The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  Alvin tapped my forehead once, playfully. To snap me out of myself, to make me comfortable, I am sure.

  “I’ll see you” is probably what I said then instead of good-bye. That was my rhetoric, my mind-set then.

  Now—if I had known that Alvin would be leaving me—I would have porch-sat with him in the still of that night, told him how I’d been growing, how I was moving into myself. We would have shared our stories, in the way kids do. “Alvin,” I might have said, “do you know they have white sand dunes in New Mexico?” I would have asked him about his own days (What was his life, his world? Who do you love?), about New Orleans East, would have wondered aloud about the hurricane I saw taking shape in his eyes, would have called home on those Texas Sundays instead of underlining passages that no longer make good sense to me. And then I imagine that there would have been more between us, more between the boy and girl who sat in tree branches for hours watching the world go by beneath us, maybe we would have even talked hours before Alvin’s drive to the grocery store, a journey undertaken when he was high, on heroin, where his car had spun out of control, slammed into a pole just a street or two away from Wilson, instantly breaking him into two. All of this on Chef Menteur, the exact same highway he vowed to protect me from—and did.

  After Alvin’s death in the fall of 1999, I never again laid my head down to sleep the night inside the Yellow House; from then on, I laid my head down to sleep in other people’s houses. Where you sleep the night speaks a great deal about your position in the world. I observed the life of the house from a distance, from Texas apartments at first, then from California apartments, and finally from New York apartments.

  My mother, Ivory Mae; my sister Karen; and Karen’s two children stayed on in the Yellow House long after I’d gone.

  Troy and Carl returned there, too, between loves. They, Carl and Troy, were the final inhabitants of the house, posting up on either end of it after Mom and Karen had moved closer to St. Rose. Troy lived upstairs and Carl in the living room, always our best room. I commented on and observed this from a distance during regular phone calls with my mother.

  I began to say things Mom used to say: You know that house not comfortable … What were Carl and Troy waiting for? I’d ask to Mom’s silence. For the house to fall down on their goddamn heads, I’d answer. Later, my words would come to feel like a summoning.

  But of the house’s near-to-final days, it is for Ivory Mae, its sovereign, alone to tell:

  The roof of the house in the bedroom where I was sleeping, it was raining in there. It had caved in. We had to put a piece of plastic up, and they had a tub catching water. I had to push the bed over to the closet some when it rained. That went on for quite a while.

  In the wintertime, by them having that big hole in the roof, at the top of the house, we had a space heater in my bedroom, and if it got real cold I would have to put up a blanket or something by the door.

  The front room, I used to try to keep that as clean as I could. The rugs was all discolored.

  Even though it was a rag, it was beautiful. I always tried to put a bright curtain, I tried to put a rug.

  If a book comes out, people are gonna say, Well this can’t be the people I knew.

  You know what I’m saying?

  I was living a lie, you know?

  I was portraying this image, which it wasn’t no image, it was me.

  That was the whole story that nobody knew, where you were living. Everybody just assume by you always looking nice and driving your car and all, everybody just assume that whatever place you was in was, you know, the way you look. Because when people would come the outside of the house was always clean.

  I always thought I was gonna be able to get the house done. At that time even with my brother, Joseph, being a carpenter, there wasn’t really any money to buy materials.

  I feel like everybody grown up should have a legacy, like a house or something, to leave for the next generation. Just like my mama left a house, I feel like God had blessed me with a house, that’s the way I should go out.

  Everybody was saying, Why don’t you go out there to California by Byron, Byron wants you to come. I went and I felt some relief about being in a house that was nice. But after a while I felt like what am I really doing here?

  Is there really a place anywhere for me?

  Then Elaine asked me to come to St. Rose, to our mom’s house. I never liked the country. I wasn’t no country person, but it was a nicer house and I could be close to Mom.

  I’d still go to the old house to pick Troy up. Sometimes I would go in there and no one would be there. If I saw the bathroom needed to be cleaned or something, I’d do it. By that time, Carl had painted the tub black.

  The den part … they had so much storage stuff, they’d made it just like a junk … And even the yard. My flowers … the plantings …

  I would go in the closet to get stuff I had left. I wanted to get your daddy’s flag, but when I went to get it, it was all raggedy and the rats had … It had holes like something had been tearing away at it.

  The kitchen, they had that big brown table and all the chairs. I wish I had gotten some of those because those were good pieces of furniture.

  The last time I went in there, Carl had that bed in the front and it look like nobody was …

  I figured they wanted to live there.

  I don’t think this is something that I really want to remember. It just look like Simon was a part of my life that just disappeared, was gone, and look like that’s what this was, too. The house was there, and then it wasn’t. That’s strange, how something could be and then it’s not.

  If you could fathom that.

  I could have done more. That’s the way I feel. It feels like I was the cause of some of these things. And you don’t want to be the cause.

  If I had … If I would have been more particular …

  I missed a lot of opportunities that were so open to me.

  And then you see the lives of the children and they become the living people of the house, the house lives in them. They become the house instead of the house becoming them. When I look at you all, I don’t really see the house, but I see what happened from the house. And so in that way, the house can’t die.

  MOVEMENT III

  Water

  Far off from these a slow and silent stream,

  Lethe the river of oblivion rolls

  Her wat’ry labyrinth, whereof who drinks,

  Forthwith his former state and being forgets,

  Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  The City of New Orleans exists in a very watery

  world … surrounded by lakes to the north and east

  and bisected by the Mississippi River … surrounded

  by water above (humid atmosphere and sixty inches

  average annual rainfall) and below (a high water table).

  Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP, 2007)

  You guys are not from New Orleans and keep throwing it

  in our face, like, “Well, how do you feel about Hurricane

  Katrina?” I f-king feel f-ked up. I have no f-king city or home

  to go to. My mother has no home, her people have no home

  and their people have no home. Every f-king body has no home.

  Lil Wayne

  I

  Run

  August 27, 2005

  Harlem–New Orleans–Missouri–Ozark, Alabama

  Find Lynette and me at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, swinging out at Marcus Garvey Park. Spot us in the crowded amphitheater. It’s frenetic. I am wearing a bright-orange halter dress with a wide-brimmed hat, its long black ribbon a vine running along its circumference, then snaking down the middle of my back.

  Lynette and I are neighbors on 119th Street in Harlem; we live three houses apart. I am one inch shorter than Lynette’s six feet, but she is still five years older. Men on the streets catcall us, say, “Y’all must be tw
ins.” Neighbors say they can tell us apart from behind by how and where we walk. Lynette, a makeup artist now, takes Lenox Avenue to the subway, a route that requires you meet eyes and talk. To get to my job at O, the Oprah Magazine, I mostly take quieter Fifth Avenue, switching along in high heels (Lynette says I am still playing school, like in the Yellow House). But today, we sisters are seated next to each other and Harlem is the only place in the world where we want to be.

  While I am tapping my foot to catch the rhythm my mother is gathering up her things. While I am egging the music on, my mother is evacuating Grandmother’s house in St. Charles Parish where she moved to be closer to her mother’s nursing home and to my sister Karen and her two children, Melvin and Brittany.

  Troy has left work early and is supposed to be making his way to them from the city. Karen has gone to retrieve him at the midway point, on Airline Highway, but he is nowhere to be found; someone has dropped him off in the wrong place, and everyone is trying to be elsewhere.

  Like Eddie, who calls from the highway en route to Missouri, saying what everyone already knows: “Get out.”

  Getting Troy takes a long while; he has always been a pain, but the confusion lends time. Everyone packs a bag apiece. My mother makes sandwiches and fills a cooler with drinks. In the slow hurry, seventeen-year-old Melvin forgets the eyeglasses he needs to see.

  The five of them—Melvin, Brittany, Karen, Mom, and Troy—head to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the home of a cousin, together in the one small car. Mostly sitting in traffic. What is normally three hours becomes seven. Night descends in an instant and Karen does not like to drive in the dark nor does she like to drive on the highway, never having lost the horror of Chef Menteur.

  My sister Valeria heads eastward in an untrustworthy car with her two daughters, one of whom is pregnant, and their children. When she finally stops driving, after the gas runs out, she finds herself in Ozark, Alabama.

  Lynette and I call Michael on the walk home from the Harlem concert. He claims he’s crossing the Texas border: “I’m out of there, baby,” he is saying. This, it turns out, is the lie you tell your baby sisters.

  Carl gathers up his family—his wife Monica and three teenage daughters—and heads for Monica’s office at the Regional Transit Authority building, now an employee shelter. He ties his green motorized boat to the back of his pickup. At the shelter, Carl tells them to go on in, “Go head now, I’ll be all right,” then turns around and goes back home to wait.

  Grandmother’s whereabouts are not known. What we think we know: she, along with the other patients in the care of Chateau Estates nursing home, is being evacuated. In the flurry, Mom has called them, and this was the promise made over the line. Grandmother is gone, but we could not tell you to where.

  All told, we scatter in three cardinal directions, nine runny spots on the map.

  II

  Survive

  August 28, 2005–September 4, 2005 Harlem–Hattiesburg–New Orleans–Dallas–San Antonio

  CARL

  You gotta realize … the Yellow House was up and running.

  A few years after the Water, Carl reconstructed for me what happened.

  Carl and Michael sat outside the house, near to the curb. They were grilling, a half gallon of gin between them. The Mississippi River on one side, Lake Pontchartrain on the other. They were in between water. People who were evacuating drove past the intersection where Chef Menteur met Wilson, heading west toward the city; from Chef Menteur Highway they could see the smoke rising off Carl and Michael’s grill.

  You gotta realize, Mo. It’s August. It’s beautiful. A Sunday. I then cut all the grass, weed-eated and everything. Had it looking pretty.

  Mike, I don’t b’lee I’m going nowhere, Carl had said.

  “I know I ain’t going,” Michael said back.

  The city had imposed a 6 p.m. curfew.

  It got dark, got to be eight, eight thirty, still no rain or nothing. Shit, see bout eleven, eleven thirty at night that’s when it started to rain. When Carl tells a story he always gives two close options for the truth.

  He packed his ice chest and told Michael good-bye, nothing memorable, and drove off in his pickup truck. Michael left to find his girlfriend, Angela, at their house on Charbonnet Street in the Lower Ninth Ward to see where they might head. It was already too late; he knew he was not going far.

  The Yellow House, where Carl lived off and on when he had fallen out with Monica, stayed behind. Cords stayed plugged into the walls. His boil pots sat underneath the kitchen sink. That’s what “the Yellow House was up and running” was meant to say.

  Carl took Chef Menteur to Paris Road to Press Drive to the brick house where Monica lived with their three girls. The street was empty and quiet, not unlike its normal self. Carl did not know if anyone else was around. Why should he have needed to know? He was feeling good.

  Mindy and Tiger, his Pekingese dogs, did not appear at the door when he entered, but soon they were running by his slippered feet. The house phone was already ringing. Even though it was 2005, Carl still did not have a cell phone, having no desire whatsoever to be reached.

  Mama and them kept calling, Boy, get your ass out the house.

  He sat in the recliner and watched the television.

  Well fuck, by my drinking I had then fell asleep, full of that gin.

  He woke and moved from the chair to the bed, but before he slept again he made small preparations, just based on feeling.

  Monica had a big ole deep attic, so I put the steps down. I had already mapped it out in case I had to get out of there. I had a hatchet up there already with the bottled water. Had my gun, the same gun right there, had my water and everything, the meat cleaver.

  See bout three, four in the morning, the dogs in the bed scratching me, licking on me.

  Damn, it’s dark.

  You could hear it storming outside. I put my feet down.

  Water.

  Sound like a damn freight train derailing. Shit crashing. Shit flying, hitting shit.

  I can’t see nothing, but I know the house. I throw Mindy and them up the attic steps.

  I go in the icebox take the water out there. Shit, bout five minutes later the icebox come off the ground. The icebox floating. I got to go up now myself, the water … I got pajamas on.

  I took a pair of jeans, I still got them jeans, my Katrina jeans. I go up there. Just waiting. Just riding it out.

  Sitting there looking at the water coming. I got my gun, I got a light on my head, I say damn the hurricane rolling out there.

  That water coming up higher and higher.

  IVORY MAE

  My mother calls Harlem from Hattiesburg, says, “Water is now coming into the house. We’re calling for help.” The phone line cuts out right as she is speaking so that is all I have to go on for three days. Those two lines keep replaying in my head—during half sleep, at dinners where they seem to issue forth from mouths of people concerned with entirely different matters, at my magazine job where I appear to have it together, and at every single moment of quiet.

  Water is. We are.

  Calling. Help.

  CARL

  It’s been bout four, five hours. All a sudden, the water don’t look like it’s coming no higher. It just stopped right there, bout six or seven feet. You could hear all kind of birds then came through all the windows.

  See when daybreak come, that water it start coming again, it start coming all the way now.

  I got to start cutting now.

  The water coming.

  It’s daytime now. I can cut now.

  The water steady rising.

  I said, Shit I gotta get through this attic now.

  Never panic, Mo. You can never panic.

  I’m cutting through that sucker. I got an ax, I’m cutting through that son of a bitch.

  I was gonna shoot my way through it if it wasn’t gone cut. I was gonna blow some holes through that son of a bitch. I’m getting out that roof.

&
nbsp; Once I got my head out, I looked round.

  “Hey man, I thought y’all was gone,” someone on a roof several houses down called.

  Water edged the roof. Carl’s green boat was nowhere in sight.

  It’s hot outside now, you gotta realize. They had a bucket floating. That’s how I kept the roof at the pitch cool.

  It’s beaming on that roof. That attic don’t cool down until nine or ten o’clock at night. We’d stay up and talk all the way till about midnight. Survival shit. If them people don’t come, we have to swim out of here or this or that. I said whenever y’all ready but let’s give it a couple days.

  Back then, the old folks across the way was telling stories bout they had a big alligator in the water. I mean if I had to swim I would have but you ain’t gone get in no water and people saying they got an alligator. We’d sit out there talking until we get so tired. Sometimes we’d straddle the roof, sideways like this so you don’t roll off.

  Some nights we were in the attic when it had done cooled down good. I’d pull the stairs up—you didn’t want anything from the house to climb in there. Mindy and Tiger knew something wasn’t right. They running all through the attic, barking at anything, never slept, lil wild mutherfuckers.

  After three days, me and another dude got in the water.

  There were still rules in the new Old World.

  You swam up the middle of the street. You knew the neighborhood. We never dove because you never knew if they had a post or something down there. We swam to where them old people was. We made sure they were all right. We stood there a couple of hours, one dude had food and was grilling and smoking cigarettes.

  “You must have been hungry,” I say.

  But if you eat you got to use the bathroom.

  On the way back, swimming, saltwater rushed into Carl’s mouth.

  Two, three more days passed in the same way with nothing changing.

  HARLEM

  Five days since the levees broke. There is nothing to do here except to feel helpless. All the windows of my duplex are wide open tonight, to let the outside sounds come in. I am being particular about this because my loudmouthed neighbors remind me of home. I sit cross-legged before the television set in my swamp-green painted room, watching CNN on mute, searching only for Carl’s white cotton socks pulled up high, size 13 feet. In the day-to-day, I neglect serious consideration of any newspaper article except to scan for names and faces of my beloveds—Michael, Carl, Ivory, Karen, Melvin, Brittany.