The Yellow House

  For the mayoral interview more than a decade later, I was staying in Le Pavillon Hotel on Poydras Street downtown, a white, majestic building with archangels the size of ancient Roman pillars out front. On the complimentary water bottles in the room, Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying, “Imagination governs the world.” Some marketing person added: “With a history stretching back to the Gilded Age and impeccable French decor throughout, Le Pavillon Hotel of New Orleans piques the imagination in a way the emperor himself would applaud.”

  One night during my three-day stay in Le Pavillon, which was built in 1907 and whose website describes it as the kind of place where guests can instantly “conjure up the days of genteel luxury, romantic evenings, and glittering nights,” someone fired what sounded like four gunshots outside my door while I sat in bed watching HBO. For a moment, I felt confused about where I was, having just returned from Burundi. But I was no longer there. No, this was the fifth floor of a luxury hotel in New Orleans. I dropped down to the floor where I tried to squeeze myself underneath the bed. From there, I reached my hand up to the telephone on the bedside table and dialed 0 for the front desk operator, who said: “It’s being handled, all under control ma’am” and hung up. I stayed on the floor looking toward the crack underneath the door as the sound of chaos broke out. First someone was cursing and then the sound was of police officers’ walkie-talkie noises. When I opened the door many minutes later, a man and his daughter were sprinting toward the exit doors, a moss-green plastic suitcase in the father’s hand. I slept.

  In the morning, I noticed the glass next to the elevators had been shattered, but other than that there was no sign of violence to the facility itself. There was also no news of what might have happened in the local papers or on the television. When I mentioned the commotion to the manager at the front desk, she tried shushing me and then offered a “continental breakfast on the house”—which I declined.

  I met with Nagin on the second floor of city hall. It was plush, with bright-red carpeting and dark wood furniture. On the wall of the waiting room were black-and-white photographs: brass bands, local musicians, and second lines; the St. Louis Cathedral wrapped in fog. When it was time, I entered through a half door as if stepping onto a witness stand. This was the passageway to the mayor’s office.

  When I was born, New Orleans had a black mayor, Sidney Barthelemy, second in a long line that would end with Ray Nagin. Ernest “Dutch” Morial, my mother’s favorite, the eventual namesake of my elementary school, came first, before Barthelemy and Marc Morial, Dutch’s son. Each of these men served two terms for a total of twenty-four years. I was that old when Nagin was first elected, had graduated by then from the University of North Texas. Black men running the city was my norm. These mayors were light skinned with recognizable family names linked to black Creole heritage. It was tradition for everyone in our household—and in the city—to follow the elections of these mayors closely and with verve, to speak about the men in intimate terms, as if they were applying to become a member of the family. My mother, who voted along person over party lines, always liked that Nagin was a businessman who ran Cox Cable successfully. He should know how to do something, she judged by the quality of our cable news programming, betraying how little faith she had in city politics.

  And here he was, standing before me, C. Ray Nagin in a suit with a shiny red tie. His trademark shaved head. I had seen him on television but still wasn’t prepared for how it glistened. He was a politician; he eyed me as if we had already met. He was a beautiful man, I thought, with an easy way.

  Nagin had been reelected for a second term in May 2006 when two-thirds of New Orleanians were still displaced and pop-up voting booths were everywhere in the state. Some of the displaced voted absentee, others were bused in to vote then bused back to their exile. It was a historic election—the victor would determine the course of the recovering city—with an unprecedented twenty-two initial candidates. Nagin, out-fund-raised and politically marred—much of his business and establishment base had turned against him after he declared New Orleans “Chocolate City”—was the underdog in a place whose founding narrative is essentially a comeback story. When I was growing up, people were wearing paper bags over their heads at Saints football games (that’s how sad a team the Saints were), but the crowds still showed up. Nagin had survived the Water. He could say, I stayed. I was here. His not leaving meant: I am one of you. That was a Purple Heart in a city where outsiderness is never quite trusted. Before the storm, New Orleans had the highest proportion of native-born residents of an American city—seventy-seven percent in 2000, which meant that only a small fraction of New Orleanians ever left for elsewhere. This was why the mass displacement meant so much. And why those, like me, who had left and returned had to prove their nativeness all over again.

  It was a conversation instead of a job interview. There was little of the interrogation I had prepared for.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to return to the Deep South?” Nagin had asked.

  Because I had not known what the question meant—we were only just beginning down the road together—and because I had not yet learned that everything ever said in politics had an ulterior meaning, I answered too literally. I set out to please the man.

  “Yes!” I said.

  “Why come and work for a vilified, hated administration?” he was asking now, a large television, the sound muted, playing world news behind us.

  Nagin knew how to be a local mayor, I had theorized, watching his performance from afar, but he had no experience as a national one. When Katrina cast him into the world’s spotlight, I reasoned, he began to play to the media. “They know every now and then I’m gonna say something wild,” he said once. This was what local journalists called Rayspeak. He was also, like most everyone working in city hall, some of whom were still living in formaldehyde-laced trailers, personally affected by and trying to recover from the Water.

  But the speech that recast him as “vilified” was delivered on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in February 2006 when he vowed that New Orleans would remain a black city. In a city that appreciates the indirect over the straight way, Nagin’s having said this was a distinct drawing of a line. “It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans,” he had said. “And I don’t care what people are saying uptown or wherever they are. This city will be a chocolate city at the end of the day.” Uptown was code for white. White is code for power.

  Nagin still won reelection a month later, not because the white base he charmed four years earlier voted him in, but because of those displaced blacks who were bused in to vote. The idea of a chocolate city is, to me, the least interesting part of that MLK Day speech, which Nagin posited as a conversation between himself and Dr. King in which Nagin described to King all the nonresponse to New Orleans post-Katrina. In the speech, King answers Nagin back in some variation of the phrase “I wouldn’t like that.” The speech devolves into a scolding of black New Orleanians who Nagin blames for out-of-control crime rates: “We as a people need to fix ourselves first,” King reportedly told Nagin in this imaginary conversation they had. “The lack of love is killing us,” Nagin also imagines King saying. Nagin called up a finger-wagging, do-better-for-yourself-or-else version of King.

  I was arriving at city hall halfway through Nagin’s final term, at the moment of reveal: how much “recovery” would actually be achieved now that the money that had been tied up in what Nagin called “governmental constipation” had finally arrived?

  Nagin was concerned about his legacy, said he needed me to make “more of a connect-the-dots narrative, understanding what was behind all the past decisions.” He spoke about the demolition of the housing projects as a thing that would “change the map of New Orleans.” The year 2008, he had pronounced some months before, would be the “Tipping Point.” “New Orleans is about to explode,” he had promised the city council. I would document this burgeoning, he explained.

  He
had run for mayor, he told me, because he wanted to create a city where young people did not have to leave home to make a promising life the way that I had. He said he had been thinking about the future of his own two sons and their high school friends. “What kind of New Orleans would they inherit?” he wanted to know. It was a rhetorical question, but in my head I was seeking an answer. The sound of Nagin’s voice jolted me back.

  “Welcome home,” Nagin had said. “Have fun, and welcome to the team if you take the job.”

  I stuck around for a few days after the meeting for the reopening of the police department’s headquarters. The police had been working out of trailers for two and a half years since the storm, but now there was a ribbon cutting and a speech.

  I appeared on the scene and did not know what to do. Ceeon was too busy running around; I found myself eating red beans and rice underneath a tent with the city administrator and the police chief, Warren Riley, who turned to me and said, “You have a different look, a different style. Where you from?”

  “I’m from here,” I said.

  “You don’t have a New Orleans accent,” he said. I have heard this many times. Normally I say: “Give me enough to drink and I will have one” or “Get me around my brothers and I will have one.” But I will not have one, no matter who you get me around. To Riley’s remark I instead said, “I grew up in New Orleans East.”

  He asked the question most New Orleanians ask first in order to place a person: “What high school did you go to?”

  “Word of Faith,” I said, “off I-Ten service road.” I had given this response a million times. This was always the point when the conversation stuttered. Often, when I tell fellow natives that I am from New Orleans East they will say, “Oh baby, don’t tell nobody that.” And I laugh with them at my outsiderness.

  In New Orleans, what high school you went to tells other people what neighborhood you are from. What neighborhood you are from lends or takes away status. Being from a high school like St. Aug and Warren Easton with their famed marching bands is a privileged thing, cultural cachet, firmly placing you in the city’s narrative of itself. Word of Faith had no marching band, had no band at all.

  Later, after I am working in city hall, I will edit bios of city council members for legislative trips to Washington, DC, that open with the high school the councilperson graduated from, as if anyone outside New Orleans would know or care, as if high school were the most important accomplishment ever.

  Riley, still trying to place me, asked about my people. “What’s your last name?” he wanted to know. To his mind, Broom indicated nothing about my origins. My mother’s name, Soule, was much more alluring in the narrative sense. I knew this instinctively during childhood when I told Mom that I would take her maiden name, call myself Sarah M. Soule. I liked the sound of it (see how it looks written down), loved what it would have said of me. To be called Sarah Monique Soule. My mother yanked me out of my reverie, said, Girl, you can’t take on a person’s maiden name. That’s my name!

  I took the job. I was the senior writer, hired to “creatively tell the story of the City’s recovery after Hurricane Katrina,” according to my offer letter. An at-will employee, I could be released from my duties at any time without explanation. I was to be the “author and final editor of all communications and marketing materials.” The 2008 State of the City address was in May, four months after my start date. I was to lead the writing of that, working closely with the mayor, whom I was to call Mr. Mayor at all times. The State of the City address was a goalpost; in the months leading up to it I would collect “proof” of the progress made for Mr. Mayor’s yearly report.

  But first, I flew back to New York and retrieved my things from storage before driving them the twenty-three hours to New Orleans in a U-Haul truck. We—Manboo, Carl, Eddie, and I—unloaded them into a pink camelback house near Carrollton Avenue in Hollygrove where Lil Wayne comes from. It was February. This camelback was the cheapest house I could find in a market where most rentals were $1,300 and $1,400 a month, four times what they were pre-Water, not much less than the rent I paid in Manhattan. Fifty-five percent of New Orleanians rented before the Water. My sister Karen was one of them, renting a three-bedroom house for $350 a month. It would have been impossible for the same people who rented before to afford the city now. This was partly why my displaced family stayed gone—Valeria and Karen and Troy and Michael were, three years later, settling into lives in Alabama, Texas, and California with no intention of returning.

  The Carrollton area held many of the city’s contradictions. On Oak Street, which I could see from the porch of my rented house, there was the fanciest snowball stand I had ever seen, which accepted credit cards with a minimum five-dollar purchase. Next door to that was a shoe repair shop whose owner was in town two weeks on, two weeks off so that he could travel to Texas where his displaced family lived. At night, in my neighborhood, it was difficult to find parking because of everyone who had traveled to Oak Street for dinner at Jacques-Imo’s, which served alligator and andouille sausage cheesecake as an appetizer. Michael worked as a chef at Jacques-Imo’s for six years before the Water. He helped build the menu, became part of the place’s appeal and expansion, and wanted to return to help Jacques-Imo’s reopen, but the owner wouldn’t help him (financially) relocate back to the city that Michael, more than all of us, has forever loved.

  After I settle into the rhythms of my city hall job, I will return home exhausted most nights and drive around for fifteen minutes (at least) in search of parking, and I will think of how easy it would have been in the world before now to have a meal in Jacques-Imo’s swamp-theme dining room, at a small table in the back. How I know Michael would have appeared in his black-and-white-checkered balloon pants and plastic clogs, call me baby girl, plant a massive wet kiss on my cheek, and give a side hug. How I wouldn’t have to order, Michael would send plate after plate of my favorite things. Every night after the “exhausting context” of my city hall job, when I drive past Jacques-Imo’s to my rented pink camelback, I will wish this same wish (that Michael was just around the corner) and every night it will not come true.

  To either side of my camelback were dilapidated houses that had not been fixed since the storm, but where people still lived. My neighbors across the street were three generations living in a three-bedroom house with five or six children and another on the way.

  After I moved in, Mom and Auntie Elaine arrived at the camelback with their sewing machines to dress the windows with Burundian fabrics. Outside, Carl and Eddie sat on the porch cursing passersby with their eyes. “You gotta let these dudes know you got people,” Carl had said. “Show them you not living here alone.” Even though I was.

  I painted the kitchen the same Mardi Gras yellow I had painted my Harlem kitchen and busied myself with dressing the camelback shotgun. A house always insists on being kept. Mostly, I had to find shelves where my books could live.

  During these settling-in days, I observed Nagin as much as I possibly could.

  I was to serve as his mouthpiece, I kept telling myself. I needed to know his rhythms of speech. This was my job. In despairing moments I reframed it: I was to inhabit Nagin’s voice to the exclusion of my own. I would not speak—just as I had not spoken in my own voice in Burundi. All of these things were true.

  I watched for him: there was Nagin on the front page of the Times-Picayune at a gun show in the Superdome, grinning big and pointing an M-16 rifle directly at Police Chief Riley at a time when the city’s crime rate was out of control. My mother looked at the image and said, How dumb can you be and still breathe! The next day, the newspaper ran an apology, admitting the photograph was a cheap shot, capturing a “split second as the gun was being lowered,” but the damage was already done.

  I watched Ray Nagin’s weekly appearance on WWL Channel 4’s morning show with hosts Sally Ann Roberts and Eric Paulson, a segment that earned him the title “Sugar Ray” Nagin from a local opinion writer.

  Here’s w
hat happened: The three of them sat in front of a fake cityscape featuring a row of shotgun houses. The mayor began well, speaking of blight and the good neighbor program, which was under criticism because it wasn’t working. But then talk turned to recent public information requests for his calendar. “My disappointment is with the way some in the media are handling me personally,” he said. “I’m upset with this station…. This has gone beyond the point of reasonableness.”

  “Why would anyone be after you personally?” one of the newscasters asked.

  “If you supported someone else, get over it,” Nagin said. “I’ve alienated some people who have significant influence in this community and they are relentlessly trying to destroy me.”

  Sally Ann’s newscaster demeanor turned motherly, what was public became private, on air. Sally Ann’s face grew full of concern. “People who care about you may be worried because of your emotional state. I’ve never seen you this emotional.”

  Complaints go with the job, both hosts were saying. “You’ve always laughed it off, kept your composure. How are you planning to deal with your position of power?”

  But the mayor was stuck on the possibility that someone could hurt his family. “Somebody approach me wrong. I’m going to coldcock them.” he said. Paulsen asked would he ever pick up another gun. “In a different capacity, maybe,” Nagin said.

  “Can you act appropriately in the emotional state you’re in right now?”

  They no longer spoke directly to each other.

  “How much more accessible can I be?” the mayor asked the camera.

  “Be well,” Sally Ann said to Nagin, who would no longer show up for his weekly recovery updates on WWL, appearing on its competitor, WDSU, instead. I watched this scene cross-legged from my art deco bed on the second floor of the pink camelback house.

  In the New Orleans I returned to in January 2008, the following things were true: The city’s homeless population had doubled from 6,000 pre-Water to 12,000 post. Just a month before I arrived, in December, the city had cleared a homeless camp of more than 250 people who had set up tents in Duncan Plaza, a park visible from city hall’s windows. Every day there were protests, the voices of chanting marchers clear inside my office: “Hey Ray what do you say? We need housing today.”