The Yellow House

  Adam was the first person back on his street, which still looked deserted. He told us how, last week, a body was burned in a car near to his house, an ideal location because there were no police patrols. We were from the City, had the insignia on the driver’s-side door, but I knew that there was little I could do to improve Adam Summerall’s life.

  I wrote Adam Summerall’s story into Mr. Mayor’s speech, but Adam Summerall disappeared. He had given me a number that day, but when I called, it didn’t work. I drove back alone and left notes for him on the trailer parked in the driveway on the ghost street where he lived, inviting him to the speech, where he would be acknowledged, but it was clear that he wanted no part in the version of the recovery story we were trying to tell.

  We were measuring recovery by spoonfuls, it seemed, counting every new building, no matter how small the repair. The Mahalia Jackson Theatre was under renovation, one of the larger projects. We were erecting giant billboards around the city, sometimes in front of minor street repairs. “Planted nearly 6,000 trees; repaired 113,117 potholes; replaced 14,646 street signs,” we bragged in the State of the City booklet.

  The night of the State of the City speech was charged. The Mississippi River was visible through a wall of windows. The optics were right. Local celebrities like the actor Wendell Pierce were there in support of Mr. Mayor, who I watched while standing in the back of the hall where I steadied myself for his improv.

  “Thank you for meeting me at the river,” Mr. Mayor began, his head shiny like his gold tie. He read every single word without a single change, using his hands to deliver it with passion. The speech was the city’s origin story, its comeback tale: “From this city’s founding, there was much to overcome: mosquitoes, yellow fever, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. In spite of having more than our share of swampland and being built below sea level, we have consistently beat the odds, as we are doing today.”

  The river was the metaphor: “It keeps moving … it does not always stay the same. Over time, it has changed course.” In the section about neighborhoods and housing, Mr. Mayor bragged about the demolition of over eight thousand houses. I thought of my Yellow House, of other people’s gone houses, the stories they contained.

  The one time I thought about going to where the house used to be, I wanted to bring a coworker with me to visit Carl, whose love for me appeared to grow whenever I brought a beautiful woman around. I had been bringing attractive women around for my brothers to appreciate looking at all of my life. When I described the short end of Wilson where the Yellow House used to be to this coworker she said, “Oh yeah, I know that scary little street.” I changed my mind. We did not go.

  It was odd to be in New Orleans and not to visit the street where I grew up. Odder still that at a friend’s urging I had begun writing letters to the house, which was only fifteen minutes away from the rented pink camelback. “Yellow House,” I wrote. “Sarah Dohrmann suggested I write to you. You who I do not know but can envision, more than that, can feel. I am unsure of how to go home. This exercise seems silly, but that is a cop-out; there is so much to say. Up until recently, we spoke of you often, called you the old house, and Carl still goes there to you to drink beer with his buddies as if you are still there. It is obvious that you are gone and yet you are not. Our psyches keep you. You are ravenous and gluttonous.”

  Nagin’s speech ended with a flourish—a broadly sketched vision for New Orleans ten years down the line. A city with great neighborhoods, good schools, high-paying jobs, where the river was a destination with a state-of-the-art amphitheater overlooking the water and a Canal Street that was bright and bustling.

  The end of the speech was my favorite part to write. It rested on the myth of New Orleans’s exceptionalism, but that was also the rousing part: “Remember that from the unlikeliest stretch of swampland rose the likeliest of cities…. We drained the swamplands and built a city with distinctive architecture … and when the city flooded, we built up again, drawing on our past, but focused always on the future.

  “After Katrina,” Nagin said, his voice booming, “when some said we shouldn’t rebuild below sea level and were calling us refugees and KAPS [Katrina-affected persons] instead of our real names, they didn’t know where we’d come from. They didn’t know what we knew. They never lived or played here. They didn’t have skin in the game. They didn’t have our genes.

  “This is our city, from the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain, from New Orleans East to Algiers. We can’t get distracted now. We can’t stop now.”

  The day after the State of the City speech marked day one of hurricane season. It was June 1. We were all gloating. The speech went well; Mr. Mayor said every word; even the media backed off. Now that the big speech was over, where was the new goal line? More and more I began to feel that I was on the wrong side of the fence, selling a recovery that wasn’t exactly happening for real people, not for my mom or for Michael, Karen, Valeria, or Adam Summerall.

  After the big speech, my dailies included a line of warning about storm preparations—just in case. We launched Mr. Mayor’s TV show One New Orleans to capitalize on the goodwill generated by the State of the City. Somehow, and I still don’t know how this came to be, I became the host, which got me out of the office and allowed me to focus on natives who were doing things inside the communities where they lived. I was back in journalist mode, interviewing people I found personally interesting: Carol BeBelle who ran a community center on Oretha Castle Haley; Mr. Syl who ran the Backstreet Indian Museum in the Seventh Ward. At the end of each of these interviews I usually forgot to say the show’s sign-off: “Don’t forget to rethink, renew, and revive your One New Orleans.” It was as corny as it sounds.

  When I was not filming the television show, I was fighting with Ceeon over my salary, which was far lower than what she quoted when I was in Burundi. This salary issue was only one of the things that led me to look elsewhere for work. Clearly, no answers were to be found in city hall. It was concerned only with protecting itself; that is the nature of politics. The story we were most focused on telling was Ray Nagin’s. The recovery wasn’t happening, for many reasons: Nagin didn’t have the relationships to push things through in a tangled political web of Louisiana and DC; the city’s anticorruption safeguards were actually adding layers to processes and thus slowing recovery; but also, Nagin—his perceived ineptness—became the story in a way that the city’s residents never did.

  The job was so emotionally draining that some days I sat at my desk and felt the entire right side of my face go slack. I would think, “Have I just stroked out?” but not move to do something about it. What I felt in those moments was the absence of feeling. Meanwhile, towering signs were being raised on wooden stilts in front of buildings: OUR RECOVERY IN PROGRESS.

  My days passed like this, without real significance, without real achievement. I kept writing the mayor’s dailies and sometimes reading the papers to see if any of the words I had written had shown up. They rarely did.

  In August, a mere six months after I had arrived, I fled my job and left New Orleans. I was embarrassed to have lasted only half a year in city hall, but I was happy to go. By leaving, I reclaimed my voice. The circle felt complete, somehow, even though little had changed. Carl was still displaced. So was my mother. Others of my siblings were angry, couldn’t imagine returning to the broken city. By the time I left, even though I worked in city hall and had been described by my coworkers as indefatigable, I had not moved one inch closer to getting Mom’s Road Home application finalized. That would not come for another seven years.

  MOVEMENT IV

  Do You Know What It Means? Investigations

  the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth

  Adrienne Rich

  A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remake
s it in his own image.

  Joan Didion

  His journey is a pilgrimage; it is a journey into the interior of the self as much as a travelogue, a vision quest that concludes in insight. But there is no conclusion. The journey itself is home.

  Sam Hamill

  I

  Sojourner

  When I returned home to New Orleans for a second try at making a full-time life there, it was winter 2011, six years post-Water. In the days after Perdido, I moved back into the exact same Harlem apartment on 119th Street that I had left, three doors down from Lynette, as if it were base, the neutral ground of my adult life. Post–city hall, I nurtured an interest in the nonprofit world, in the matter of saving other people’s lives or easing them, however slight. I was, I think now, paying penance for my unfruitful, wrong-side-of-the-fence stint in city hall. In those intervening years, I had fallen in love with a man with whom I built dreams of marriage. I still could not, however, fully imagine a house of my own. I believed then, and to some degree still believe now, that even at their best, houses were perpetually in a state of entropy. It was just gravity doing its work. But together, this man and I fantasized and planned for our own created family and its accompanying house (built to our specifications, from the ground up), where we might live out our days together.

  But this relationship of mine imploded brutally and without warning; I still cannot pinpoint what caused this denouement. For all of the violence I felt, it was the quietest of endings, a sudden slipping away. It had the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality of a house disappearing suddenly from the landscape, of a father there one day, gone the next.

  But the man I had intended to marry was still alive. He had not died; the force of his exit only made it feel so. I grieved the loss of him as I would the dead, submitting myself to the emergency room thinking I was having a heart attack when I was having a panic attack. Had no appetite, for the first time ever. Wandered Harlem streets as if set loose. No map. No compass. No desire. A friend saw me once, in this state, on Lenox Avenue and said, “I’m taking you for a double-meat hamburger.” I cried in the middle of sentences that tried to explain my ache—in restaurants, in the theater, in the back of taxis, at dance parties, in work meetings. Whenever I felt, I felt sad.

  I fed the gaping hole (that bare plot of fetid land) in my emotional world with a big executive director job I had taken in 2009. I was running a global nonprofit with more than three hundred employees, a free health clinic situated in Burundi’s mountains with offices in New York City. It was the kind of job where the following could happen: On my fifth day in the role, one of our drivers, Claude, was ambushed on his way up the mountain to deliver medical supplies and staff to the clinic. Claude, who I had met and liked, was shot in the head and died. The other five people in the car pretended they were dead and thus escaped. When I arrived to Bujumbura days after this tragedy, I was retrieved from the airport in the same pickup truck Claude was driving when he was murdered, the bullet hole still in the front windshield. His blood had been scrubbed away.

  I find it impossible now, in the retelling, to know exactly how I decided to move back to New Orleans that winter. My misery then was so great. It is hard, too, to talk about returning to a place you have not psychically left. Undoubtedly, it had something to do with the intensity of my work in Burundi and the dissolution of those personal dreams, the combination of which made me long to return to the place where my mother lived. Though I suspect there is an ancient reason for this, moving back to New Orleans and successfully living there had been a goal of mine ever since leaving.

  “Paying attention to being alive” was how poet Jack Gilbert described what I wanted to do for a year in New Orleans. Where before, I reasoned, I had lived my familial life by rote, beneath the carapace of clan, now I would be present, physically at least, more than I had since that original departure to Texas, in 1997 years before, when I was not yet fourteen/eighteen and riding to college in Eddie’s pickup truck squeezed in between Carl and Michael.

  But that was not all. I wanted to work full-time at being what I had never wholly allowed myself to be: a writer. I would observe my family and my city, spend time in the city’s archives and with my mother’s old papers, collecting my family’s stories as a journalist might. Carrying a red tape recorder, I would document almost every word, and these stories would become the book you are reading now.

  In that New York fall of 2011, my boxes sat all around me in the Harlem apartment, like cardboard spectators, their labels addressed and predestined: Sarah Broom care of Ivory Mae Broom, St. Rose, Louisiana. I quit my executive job and had nice savings and a small book advance. This was not a Good-Bye to All That moment; I understood nothing beyond this solitary fact: I was going.

  The books traveled ahead of me; they arrived before. I took the long way back as if seeking literal grounding in the people who confirmed and composed crucial parts of my identity, flying from New York to Vacaville, California, where Karen and her family still lived. Troy and Herman were still there, too.

  My mother cheered on this journey of mine, as if by making these stops I would reconnect the fraying family edges, advising me by phone on how I might achieve this lasting dream: When we talk and if something doesn’t go in a straight line, y’all want to stop. Y’all patience wear out. Like y’all already got it planned in your mind, how the story gonna go. Everyone tells stories, but have we listened to Troy’s stories? We have to be quiet and invite someone not so up front to say something. Everybody needs to be listened to. My main thing is legacy. After I’m gone I want everyone to love each other and understand each other.

  What I mostly took away from these conversations was how my mother had begun using the phrase “after I’m gone.” As in: Maybe that Road Home will come through after I’m gone.

  Melvin and Brittany, Karen’s children, adults now, retrieved me from Sacramento’s airport. That Melvin was now a grown man driving his own car surprised me. I watched the speedometer from the passenger side, aware that doing so lost me cool Auntie points. How settled in they seemed: Brittany studying biology at the University of California–Merced. Melvin, still deliberate and shy, but married and in the air force. Karen worked in social services for the state. Troy was still unloading boxes at Walmart. Herman had found his calling as a used car salesman, a job he, with his bluster, seemed designed for. Unlike me, not one of the displaced had it in their mind to ever resume life in New Orleans.

  During the day, Byron and I shopped to find a used car in which I would drive to visit others of my siblings in Arizona (Darryl) and San Antonio (Michael). Early on, when the journey still held the romance inherent to all beginnings, I thought I would visit the southern contingent of my scattered family, too—Deborah in Atlanta; Simon Jr. in North Carolina; and Valeria in Ozark, Alabama—but this would not be so.

  In Vacaville, I wore my red muumuu for the first four days. Byron encouraged me to sleep without an alarm. Whenever I woke, I sat in a roller chair in Byron’s garage and spun across the concrete floor while he worked underneath a car. I told him about my heartache, the same story on repeat with different points of emphasis. At the perfect right moment, Byron would speak up to defend me, which made the world seem kinder than I felt it to be. Often, when Byron and I were together like this, we’d call our mom and put her on speakerphone. Byron is my baby boy, she would always say to him at the near end of our call. And you are my baby girl.

  I stayed for two weeks.

  The morning of my departure from Vacaville, I woke to find Byron already loading my things into the car. As I drove off, I watched him through the rearview, standing as in his Marine picture, hands in his pockets. Water collected in my eyes and I let out an audible huff, not wanting to go but knowing I could not stay.

  I hit the highway. Driving alone, I recalled the lessons bestowed by my brothers. How to follow the flow of traffic while speeding, checking the rearview at all times, taking cues from eighteen-wheelers who have the long view. B
y night, I was pulling up to Darryl’s handsome two-story house. His four sons burst through the screen door and surrounded me in the car. Before I could step out, they were grabbing suitcases and rolling them inside. Darryl was at a Bible group, they let me know, but he had made red beans and rice, which I dutifully ate. I had not seen my brother in six years, since Grandmother’s funeral. I couldn’t call up the last conversation I’d had with him. I’d met his sons only once, when they were babies. After dinner, I searched for traces of Darryl in the house, his house, spotting an old sweatshirt hanging in the laundry room, “Darryl’s Construction Company” on the front. The boys followed me around and stared, trying to decide who I was to them. Darryl had a younger daughter, Sarai Monique, my namesake. When my mother told me that Darryl had named a daughter after me, it rearranged my presumptions about my relationship to Darryl, which were, I realized, suspended in the moment when he hid underneath my bed in the Yellow House.

  I was asleep when Sarai and Darryl arrived, but Sarai burst into the room and shook me awake. She had shoulder-length braids and wore black, plastic-rimmed eyeglasses too wide for an eight-year-old face, especially when they slid down her nose and she let them stay there, looking at you over the frame. Darryl appeared in the doorway. Chewing gum. I watched his face. He was heavier than I remembered, which I took as a sign of his being drug-free, a sign of overall good health. I watched his scar, the bullet graze beneath his left eye. It looked like a star. It was him. I grabbed and hugged Darryl two or three times. Like I hadn’t in my life before. Was glad to see him and nervous, too. He left the room and returned with an embarrassing photograph of me from high school. He looked at the image and then looked at me. “You still look the same, baby,” he said. My eyes shifted to notice his sneakers. To change the emotional tenor, I gave him the most humorous update possible on our siblings in California.