The Yellow House

  Mom wore a white surgical mask. I glimpsed her through Byron’s front windshield, her body parallel to the Yellow House, facing Old Gentilly Road, her shoulders slightly tilted, sunk in the buttery leather front seat, a hand cradling one side of her face. We, her children—Byron, Lynette, Carl, Troy, and me—jolted to the house.

  Birds were now living in our childhood home. When we approached it with its broken-out windows, they flew away, en masse.

  The house looked as though a force, furious and mighty, crouching underneath, had lifted it from its foundation and thrown it slightly left; as though once having done that it had gone inside, to Lynette’s and my lavender-walled bedroom and extended both arms to press outward until the walls expanded, buckled, and then folded back on themselves. The front door sat wide open; a skinny tree angled its way inside.

  And the cedar trees: once majestic, at least twenty-five feet tall, and full of leaves that I hid in as a small girl. An impossibility now, for the sole surviving one was puny and on the way to dead.

  We poked our heads through the house’s blown-out windows—peered into the living room through the wide-open frames. Walked along the side and stood in front of the new entrance, a fourth door designed by Water. The house had split in two, just as Herman said, the original structure separated from the later addition that Simon Broom, my father, built. On the original section of the house, the yellow siding hung off like icicles, revealing green wood underneath. That was the house of my siblings, a green wooden house, not the Yellow House that I knew.

  We did not enter, even though the house we knew beckoned. We stayed outside, looking through the one big crack.

  Somehow, standing as we were—spaced perfectly apart—made me think of the time, a few days before Grandmother’s burial, when I wandered through Providence Memorial Cemetery with Lynette and Michael. It was an impromptu trip. Michael said he knew where our fathers were. “I got two daddies in one cemetery,” he bragged as we turned into the graveyard on Airline Highway.

  Michael gestured toward one of the only trees in sight. Webb, his birth father, was buried over there, he seemed to know. It was a month after the Water; everything was still ruined. There was no grave tender to ask.

  We walked and walked. Over to the tree then past the tree to the rows of graves beyond it.

  “My daddy not buried too far from your daddy,” Michael kept saying. It was strange, his separating us out as siblings. It felt unnatural.

  When we did find the men, they were nowhere near where Michael thought, but they were close together in the ground. I had never seen the burial spot of my father, Simon Broom. I learned his birthday—February 22—for the first time on that day and saw that he had died on June 14, 1980.

  The three of us stood apart saying nothing whatsoever. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

  At the cemetery that day, there was little to look at, unlike this moment outside the Yellow House where there was too much detail for the eyes to make sense of: The white plastic art deco chandelier dangled from a white cord in the girls’ room. A pair of Carl’s pants in a dry cleaner’s bag hung from the curtain rod. The white dresser that was painted over so many times that the drawers were permanently shut, the dresser Lynette and I used to pose in front of, where I would make rabbit ears behind her Jheri-curled head. I felt that old, childish shame again. I did want the Yellow House gone, but mostly from mind, wanted to be free from its lock and chain of memory, but did not, could not, foresee water bum-rushing it. I still imagined, standing there, that it would one day be rebuilt.

  The House called.

  This is how you, Sarah, wanted it.

  You, House, are nothing but a crack—you are wide open and showing. You tell on yourself.

  My mother stayed in the car, refusing to look. I recognized this behavior of hers as disappointment. To whom, I wonder, was it directed? My siblings and I who had let the house weaken, or the limping, fractured structure itself?

  Before we left, I entered the front door and took baby steps forward, afraid the weight of me might collapse the house. The farthest I went was into the living room, where it was all dust, wood chips, waterlines but also the light switch by the front door: cream colored, gold scrollwork making an intricate design in the center. Pretty.

  After a time—short or long I do not know—we joined Ivory Mae in the car that she had not left. She was still wearing the white mask over her nose and mouth.

  Carl needed to go back to Monica’s house, from where he escaped the flood, for his weed eater, he announced after we were settled back into the car. At Monica’s, Carl entered through a wooden fence, crumpled like an accordion. I photographed his every movement as if to save him from disappearance. Mom kept yelling from the car: Just leave the damn thing, Carl. I’ll get you another one. Come on now, boy. Her voice was resigned, muffled by the mask.

  But Carl always does what his mind wants. Next we saw, he was up on the roof walking with a loping stride.

  Picture a man set against a wide blue sky, wearing a bright-red Detroit Pistons hat, blue jean shorts that fall far below the knee, and clean blue sneakers. In the first frame, he is bent down, holding himself up by his hands, entering the escape hole, a rugged map carved through the roof, feet first. By the second frame he is shrunken to half a man. In the last frame, we see only his head. Then he disappears inside.

  Carl reappeared holding a weed eater in one hand, a chain saw in the other.

  Now he was pointing at the hole in the roof.

  He was performing, his movements quick, wild but measured; he was earning his nickname. Rabbit. We formed a semicircle, looking up at him from the ground, as if poised to catch him.

  Come on, boy. Carl, come on now, get your ass down now. Leave that goddamn mess behind, my mother was still yelling. It was rare to hear her curse, but still we stayed watching Carl. None of us obeyed her command.

  We were here, it was apparent, as witnesses to what Carl had come through. To retrieve, in some way, not the weed eater but the memory.

  VI

  Erase

  July 2006

  Wilson Avenue

  My mother, Ivory Mae, called me one day in Harlem and told me the story in three lines:

  Carl said those people then came and tore our house down.

  That land clean as a whistle now.

  Look like nothing was ever there.

  The letter from the city announcing the intended demolition, the planned removal of 4121 Wilson, had been sent to the mailbox in front of the exact same house set to be torn down, its pieces deconstructed and carted away.

  The Yellow House was deemed in “imminent danger of collapse,” one of 1,975 houses to appear on the Red Danger List, houses bearing bright-red stickers no larger than a small hand.

  The notice in the mailbox in front of our doomed house read in part: Dear Ms. Bloom: The City of New Orleans intends to demolish and remove the home/property and/or remnants of the home/property located at 4121 Wilson … THIS IS THE ONLY NOTIFICATION YOU WILL RECEIVE. Sincerely, Law Department-Demolition Task Force.

  Not one of us twelve children who belonged to the house—not Eddie, Michael, or Darryl; nor Simon, Valeria, or Deborah; nor Karen, Carl, Troy, Byron, Lynette, or myself—was there to see it go.

  Look like nothing was ever there.

  Before our house was knocked down, Carl had overseen its ruins, driving by almost daily, except for the day when he suddenly fell sick in the driveway of Grandmother’s house where he was living. One minute he was revving his engine for the drive to NASA in New Orleans East, the next, his head lay down on the steering wheel. A neighbor saw this, a busy man’s head down, and became alarmed. Carl was rushed to the hospital for surgery. “Crooked intestines,” was how Carl interpreted the doctor’s diagnosis of intestinal obstruction. “They had to chop a large section of me out. I was all twisted inside from all that bad water I was swimming in,” Carl was convinced.

  He stayed in the hospital an additional thirt
y days postsurgery after incurring an infection from the hospitalization itself. This was how it came to be that he missed the letter in the mailbox and the house was demolished without our knowing it.

  Everyone else was still displaced. The only one to see our house go was Rachelle—Herman and Alvin’s sister, Ms. Octavia’s granddaughter—who we called Ray. She was the inheritor of the last remaining house standing on the street. Ray snapped Polaroid images of the Yellow House’s demise, instant evidence that she misplaced and could not find when we came back around, months after the fact, asking, “Did you see it? Did you see the house go down, Ray? Did you see?”

  Perhaps there is a trick of logic that fails me now, but to deliver such notification to the doomed structure itself seems too easy a metaphor for much of what New Orleans represents: blatant backwardness about the things that count. For what can an abandoned house receive, by way of notification? And when basic services like sanitation and clean water were still lacking, why was there still mail delivery? But we were not the only ones. Lawsuits were filed against the city on behalf of houses that unlike ours stood in perfect condition when they were knocked down. There were sanctuaries, actual churches that deacons prepared to move back into, only to discover them gone. A newspaper article headlined NEW ORLEANS’ WRECKING BALL LEVELS HEALTHY HOMES asked the simplest and thus most profound questions, such as: “How do you not inquire before you knock a place down? How do you not knock on the door first?”

  During a later trip to New Orleans, I retrieved the file from city hall that told the story of the demolition. I carried it around in my purse and wrote “Autopsy of the House” in large letters on the front page. The cover letter held the following disclaimer: “The subject property was not historical in nature.” The report tells this story: The house was displaced from its foundation. Structural displacement was moderate as opposed to severe, which would have required that the house float down the block and settle in another locale entirely. City inspectors deemed the house “unsafe to enter.” There was asbestos everywhere, in the living room walls, in the trowel-and-drag ceilings that Uncle Joe had painted, in the asphalt shingles, in the vinyl sheeting on the floor. City inspectors noted that the left wall framing was severely “racked.”

  I called on an engineer friend and described the house, told her I was trying to learn from reading the autopsy which of the structural problems were waterborne and which were just the dilapidated house. An engineer would not use the word “dilapidated” to describe the house in its post-Water state, she told me. Dilapidated is a judgment. From an engineering perspective, she explained, the house was stable after the hurricane. It just wasn’t contained. All the cracks happened so that the house could resolve internally all its pressures and stresses.

  Water entered New Orleans East before anyplace else. On August 29, 2005, around four in the morning, water rose in the Industrial Canal, seeped through structurally compromised gates, flowed into neighborhoods on both sides of the High Rise. But that was minor compared with what would come two hours later when a surge developed in the Intracoastal Waterway, creating a funnel, the pressure of which overtopped eastern levees, destroying them like molehills. Water rushed in from in the direction of Almonaster Avenue, over the train tracks, over the Old Road where I learned to drive, through the junkyard that used to be Oak Haven trailer park, and into the alleyway behind the Yellow House, which may have served as a speed bump. The water pushed out the walls that faced the yard between our house and Ms. Octavia’s. The standing water that remained inside caused the sheetrock to swell. Water will find a way into anything, even into a stone if you give it enough time. In our case, the water found a way out through the split in the girls’ room.

  “Water has a perfect memory,” Toni Morrison has said, “and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

  The foundation of the Yellow House was sill on piers, beams supported by freestanding brick piles. Not an uncommon way of building in Louisiana, this foundation did not stand a chance against serious winds and serious flooding. The autopsy report testifies that our sill plate was severely damaged, that the connection was “pried or rotated.” It could be said, too, my engineer friend told me, speaking more metaphorically than she was comfortable with, that the house was not tethered to its foundation, that what held the house to its foundation of sill on piers, wood on bricks, was the weight of us all in the house, the weight of the house itself, the weight of our things in the house. This is the only explanation I want to accept.

  The only structure that was stable at the time of demolition was the incomplete add-on that my father had built. The house contained all of my frustrations and many of my aspirations, the hopes that it would one day shine again like it did in the world before me. The house’s disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father’s absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.

  I had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not. When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.

  VII

  Forget

  August 2006–January 2008

  New Orleans–Istanbul–Berlin–New York City–Burundi, East Africa

  The large, close family is like an amoeba. To disconnect from its slithering mass is to tear. A friend once told me that it is easier to cut than to tear. I learn this, but slowly.

  At first, I drew closer in—to the city and to my family—returning from New York where I lived to New Orleans seven times in three months, more times than in the past three years. It was not the ruinous structures that drew me—or even the city’s failing infrastructure. Those of us who were born to New Orleans already knew its underbelly. Storms, of all sorts, were facts of our lives. Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew. I knew, for example, that we lived in an unequal, masquerading world when I was eight and crossing the dangerous Chef Menteur Highway with Alvin. I knew it at Livingston Middle School when I did not learn because no one was teaching me. I knew it in 1994, when we were petrified, afraid the law might kill us—knew it before, during, and after the Water. Katrina’s postscript—the physical wasteland—was only a manifestation of all that ailed me and my family in mind and spirit. When we spoke on the telephone (and all of us were always on the phone with one another) we said all of these things in so many words.

  Tallying up the cold, bare numbers provides some measure of clarity. Before August 29, 2005, my mother, six siblings, and seventeen nieces and nephews lived in New Orleans. Now, I had two brothers in all of Louisiana. The rest were scattered among seven states. When I flew to New Orleans, there was no one to retrieve me from the airport. Every time I arrived on these seven visits, alone in my rental car, I made a ritual of touring city streets, getting lost without trying—crawl driving down Marigny, Marais, Roman, Burgundy, St. Claude, Governor Nicholls, Mirabeau, Paris, Elysian Fields, Louisa, and Florida Avenue—with John Coltrane chanting: “A love supreme, a love supreme …” The deserted houses I passed along the way spoke their messages from beyond, words transmitted by spray paint on brick and wood. Some of the houses asked rhetorical questions: “Michael, where are you?” or “Does this feel right to you?” Others said the obvious: “We have moved.” Some spoke Spanish: “Con Todo Mi Corazón!” There were the stern houses: “Please remove
your car from the boat without crushing it,” and the defiant, name-calling ones: “Hey Katrina: That’s all you got? You big sissy.” The religious houses quoted Bible scriptures; the guilty ones cursed; the sorrowful, leaning and crushed, wailed and moaned.

  On one of these drives, I spotted a man and woman in masks and blue bodysuits. They waved and I returned the gesture. The only other movement that day came from a pack of scraggly dogs fighting over a foam to-go plate. When my car approached, they didn’t bother to look up. They were hungry. They had been left on the scene to duke it out. They had nothing in this particular world to lose.

  I made these seven trips back home for shaky reasons, grasping at the slightest thing. Attending, for instance, Tales of the Cocktail, an annual event held by the spirits industry. For the conference, aptly themed “Sip for the City,” I stayed at the Monteleone Hotel on Royal Street in the French Quarter. In the elevator, the bellhop, an older black man with a pockmarked face, said, “Is it hot like this where you come from?” Overly sensitive to any implication that I was not a New Orleanian, I became annoyed at his question.

  “I come from here,” I said.

  I mostly stayed hidden inside my hotel room, which had been named Vieux Carré Suite. It was not special, the room, and I was no mixologist. I had no business hanging around there. My brothers taught me long ago that a mixed drink should be the color of alcohol, not of the mixer, and that was all I needed to know.

  The French Quarter, chosen by the city’s founders for its high ground, was one of the only areas spared the Water. I spent my days wandering its streets, as if for the first time. The city was still mostly devoid of its natives, but the tourists always come. Visits to Bourbon Street were justified as an act of economic good. “Do your part for the recovery of a great American City,” an editorial suggested. “Fly. Order. Drink.”