The Yellow House

  There still remained a camp of homeless people, impossible to miss, who had set up tents under the interstate bridge on Claiborne Avenue. Mr. Mayor complained publicly that one of the homeless men living there had given him the middle finger when he passed by in his black car one day. The city under the bridge wasn’t good for optics, which is to say tourism, he complained. That there was—and to some extent has always been—a homeless camp underneath the bridge is not surprising. The interstate bridge, erected in 1968 to provide access to New Orleans East and beyond, ran above part of what was once a thriving black community, above what was once more than 150 homes, over what was once the black shopping district with tailors and clothing stores, five-and-dime stores, restaurants. Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory shopped there as children. My mother shopped there when she had children. The neutral ground where the homeless lived in 2008 was lined back then with more than two hundred great oaks—the longest continuous line of oaks to be found anywhere in America—all of them bulldozed to make way for the concrete bridge. MOVE OVER, TREES, read the headline in the Vieux Carré Courier, which could afford to be flippant. The French Quarter avoided a similar expressway that would have wiped out the neighborhood, but the city’s political and business elite put up a winning fight; for the bridge on Claiborne, there was a battle, too, but black people—underresourced and overextended—had bigger wars to win, like basic civil rights. The bridge won.

  The overpass on Claiborne Avenue is where my brother Carl sets up shop every Lundi Gras, where he cordons off the same triangular spot of grass with yellow police tape and babysits it overnight so that on Mardi Gras day the entire family—which includes me and my siblings, but also all of Carl’s friends who are our family by extension—can show up to eat boiled crawfish and see the Zulu parade pass by, where we can get up close to the Black Indians, pose in photographs flanked by their feathers, say, “You look real pretty today.”

  In the city that I returned to in 2008, more than 100,000 people—one-third of the population—were still displaced. A woman whose home was destroyed during Katrina described her return to New Orleans two years later as “like … walking into a strange country. It’s just totally different. It just feels like you’re in outer space.”

  In that city, 109 bodies had yet to be identified. A stone monument to those who had perished in the Water was talked about but had yet to be erected.

  For those who had returned, basic services such as trash pickup and water drainage were still scarce. Mounds of debris remained. Thirty-eight thousand people, including Manboo, still lived in toxic formaldehyde-ridden trailers.

  In New Orleans East, the marshes burned. Their smoke made visibility on the bridge near to zero. Cars crashed. I mean major pileups with ten, eleven cars. The city issued “boil water” alerts. The hospital where I was born, Methodist, stayed shuttered; there was no hospital in the East. Seventy-five percent of water drainage stations were operating below capacity; streets flooded at minor rains.

  But citizen activism throughout the city was at an all-time high. Residents could not afford laissez-faire. They were forced to know. It was a city full of autodidacts, learned in real estate, construction, insurance, and city politics. Protests sprang up everywhere, people putting their bodies on the line—protesting the school district, protesting affordable housing shortages, protesting FEMA’s Road Home Program. In my life in New Orleans before the Water, I could not recall a single protest ever.

  Before I could begin work at city hall, there was antiquated-seeming paperwork to fill out. On the question of race my choices were: “American Indian (red), Caucasian (white), Malaysian (brown), Mongolian (yellow), or Negroid (black).”

  I was handed a BlackBerry phone and the keys to a black SUV with a white City of New Orleans emblem, which would soon feel like a scarlet letter, painted on the driver’s-side door. At stop signs, random drivers shot venomous looks. I started driving in the far-left lane at all times so that the insignia faced the neutral ground. Whenever I drove the city car to Manboo’s house on Franklin Avenue, he yelled, “Look what our tax dollars are paying for,” from the porch as I was pulling up.

  On my first day of work, Ceeon introduced me around as “our writer,” and what this mostly meant was that I wrote the mayor’s dailies—speeches delivered to visiting groups in town for conferences, at the Nike outlet store opening, or to His Highness, the Emir of Qatar. These speeches, I soon learned, always began with the city’s claim to greatness and creativity. “Welcome to New Orleans,” they would begin. “Home to Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson and Lil Wayne, for those of you into hip-hop.” We had a rotating constellation of musically gifted natives (Wynton Marsalis, Sidney Bechet, and Aaron Neville were favorites) to plug in, depending on the crowd and their mood. Mr. Mayor spoke in short sentences with a lot of lift. He liked to describe things as “awesome.” Often in his talking points, I wrote sentences with exclamation points behind them, sentences like: “Now that’s commitment!” I was breaking the rule I’d learned in journalism school about having only three exclamation points to use over a lifetime. The speeches always reminded that by virtue of New Orleans still existing, much had been achieved.

  In these speeches I wrote, the city was collectively referred to as “One New Orleans”; the work post-Katrina was the “Bricks and Mortar of Recovery” and the story of progress, “The Arc of Recovery”; what Mr. Mayor was doing was “Reinventing the Crescent City.” These were our go-to phrases.

  When the mayor did not read from the talking points and winged it instead, which was all of the time I worked there except twice, I wrote responses to the media, slapping them for criticizing the offhanded things he improvised.

  The first time I was called to do this was on the occasion of Eve Ensler’s V-Day Celebration, which was honoring displaced women by bringing them back to the Superdome, infamous as the shelter of last resort where the roof blew off in the middle of the hurricane. Ensler was putting on her play Swimming Upstream. In the press conference before the event, Nagin became emotional, saying he knew how much New Orleans women had suffered post-storm. They needed time to heal, he had said. He was glad Eve Ensler had chosen to return to the city, of which he was, in his words, a “vagina-friendly mayor.”

  The moment he said it I began composing notes for a response in my head.

  Local columnist Chris Rose wrote, “Unpredictable would be if our Mayor said something that was inspirational, that indicated just a hint of gravitas one would expect of the man who was elected to lead the rebuilding of this great city. The point here is not vaginas,” he went on to write. “Vaginas are good things.”

  The furthest I got in writing the response were notes: “Columnist’s focus is off, piece is base and cheap. It’s entirely appropriate that mayor mentions that we are vagina friendly. Note the ways this is true.” Before I could respond, another crisis had come up. The St. Bernard housing projects were being demolished. Community members were enraged that these architecturally sound buildings were bulldozed before there were affordable housing alternatives. Protesters with HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT signs were crashing metal gates and throwing themselves in front of bulldozers on the day the demolition was to begin. These were the real issues, but I saw these things only peripherally. I was mostly chained to my desk responding to media requests or news stories that painted Mr. Mayor in a negative light.

  From my first day, the communications department was besieged by records requests from the local media. I spent a lot of time not planning the State of the City speech or figuring out how to communicate about the recovery but working as a liaison between the law office and communications department. The press wanted credit card records, employee car and gas fill-up records, cell phone bills for every employee, and Mr. Mayor’s calendar.

  In my first staff meeting with Mr. Mayor, he expressed displeasure at the work I had been doing, but indirectly, never looking at me or in my direction, saying only that he would go easy on the new person.

&
nbsp; The communications department stayed in reactive mode. Those of us appointed by Nagin to serve his administration were collectively referred to as “Nagin’s City Hall” in news stories. The mayor suffered almost daily name-calling. Often, he fed into it. At a press conference before a trip to China someone asked if he’d been briefed on Chinese customs so that he could avoid his typical faux pas. He still made a stereotypical joke about rickshaws. He lived within the image made for him. It was easier, I think. Alone with him, in meetings, I praised the view of him that he kept hidden from the public. He was a voracious reader, an intellectual, as I experienced him. I suggested he write a book that presented this thoughtful side.

  In community meetings, the mayor affected charm and distance at the same time, sometimes smacking gum, which made him seem lackadaisical in front of community members who showed up with real problems. One man complained about lack of drainage on his street, how the water had “no place to go. We’re afraid of the next rain,” he said. There were the uprooted young people now living with grandparents and ignoring community norms by having parties with DJs in the front yards. “Now why can’t they do that in the back?” one person asked. Some houses, people complained, were abandoned and unattended after owners “sold to the Road Home.” Nagin could turn flip with those who disagreed with his version of recovery: “Man, you’ve got some issues,” he said to one man. Or: “My bullshit meter is at zero. No tolerance for it.”

  By now, the Road Home Program was generally agreed to be a massive failure. Homeowners had three options: stay at the damaged address and rebuild the home (most lucrative), sell the home to Louisiana and buy a new house in the state, or sell the property to the state for unrestricted money that could be spent however and walk away (least lucrative). My mother was leaning toward the first option, which would have meant more federal money but also would have required she live on a ghost street. Most of us children, except for Carl, tried to dissuade her from rebuilding on Wilson. “Who wants to live on a dead street?” I had said. Finally, Mom settled on option two, which meant she would find another house in New Orleans, but Road Home undervalued the homes in its calculations, especially in less-valued neighborhoods like New Orleans East, by making grant estimations based on a house’s pre-storm value rather than what it would cost to rebuild. In areas across the Ninth Ward, including in New Orleans East, this meant that rebuilding costs almost always exceeded grants by an amount that made it impossible to rebuild and therefore impossible to return home. This was the case for many black families who were trying to get back.

  Now that I worked in city hall, I tried to expedite Mom’s Road Home application, spending my lunch breaks at the desk of a woman in the tax assessor’s office, trying to gather information needed by Road Home attorneys assigned to Mom’s case. I discovered that tax bills had been accumulating on the Yellow House during the eighties and into the nineties—beginning the year after my father, Simon Broom, died and continuing through the years when Mom was paying for my private school.

  Mom kept telling Auntie Elaine, with whom she was living in a small room in Grandmother’s house, that she would soon be moving into her new house. Road Home, she kept saying, would come through any day now. This bothered Auntie because it made her feel my mother was impatient with her lot in the world, which she was. Mom spoke of the people in St. Rose as if they were different and set apart. I never was no country person. It won’t be long. I’ll be out of here soon. I don’t want to leave this earth without a house to my name. “Mom, stop being dramatic,” I would say. Not understanding. Not then.

  My mother came to Cambronne Street often, having driven the narrow River Road the fifteen miles from Grandmother’s house in St. Rose to my pink camelback. When she came we mostly spoke about her ho-hum life in St. Rose and I gave whatever small updates I had on her Road Home file. I don’t want to leave this earth without a house to my name, she would say again.

  But the lawyers assigned to her case by Road Home kept losing papers. A few times, the law firm that was contracted out to handle our case suddenly and without explanation was replaced. When my father died, it was discovered that the house had been put in his name, which meant all of us children had to transfer our stake in the Yellow House to my mother before she could legally sell it to Road Home for the grant money. After all the labor it took to submit these signed Acts of Donation, the lawyers still lost the files. Each sibling would have to resend the form and then the lawyers would discover something wrong with it. It was a bungling loop. Road to Nowhere, I had taken to calling it.

  Always another paper lost. My mother never called the legal documents by their convoluted names; those were impossible to remember. When she and I spoke, our conversations were full of elisions and vagueness. Did they send that paper those people said they needed for the thing?

  What paper? I was always asking. What thing?

  Her language, I noticed, had become more imprecise. Those people on the news said that thing had hit whatchamacallit.

  Which people? What?

  I wanted to talk about the Yellow House one day in the Mardi Gras yellow kitchen on Cambronne Street, was asking my mother how she felt now that she was living outside it.

  Just let that house die like the storm, she said to me in the clearest of terms.

  By April, I had begun writing the State of the City speech. There was also the accompanying event to produce. We chose the Port of New Orleans Cruise Terminal for symbolic reasons. The port was once the economic engine of the city, before tourism. The media intensity—not about the speech but about gaining access to the mayor’s calendar, which was a public record—was revving up. Around this time, I was recorded without knowing it, one day in the office when reporter Lee Zurik from WWL, Channel 4, came around looking for the mayor. The office was empty. Everyone was somewhere else, except for me. Which seems suspicious now. I heard a knock on the door and kept it propped partly open with my foot. “He’s not here,” I had said without affect. Zurik went down a list of names of people whom he wanted to see, none of whom were there. “She’s not here,” I said. “He’s not here.”

  In the broadcast, which appeared on the nightly news, that benign interaction was cast as part of a smoke screen the reporter claimed to have uncovered. It was a funny-looking thing because the hidden camera stayed seated with the reporter who was looking up at me. “Smoke screen,” the television announced in huge dark letters. My brother Eddie called, said he was glad my hair wasn’t standing up. The news appearance elevated me to minor local celebrity status for a few days. People recognized me in the city hall elevator. “Hey, you the woman from the news,” strangers were saying. That Sunday at the second line: “Hey, you Ms. Smoke Cloud,” one dancing man said. I was there with Eddie, whose feet hurt before we even made it to the parade. Eddie could be down on the city—I knew this—and though much of what he said was true, I felt like dancing, not hearing him analyze the dysfunction. “New Orleans is a mentality,” he started. “We locked up,” he went on. Eddie was just warming up. It was midday, hot as hell. The parade moved from South Rocheblave to Toledano Street, made a left on South Claiborne where the great oaks used to live, then took a right at Louisiana Avenue. I was walk-dancing, twisting my hips.

  “From the day you were born,” Eddie kept on, “the same shit been happening. People get dressed up every Friday to go out, but they have dead-end-ass jobs. But from Friday through Sunday it’s popping.” A man buck-jumped alongside us, performed a split three times. I whooped.

  We turned left at LaSalle, then left onto Washington, and then onto South Saratoga Street.

  I was caught up in the music, dancing right behind the tuba player where I like to be. One man said, “Go ’head now in that purple dress,” and I went. Rolling. Eddie was shuffling about in his bad mood. “People spending all this money, you’re dyeing your shoes. Come Monday you go clean up the hotel. Where is the logic there?”

  The parade stopped at the Purple Rain Bar for drinks and I lo
aded up on Jack Daniels to drown out Eddie who was now narrating our family history as we went. We continued onto Oretha Castle Haley, which was called Dryades when Grandmother lived there, then to Philip Street where Sarah McCutcheon used to live, then back to Dryades and to Jackson Avenue where Aunt TeTe used to live. As long as we were moving, I did not feel my feet.

  No State of the City speech can claim to have one author. Every person on the political team needs to believe they have had their say, but several things about this speech were mine. For one, New Orleans East factored in it heavily. And in the opening lines, when Mr. Mayor greeted those New Orleanians still displaced, he greeted “those still in Texas, Alabama, California, and elsewhere,” which was exactly where my siblings were.

  Writing the State of the City required that I get out of the office and see recovery for myself, which I loved to do. The first place I went was New Orleans East, but not the Yellow House or anywhere near Wilson Avenue. A colleague and I drove farther east, beyond my now abandoned high school, Word of Faith, toward Michoud where Carl worked. I was looking for someone who came back to the East, rebuilt against the odds. Driving east, I noted the amount of trash. “Sanitation needs to get out here,” I wrote in my notebook. Apartment complexes everywhere were still in ruins. It looked like the day after the Water, minus the flooding. One apartment building was devastated by fire; the front facade of the complex had been burned open to the street, making it a creepy life-size dollhouse with peach-colored waterlines. We found Adam Summerall outside a salmon-colored house with a trailer in the driveway. When we approached, I noticed a Bluetooth in his ear. “Oh I was just calling y’all,” he said. “Y’all” meant “the City.” His street flooded, he reported, after five minutes of rain. “A neighborhood with good drainage, man, that’s a dream,” he said.