The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  Somewhere in the house, the kids fought over the TV remote. Inside the bedroom, Darryl was telling me that he was proud of me. I had left home and stayed gone even though, he joked, I was going back now “for some crazy-ass reason.” I searched for buried messages in his face, which was not unlike the face of Michael. He had Michael and Eddie and Carl’s thick hands, Mom’s eyes. I had his cheekbones. I was noticing of all these things, it seemed, for the very first time.

  After Darryl kissed me good night, I hid my purse and my car keys. It was an old habit. In the hallway, I heard him say, “OK, group, shut it down.” The house went quiet, as if a light switch had been flipped.

  Darryl’s house of five children made me think of the Yellow House. During the night, I dreamt of it for the first time in five years. I was at the locked front door attempting to bang it down. Bam-bam-bam was the sound I made, but it didn’t yield. In the dream, the weight of the door hurt my hand too much to keep going. The next morning I woke exhausted and wrote the following in my notebook: How to resurrect a house with words?

  By the time I made it to Michael in San Antonio, three weeks had passed since I left New York and I was already desperate for the journey to end, though in a way it had only just begun. My mother advised against rushing it, but still I did, abandoning plans to visit Deborah, Valeria, and Simon, who were disappointed and let me know it. My visit with Michael was shortest of all, especially once he decided he would accompany me to New Orleans. Like back in high school, I dropped Michael off at his restaurant job at the Hilton Palacio de Rio in the afternoon. I retrieved him at midnight, the car loaded with our things. For the first three of the eight-hour drive to Louisiana, Michael talked for entertainment. Then he slept. I drove the entire eight hours, my fury at sleeping Michael gaining by the mile, to the sound track of his snoring, fighting my own exhaustion by rolling the windows all the way down and pretending I was Bob Marley’s backup singer.

  We entered Louisiana as the sun came up, the car silent, racing to St. Rose and our seventy-one-year-old mother, to Grandmother’s house.

  II

  Saint Rose

  Grandmother’s house. It can only ever be called that. Mom still lived there with her only sister, the only person I have ever called Auntie, in a small room, not more than three hundred square feet, with a row of windows facing the backyard, where she and Auntie Elaine spent most of their time, sitting among the azaleas and jasmine and gardenias their mother, Lolo, had planted, the flowers and the house having survived her. The backyard is where Michael and I, when we finally arrived, found Mom in a chair, reading.

  This subdivision, Preston Hollow, contains two streets: Mockingbird Lane, the street I know, and Turtle Creek. After the Water, the old-timers and the newcomers, as locals call them, live here together. The newcomers are mostly the displaced whose psyches or houses or livelihoods or families—sometimes all four—were destroyed by the Water. They live with grandparents or cousins, aunties or uncles, who have been in this neighborhood forever.

  The old-timers gather in back of their houses for parties, the newcomers in the front yard. Old-timers speak when they pass you by—whether on foot or by car. They tolerate all manner of odd behavior. A good example: One day Eddie and I are sitting outside Grandmother’s house when a neighbor enters her gold Jaguar, drives directly across the street to another neighbor’s house, exits Jaguar, activates car alarm so that it beeps as she approaches the neighbor’s door with a small bag. After she hands the bag over, able-bodied woman reenters gold Jaguar and backs the ten feet into her own driveway. “Is that not the most retarded thing you’ve ever seen?” Eddie said. When the woman exited the car and headed to her front door, we waved, as is the custom in Preston Hollow—for some.

  The new people tolerate no quirks of personality; they have no code, old-timers complain. The couple renting next door to Grandmother’s house are in the junk business. Their junk commerce butts up against Grandmother’s flowers. It is uninteresting trash—fake leather office chairs, yellowing refrigerator doors, washing machines, sometimes a dead car. These junk-business neighbors resist police citations, community pleas, threats by grown men like my brothers, angry stares, and gossip.

  In Preston Hollow now, the elderly are justifiably scared into self-imposed house arrest by frequent home and car robberies and flying bullets.

  But this is where my mother lives now, the first house I entered days after being born.

  In the backyard, Mom picks at me as if I am her baby chimpanzee. I am skinny, as small as I’ve ever been, weighing 155 pounds, which looks like 110 pounds on my five-foot-eleven frame. I earned this size by flinging my body through the air, running. The grief, too. Mom doesn’t care. She turns me around, pointing out areas where I should fatten up. These arms are way too little. She wraps her thumb and pointer finger around my wrist. You need a lil meat. Even dogs like some meat on a bone.

  You were always tiny, until recently, I say.

  I was never no skinny minny. I was proportioned. I didn’t have bones and thing sticking up.

  Only much later do I realize that my size reminds her of my father’s size just before he died. He looked to be wasting away, she told me once, even though he kept saying, as I had, that he was fine. She thinks I am wasting away, too.

  You gonna run yourself into oblivion, she says about my exercise habit. And then: How do you think I look? I tell her I think she looks beautiful, as always. She thinks she lost weight. I tell her I don’t quite see that. We sit together in the yard, our backs to the ugly corrugated fence erected to block Preston Hollow residents’ view of a fancier subdivision built over the park where we played as children. I scan the yard: MINDY is spray painted in black on the side of the storage shed. Tiger, one of Carl’s dogs, had died the year before, and now Mindy was dead, too, after a pit pull belonging to a newcomer came into the backyard and attacked her. Carl, who had by now moved back to New Orleans East, went to court over this. “I don’t want no money,” he said to the judge. “Just my dog back. That dog then made it all the way through Katrina. Just to die like this?”

  After a time, sitting and talking and catching up, Mom and I go inside to her bedroom where she has stored the remains of the Yellow House—things salvaged by Carl for her after the Water, but before the demolition. Behind the tall dresser where Grandmother made her prayer altar stands the still life of vase and flowers that Michael painted on velvet and that always hung by our living room door, on the perch. Underneath Mom’s mattress are the designed women Lynette made. On the linoleum floor, patterned to look like marble, beneath the bed frame, fragments of beloved possessions collect: the marble top belonging to the table that once sat in our living room; the legs from the side tables that were hell to polish. I was thinking maybe your uncle might be able to glue them back on.

  I sit cross-legged on the bed. The room has very little floor space and Mom is shuffling around it. All of the furniture in this room has been in this house forever. The bed frame, the two dressers, the mirror. These are Grandmother’s beautiful, lasting objects.

  Mom and I are close in the way that makes possible sitting comfortably together in small spaces, losing time. This is partly because of all we have in common. Mom is the youngest girl and so am I. She was born to a phantom father whom she never knew, and so was I. We get agitated in the same ways, too, when we haven’t had enough time alone, what Mom calls my acting ugly or my Monique self. But right now, we are in our element. Mom is bent over and digging in the closet that is too small for her entire body to enter. Out she comes with a silver metal box full of papers. We close her bedroom door, as if the box were a secret. Mom sits on the bed, unfolds the yellowed papers, some of them in ziplock bags, the low-hanging ceiling fan whirring like a miswired helicopter blade above us.

  Turn that fan off please.

  I jump to do it.

  Mom unravels our report cards and the tassel I wore at high school graduation from Word of Faith Academy. The navy-blue satin honors sa
sh, still in plastic, had been eaten through by rats during the time it lived in the Yellow House. There is a pile of death certificates folded in threes and falling apart, belonging to Mom’s father, Lionel Soule; Edward Webb Sr.; Simon Broom Sr.; and her mother, Lolo. There are stacks of receipts, one for a gold chain Byron bought in 1988 that she still has; birth certificates; programs from school events; and old letters that I sent Mom from college in Texas. Mom reads aloud from one: “You have got to teach me to cook because everyone here wants to know if I can cook gumbo, and I feel so bad when I have to tell them no.” We laugh at the old me.

  She finds Dad’s discharge papers. I rub his right index-finger print with my thumb. “Oh my God,” I say. “He has Carl’s handwriting exactly.”

  Mom examines each of these items first, as a docent would, before passing them on to me. I look at them hard, trying to locate the special detail, photographing some of them with my phone. When my examination moves too slowly, Mom flits the next paper at me. Here, here, here, here, girl. Take this. As if the paper is evidence burning her hands. Papers tell so many stories, she says, watching me look.

  III

  Saint Peter

  The next morning Mom and I drove the thirty minutes from St. Rose to the French Quarter. My leased apartment, where I would live out the year, sat on the busiest, most photographed, written about, used corner in all of New Orleans, where all of the city’s ideas about itself converged and sometimes clashed. And where, from my narrow balcony three stories above it all, I could watch it happen.

  That balcony overhangs St. Peter Street, but the entrance to the apartment was around the corner, behind a massive green metal door on Royal Street, which the city directory published in 1941, the year my mother was born, described as a street that “once seen, can never be forgotten, for there is no other street quite like it in America, replete as it is with picturesque characters, real and imaginary, and ancient buildings with an aura of romance still clinging to them.” In 1941 and in the many years following, black people—picturesque or not—would not be fully welcomed on this street or in any of its famed antique and curio shops unless they were passing through on their way to work.

  This apartment of mine in the LaBranche Building, named for sugar planter Jean Baptiste LaBranche, is famous not for the owner or for the structure itself but for its “striking iron balcony railings,” as one seventies-era book describes them, with “beautifully symmetrical oak leaves and acorns” likely hammered out by slaves. Built in 1835, this “brawny sentinel” of a building was flanked on all sides by historicized icons of the city, places that when taken together form what historian J. Mark Souther calls “a collage of familiar images.” These images, he writes, lend to the visitor feelings of “exoticism and timelessness.” These symbols appear on advertisements and postcards and coffee mugs, along with such taglines as: “It’s New Orleans. You’re different here.” Or my favorite: “We’re a European city on a Po-Boy budget.”

  At the end of my block, where St. Peter and Chartres Street merge, stands the Cabildo, built by Andres Almonaster y Roxas in 1795. City hall during Spanish rule, site of the Louisiana Purchase ceremonies in 1803, the Cabildo is a museum now. The St. Louis Cathedral, just next door, is the church that voodoo priestess Marie Laveau attended and where more than a dozen bishops and church leaders are buried underneath the floor. Just outside its doors sits Jackson Square with the statue of Andrew Jackson tipping his hat on a whinnying horse, which I looked out upon every day as a teenage employee of CC’s Coffee House. Jackson Square was formerly Place d’Armes, site of military barracks under the Spanish and French. And the city’s first prison.

  These streets—thirteen parallel, seven intersecting, seventy-eight square blocks, less than a mile walking from Canal Street to Esplanade, three minutes slow driving—contain the most powerful narrative of any story, the city’s origin tale. This less than one square mile is the city’s main economic driver; its greatest asset and investment; its highly funded attempt at presenting to the world a mythology that touts the city’s outsiderness, distinctiveness, diversity, progressiveness, and, ironically, its lackadaisical approach to hardship. When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?

  From my balcony, I could look over to the Moonwalk, the promenade that runs along the Mississippi River. Some days I jogged along its banks, past homeless people wrapped in sleeping bags. Just across from this balcony is an apartment that overcharges rent because Tennessee Williams lived there briefly and, some say, wrote half of A Streetcar Named Desire under its eaves. Every day when the tour guides passed by that apartment with their paying customers in mule-drawn carriages, they told the story of how, in 2006, during the Tennessee Williams Festival screaming contest when Stanleys compete to yell “Stella” best and loudest, the winner that year yelled “FEMA!” instead. It was a story that I never tired of hearing.

  Behind my apartment, in Pirates Alley, is the house where William Faulkner briefly lived, now a bookstore called Faulkner House. Nothing in this district is without an accompanying story, and there is no shortage of supporting evidence—anecdotal or otherwise. Much of this material is housed in the Historic New Orleans Collection, a few blocks from my flat, where it is possible to find the history of any French Quarter property, going back to the city’s founding, in about the time it takes me to type this sentence.

  This history was, I suppose, partly why I chose to live in this neighborhood. I wanted to know what it would be like to live in the French Quarter. I wanted to stay in what I thought might be the city’s liveliest neighborhood, where I could sit on my balcony for entertainment, walk to the gym and the grocery store, run along the levee. Rarely use the car.

  Those were the easily explained reasons. For all of my life, the French Quarter was the place where I and many of my siblings worked, a place for rushing through, and certainly not a place where we might live and sleep the night. In the 1920s, when my grandmother was growing up and living in the city, the area was described as “the area of New Orleans over which the wraiths of valorous men and beautiful women still hover.” But what was the mystique really about? And how had one square mile come to stand in for an entire city? In the 1960s when Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were young adults, Elaine Armour wrote to the Times-Picayune after an article called “If You Live IN New Orleans, You Are a Tourist Guide” appeared. Elaine Armour couldn’t understand how to get her guests to the “MUSTS,” the places in the French Quarter where the article insisted all visitors go. “Perhaps you are not aware,” Armour reminded readers, “that 1. Negroes are not housed in Vieux Carré hotels. 2. Negroes are not served in Vieux Carré restaurants or coffee shops. 3. Negroes are not served in Vieux Carré night spots.” She went on, “Negroes (who happen to be citizens of New Orleans) DO have visitors from time to time…. Might I remind you that they eat, sleep, purchase, vote and pay taxes just like every other kind of citizen in New Orleans.”

  In my growing-up years, those of us who traveled from the East, that abandoned suburban experiment, into these streets for work were the supporting players, the labor, the oil that fired the furnace, the engine that made the wheel turn, the key that opened the door. I have a deep connection to this city’s soil. It grew me. I love much of its rhythm, its ritual as lived by the citizens who make this place. This is the place to which I belong, but much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are, more often than not, underemployed, underpaid, sometimes suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness. If the city were concentric circles, the farther out from the French Quarter you went—from the original city, it could be reasoned—the less tended to you would be. Those of us living in New Orleans East often felt we were on the outer ring.

  Thus it could be said that my reaching to understand the French Quarter was a yearning for centrality, a leading role, so to speak, in the story of New Orleans, which is to say, the story of America.


  On move-in day, Mom and I entered my new building through the green metal door on Royal Street, after having pushed through a crowd of smiling clapping people with drinks in their hands, gathered around a clarinetist with long braids whom I felt I had known all of my life. The woman’s name, I would later learn, was Doreen.

  The green door’s handle was like a lever of memory. I recalled the walk home from my barista job at CC’s Coffee House, wearing that stained uniform, how I passed this very door when I took the scenic route home along the backside of the St. Louis Cathedral toward Canal Street, where I waited underneath the three-sided bus stop that left all of us who were carless exposed to the rain. Even then, the green door always had a FOR RENT sign with illegible contact information written in black marker. Never in those passings did I imagine that I would ever be privy to what lay behind its gate.

  I remembered a time long before that when I was a child on a field trip from Jefferson Davis Elementary School to the French Quarter to visit “history.” The yellow bus bumped down Gentilly Boulevard, avoiding the High Rise bridge, and sped down Esplanade Avenue, the same route I would take, in later years, to drive Michael to work. How, on that elementary school trip, we parked at the edge of the Quarter, on the rocks by the train tracks and old wharves, entering the square mile of history through the French Market where Lynette would later work as a waitress and onto Royal Street where I would later live. The French Quarter, we were told back then, when I was in fourth grade, contained our origin story. It was the place where our ancestors—African, German, French, Haitian, Canadian—we were taught, had converged in this bowl-shaped spot below sea level along the river. It was, our teacher said, the impossible and unfathomable point from which we had all spread—across Canal Street to the Garden District uptown, across Rampart to back of town, farther away from the river and closer to Lake Pontchartrain. In the more recent past, we learned, we spread across the man-made bridges and the man-made Industrial Canal, down Chef Menteur Highway, which is how we came to be sitting in Jefferson Davis at broken wooden desks, in a trailer for a classroom, hot and irritated.