan. No music was playing.

  I remember exactly the Sunday my mother called to tell me the news about Alvin. I know that I was back at school, in a Denton apartment reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. So captivated was I by the elegance and truth of Baldwin’s writing that often I would live inside it for hours, highlighting phrases repeatedly, looking up words such as “conundrum,” and writing their definitions in the margins; underlining a sentence about life in Harlem that read: “For the wages of sin were visible everywhere.”

  Sometimes when Baldwin wrote something that I felt in my core, I shut the book, stood up, and walked a circle. Sometimes while doing this, I would repeat the thing he wrote out loud or say “God damn” or “My God” to no one at all. At one of those moments, alone in my oblivion, the way I liked it, the phone rang.

  “Alvin dead, Mo,” my mother said.

  I hung up without a good-bye. I became mad at the book, at Baldwin himself for grinning in his picture on the back cover, and ran up the stairs two at a time to go to bed, because there was really nothing more for me to do.

  Alvin’s funeral came close to two weeks after his car crash so that family and friends could raise money for a decent send-away. Some of the people at the funeral wore white T-shirts with a picture of Alvin taken at a high school dance and R.I.P. just above his beginning and end dates: September 14, 1976–October 24, 1999.

  We sat around in metal folding chairs, just staring at my friend’s corpse. I stole furtive glances at Alvin from the back of the funeral home.

  It was an open casket that should have been closed. Not enough money for the best so the stitching on Alvin’s face was clearly worked
on, then worked on some more. There was so much powder foundation, especially under his eyes, making him five shades darker than in life. His hair was neatly braided in six parallel rows. No more of his smiling, though. This was a dark quiet.

  I hesitated but then went to see Alvin up close—him and his eye makeup and somber gray suit with the one pink rose pinned to it—and became greatly afraid to see him like this, lying so silent.

  James made it there that day, too, shackled legs and hands, head bowed. A pair of uniformed policemen escorted him down the aisle to see Alvin sleeping. James bent over, kissed Alvin’s dead cheek. Before he could get a good long look at his friend, he was hurried back to prison to serve his second year of a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery.

  Months before this death, on that summer break, I had seen Alvin and his mob of friends and waved from afar. I noted that they seemed up to no good, wore gold teeth, and smoked. I was sitting inside the Yellow House holding the kitchen door halfway open with my foot as my mother cooked. Alvin broke away and I met him in the yard between our houses for a hug. My grasp was loose, as if I longed to escape. I beat his back a few times like it was a drum instead of holding on to him tight, the way he held me.

  I was slightly taller than him with broader shoulders. He wore blue jeans and brown leather sneakers with a rounded toe on smallish feet.

  “You must like it there, in Texas,” he said, that toothy grin widening into form.

  “Been busy,” I said, addressing a question I thought he might ask, but did not, since it was mine to begin with.

  “You too much for us now,” he said, searching my eyes. I laughed it off, looked into the ground, but it hurt the way true things do.