The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  I flew. I ordered. I drank.

  Then there was the grand opening of Harrah’s Hotel on Poydras Street where I was part of the press junket. I knew that O magazine would never cover this hotel, but its publicists wined and dined me in my large luxury suite and I did not resist. Sometime during the visit, I drove the twenty minutes to see Carl at Grandmother’s house in St. Rose.

  A year had passed. Our mother was still in California, but I heard from her that Carl had developed a hernia. At the sight of him, I launched into question mode, asking about doctors and health insurance. “It just started, Mo, this nagging-ass pain, stabbing sometimes,” he said. “It don’t hurt unless you know it’s there.” I knew that this was only half the story but was careful not to irritate. I was still the baby girl and Carl, my big brother. I sat for a while and watched him clean while the TV played. “My ma might walk in … any moment,” Carl said, wishing.

  “Don’t worry, baby sister,” Carl said after a silence. “I’m gon get that bastard out of me.”

  For dinner, Carl fried us redfish that he’d caught in Lake Pontchartrain. Dinner was drowned in cooking oil, with no side dish. We watched the television.

  “Well, make sure you handle that doctor thing,” I eventually said. “Cause that freaks me out, the hernia thing.”

  “Sure be glad when Mama gets back,” I said as if her reappearance might, like magic, fix Carl.

  He stood up to wash the dishes. I stood up to go. “Oh, you bout to roll?” he said. “Trying to beat that traffic,” I said, then headed back to lonely Harrah’s Hotel.

  During those trips back, I visited Wilson Avenue where our house used to be only once, during the Louis Armstrong Festival. My friend David and I stood facing a 160-foot-long burrow in the ground beginning near the curb and running the length of where the Yellow House used to be. David asked where certain rooms were, where Ivory and Simon had slept. I tried to pinpoint, but found myself confused.

  “No, that was the kitchen,” I said.

  He asked where the side door might have been. Like me, he had the blaring feeling that it was wrong to stand outside a family house unable to enter into its commotion, sit down comfortably, and introduce yourself by name: David and Sarah, here together. Or have the option to stay and sleep the night in a place that you know.

  This friend, overwhelmed by helplessness, dug into the ground and recovered two artifacts from the land that once held the house: half of a yellow-and-blue fleur-de-lis plastic wall decoration that hung in the bathroom and a silver spoon bent and used till paper thin. On our way to the rental car, he fell into an open sewerage hole that neither of us had noticed. I yanked on his arm trying and trying to lift him out. When he surfaced, the entire bottom half of him was covered in muck.

  When he dropped me off at the Creole cottage in the Marigny where I was staying, I fled the car, leaving the artifacts on the passenger-side floor. David honked the horn, calling me back to them.

  I took the artifacts back to Harlem. Once, the spoon went missing from its place in the windowsill of my duplex where it had sat for months. I found it washed in the utensil drawer and thought, No, you have been misplaced, you do not belong in there with all of the others, you have not come from where they’ve come before retrieving it and putting it back on the windowsill where silt and dust could re-collect. When I left that house, I put the fleur-de-lis and the spoon in a ziplock bag and placed them in a box with Misc–Fragile written on top. I wondered, Where, if at all, might I store these two things?

  My returns to and departures from New Orleans were a vexed motion, like a thick rubber band pulled almost to the point of snapping before contracting back.

  More and more I craved forgetting. I tried and failed. Trying better, failing to forget better, just like Beckett said. Remembering hurts, but forgetting is Herculean.

  This bent toward amnesia, my search for a haven, finally led me away from New Orleans altogether. I stopped asking my mother questions about the state of things in the family, in New Orleans. The government-funded Road Home, intended as a path back into lost homes for the displaced, was frozen in bureaucracy amid heated debates and politicizing about which areas of the city were worth rebuilding.

  For Katrina’s one-year anniversary, President Bush urged New Orleanians to return home. As if it were that simple and not about ingrained historic and structural inequities, the giant matter of who could afford to. “I know you love New Orleans, and New Orleans needs you,” the president said, referring to the city in the feminine, as often happens when the place is sentimentalized. “She needs people coming home. She needs people—she needs those Saints to come marching back, is what she needs!” But his speech, delivered in the picturesque Garden District, failed to address levee failure or the lack of clean running water or bus service, trash pickup, mental health services, jobs. At the moment of Bush’s speech, signs of trauma were everywhere. Crime and suicides soared. Parents were still separated from their children. “They are raising themselves,” one teacher said of students. What Bush said was: “It’s a heck of a place to bring your family. It’s a great place to find some of the greatest food in the world and some wonderful fun.” One thing was clear: to some, the city’s delights mattered more than its people.

  In Harlem, I no longer followed what news about New Orleans there still was and instead spent my time planning trips to faraway places. In October of the anniversary year, I flew to Istanbul, Turkey. Found myself wandering in a small Ottoman village called Jumalakizik. In the outdoors there, drinking fresh raspberry juice and eating masa, a stuffed pasta dish, unable to speak Turkish beyond the basics presented in the guidebook, I fumbled around with words, searching for a way to say how the meal’s perfect presentation and taste reminded me of two women, one dead—Grandmother—and my mother, who was still alive.

  I tried—in vain—to train my attention on anyone anywhere who was not my family because … that hurt less.

  In November, I took time off from work and traveled to Berlin, still searching for that which I could not name. I visited a Turkish hammam there, to remember Istanbul. A Turkish woman bathed me, scrubbing every crevice, and this called up memories of being bathed by my mother in the Yellow House, the place I wanted only to forget. The water made a sudden, rushing sound as the woman poured it from a bucket high above where I lay; she was wetting everything, every single spot of me, and for a second I let go of what scared me about being submerged, in memory and feeling, but especially Water. For an instant, I surrendered. I must have looked at the Turkish woman with sadness or longing or fear because something prompted her to say, “Turkish Mama.” Was she asking or telling? Either way, I felt something nearly like love for her.

  I began to wish I had proper time and money for trips to Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Mali. I collected articles about these places instead of articles about the aftermath of Water, placed them in a file folder called Destinations, and dreamt about them in daytime. At night, I dreamt about the Yellow House. I was naked in it. Or cooking grits for a lover who never appeared at its door. Or else there was a commotion outside, in the yard between our house and Ms. Octavia’s, but I couldn’t find a door to exit or a window to look out from. My sister Lynette dreamt about the house, too, in nightmares where she was chased by a dragon along its back alley. For her, too, there was no escape. Troy and Michael dreamt of the house, I learned many years later, but, not wanting to know, I would not ask for details.

  Inside my Harlem apartment, I painted the kitchen Mardi Gras yellow and hung paintings and photographs of Tuba Fats and Doc Paulin’s Brass Band in the parlor. Every piece of furniture had the appearance of age. Friends remarked on how I had summoned up New Orleans in Harlem. Many of them had never been there, to New Orleans, but all of the cues existed, I suppose.

  A narrative of me had by now developed in the family. When my siblings called, the first thing they asked was: “What adventure you on now?” They said this and laughed, but I felt it as judgment. Around
this same time, in the year after the Water, Carl began to call me Sarah instead of Monique. “What’s up, Saaaarah?” he would say. His calling me by the name reserved for nonfamily made me feel separate and apart from him, like I had somehow changed—in his eyes. “Why you calling me that?” I always wanted to know, but he never answered.

  Even though I knew that nothing would ever be the same, displaced and fragmented as everything was, I tried not to let on. At the magazine office, when people asked how my family was—and they always did ask, sometimes multiple times a day—I said fine or so-so or making it. I did not completely know; they were still reacting to Water. As was I. One day, I took a stroll down Harlem’s Fifth Avenue toward Central Park to hear Joan Didion when a heavy, mean rain started, sending everyone darting for cover, nearly knocking each other over, reminding me what a hard and treacherous thing it is when Water has got you running.

  Whenever someone asked where I was from and I said New Orleans, they asked, “Were you there?” “I was not,” I always said. “But my family was.” That absence, my not being there physically, began to register in me on subtle emotional frequencies, I can see now, as failure.

  I no longer used the word “home,” did not feel I had one. How could I know what it meant? The house had burst open; I had burst open.

  My frustrations with the magazine job grew just as I faced up to the limitations of a failed love life. Satisfied with nothing, I felt trapped. Harlem evenings, I spent hours devouring war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s letters for the datelines—Tanzania, London, Mexico City. Wanted only to go, make a life, even if temporary, in distant elsewheres. Did not yet understand how movement—rivers, oceans, new sky— could be a placeholder, just another distraction holding one apart from the self.

  In the winter of 2006 I met Samantha Power, who would later become the US ambassador to the UN, when she gave a talk at the New York Public Library. I had loved Samantha’s book A Problem from Hell, about the history of the United States’ nonresponse to genocide throughout the world. A good friend, the same one who told me how it was easier to cut than to tear, knew this, and invited me to dinner with Samantha afterward. Eight of us were seated around a fancy carved library table. Samantha was at the head, to my left. Magnetic, red-haired, and freckled, she had a way of conjuring instant intimacy. I told her about my urge to travel in order to “understand more broadly the displacement of my New Orleans family.” I had said this line so much that it had become like saying my name. I was genuinely interested in placing what happened in New Orleans in a more global context to understand how loss, danger, and forced migration play out in other parts of the world. I was also finding, I can admit now, anthropological, academic language for the urge to distance myself from the fate of my family, which of course was my fate, too.

  Samantha and I were meeting for the first time and already I was asking her for a compass.

  “Burundi,” she suddenly said. “Where is Burundi,” I wanted to know but was too embarrassed to ask.

  “Burundi,” Samantha kept saying, “You must go to Burundi.” With each iteration, the place seemed bored into me. By dinner’s end, Samantha and I had drummed up the distinct feeling that there was no time to lose. I had to go.

  At home that night, I typed, “Where is Burundi” into the search engine and discovered that it was a mountainous, landlocked East African country the size of Maryland, most famous for where it is in relation to another, more widely known place—Rwanda. The country’s citizens know this so that when Burundians are asked, “Where is Burundi,” I would learn, they always answer: “Next door to Rwanda.” In that way, it is a country always framed in another’s light, a shadow of itself. Burundi is known for very little in the world beyond its borders, not for its locally grown coffee beans; not for the fact that within it resides the mouth of the Nile; nor that it suffered a twelve-year genocidal civil war, ignited in 1994, the same year as Rwanda’s more famous one, when the plane carrying Burundi’s and Rwanda’s presidents was shot down, killing them both. Rwanda’s hundred-day massacre received attention that Burundi’s twelve-year war never would even though both were predicated on an arbitrary class system imposed by Belgian colonialists. In the nineteenth century, those European foreigners twisted the peacefully interdependent system of human relations between the Hutu, who mainly tilled the land, and the Tutsi, who mostly tended cows, into a murderous one by designating one group superior based on physical differences: the width of noses, span of foreheads, height, gradations of color.

  There were no guidebooks to Burundi for me to consult, except for PDFs of outdated manuals designed by NGOs for employees who had long fled for cheerier assignments. Lonely Planet had a small section on Burundi in the back of its Rwanda book, which advised: In case of medical emergency it is best to leave the country. In Lonely Planet’s East Africa guide, Burundi was summarized in a few pages covering the dire political situation and the dire restaurant situation, the dire health situation and the dire economic situation. This was, it seemed, the place you passed through on the way to Elsewhere, East Africa—Tanzania or Rwanda or Uganda.

  Burundi was and still is on the United States’ “Do Not Travel” list, along with Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Iraq. Because it feared an al-Shabaab terrorist attack or another civil war, the US State Department designated Burundi a “danger zone” in which “Americans travel at their own risk.” Even though Burundi’s long civil war had ended in 2005 when 81 percent of Burundians elected Pierre Nkrunziza as president in their first-ever democratic election, the country was still an economic invalid hovering on the brink of war. The Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL) rebel group, I read, still hid somewhere in the countryside, ready to pounce, threatening a coup, perpetrating ambushes and banditry.

  That night at dinner, Samantha Power had raved about Alexis Sinduhije, “the Nelson Mandela of East Africa” in her view, who had won a fellowship to study at Harvard’s Kennedy School where Samantha taught. Alexis founded an independent radio station in Burundi called Radio Publique Africaine (RPA), she had told me. Most Burundians owned little, but everyone had a radio. Alexis had transformed fifty former tomato sellers, child soldiers, farmers, and teachers into well-trained journalists who reported the truth about corruption and human rights abuses; such reporting was a rarity and risk in a country of fragile peace. As a result, Alexis had been imprisoned by the Burundian government, kidnapped, and viciously beaten before escaping to Belgium where he was leading the radio station from exile. Now, Samantha had let me know, he and his team at the radio station needed help creating human rights programming, training journalists, and fund-raising—none of which I had any experience with. She thought I would be perfect for the job.

  Three days after that dinner, I sat hunched in my cubicle on the thirty-sixth floor of the Hearst Tower having a whispered phone conversation with Alexis Sinduhije, who delivered a sermon to me from his exile in Belgium, the line breaking up the whole while. He spoke to me as if my fate had already been decided, my life in Burundi drawn up for me in the present tense. We are paying you six hundred dollars monthly, he was saying, and this was a high salary in Burundi. I would be “la directrice du développement,” mostly fund-raising—writing proposals, searching for new foundation money, and meeting with ambassadors and other diplomats—to support new radio programming that would advance human rights in Burundi. Burundi is right now at the precipice, Alexis explained, you can see how it needs your vision and spirit. So decided, charismatic, and charming was he on the phone that after our call I walked, nearly dazed, the five steps into my boss’s glass office, cradling a new ambition, and announced, “I am quitting and going to Burundi.”

  She gazed over the piles of books walling her in at her desk, said, “Where is Burundi?”

  In spring, I packed my Harlem apartment. I was twenty-seven years old. I left behind Lynette and her newborn, a girl named Amelia after our grandmother Lolo. Before my flight to Burundi through Paris and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
I flew to St. Rose to visit my mother who had returned from Vacaville and was staying in Grandmother’s house with Carl. Mom looked at me a lot in her studying way. I pretended not to feel her eyes. Carl mostly stayed in the next room with his door closed. We could hear him whispering into the telephone. Whenever I picked it up to make a call, I’d hear a woman’s voice. “Sorry, Carl,” I’d say, then hang up. It was not easy for Carl and me to speak to each other. I was unwilling to perform the role of baby sister whose duty it was to assess and lighten everyone’s mood whenever needed, and Carl as big brother was off duty, too. He seemed to carry a great silent load and was concerned with getting back into a place of his own.

  The pouring-down-raining night before I left, both of us anxious and not sleeping, we’d met in the hallway.

  “So, Mo, I hear you going to Africa, huh.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Don’t let them lions getcha,” he said.

  “I won’t, Carl,” I said back.

  The next day was Michael’s forty-sixth birthday. I called him in Texas from the Louis Armstrong airport. Carl and Michael always saw me off for major life events—they drove me to college in Texas and then four years later, drove me cross-country to graduate school at the University of California–Berkeley. On the phone, I avoided talking to Michael about Burundi because it was hard to explain why I was leaving my job at a national magazine in New York for a mostly unknown place. I couldn’t say with a straight face: I’m going far away from you and I don’t quite know why. Or: I am so rattled and destroyed by what happened to our family that I don’t know how to help or what to do with my body and mind. I sought oblivion: the opposite of knowing. These feelings of mine seemed impractical, ethereal responses to what was real. I had only watched everything that happened from a distance. What right did I have to react this strongly? I felt guilty about not being “there,” not knowing exactly what my family had gone through, but also about moving to Burundi. This feeling was childish and old in me, tied to the original guilt I felt leaving Alvin and James for college when they had both dropped out of high school. Leaving home, I had learned, meant a loss of the illusion of control. You could never know all that happened when your back was turned, which, ironically, is the appeal of leaving, too. What the gone-away-from-home person learns are not the details that compose a life, but the headlines—like Alvin is dead, or the house is gone. Look like nothing was ever there.