The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  Inside the green door, Mom and I faced a long narrow brick alleyway. Dimly lit, it led to four different doors. At our feet, water drained down gullies on either side. The door leading to where I would live was the first black door on the right. Entering it led to a sunny courtyard. Above us, reaching several floors up, were balconies belonging to former slave quarters. That was what the real estate agent said. Those quarters, I would soon find out, were tiny detached rooms that tourists would pay a lot of money for the experience of sleeping the night in.

  Mom and I abandoned my luggage at the base of the stairs and climbed three flights up the curving wooden staircase. At the top we were again faced with choices. There were two doors: one to my apartment, a five-hundred-square-foot, two-room pied-à-terre; and another to its accompanying slave quarters. Both spaces belonged—temporarily, at least—to me.

  In the apartment, the outside sounds were inside, and this would be my life. From the bedroom, I heard every single word Doreen the clarinetist sang: “Baby, won’t you please come home. I’ll do your cooking. I’ll pay your bills. I know I done you wrong.” I heard the crowds cheering her on. I thought about how my life would be loud like this every day for a long while. Mom pulled aside the floor-to-ceiling lace curtains that had been scalded threadbare by the sun to reveal windows so tall we opened them up and walked straight through onto the unshaded balcony that faced Tennessee Williams’s onetime apartment.

  As was the family custom, Michael, Carl, and Eddie were summoned to help lug my suitcases and boxes up the three flights of stairs. Michael and Eddie arrived first; Carl was a long time coming. We knew not to call and harass him or ask his whereabouts. Pushiness with Carl could get you the dial tone. When Carl finally called, he said he was on Esplanade Avenue, parking. “Walk straight down Royal,” I told him. I called him back to describe the green door, but by the time I made it downstairs and through the numerous doors to outside, he had already passed me by. I walked toward Canal Street where Carl had headed, seeking his head above the crowds. I spotted him in a blue-and-white-checkered shirt walking back toward me. He was disoriented, his eyes unfocused. For a short time, I watched Carl be lost without him seeing me. He looked uncertain, his head turning left and right, like someone in a foreign land. Being watched without knowing it is such vulnerability. After a while, I called out: “Carl! I’m here!”

  I led my big brother who was now forty-eight years old through the green door and through the black door into the courtyard. I locked us inside together. Carl said the maze of doors was a safety hazard. “Too much maneuvering,” he figured. “Too many blind spots and corners.” Of all the places in the city to live, he least trusted the Quarter, didn’t find its busyness interesting or intriguing or key to anything—as I did, then.

  We climbed the wooden stairs; our feet made loud sounds together. Upstairs, I showed him the small apartment where I would live and the detached room. “You can always come to stay,” I said. “Anh hah,” Carl said back.

  I ran out to buy a rotisserie chicken from the store across the street. Mom served the meal on china she’d unpacked from one of my boxes. Eddie didn’t move very much but sat outside on the balcony, his back to Royal Street, looking toward the Mississippi. He was unimpressed by the so-called skyscraper building, the French Quarter’s first four-story building, erected in 1811. “It looks like it belongs in the third world,” he said of its pink-and-green, peeling facade, which I thought lent it romance. “You can really enjoy yourself out here,” Eddie said. “I mean, you’re not gonna come from Idaho and not see the French Quarter. That would be a total waste of a trip.” I’m thankful that Eddie’s not threatening to “get too deep.” He’s too tired for that, having come here after work at the oil plant. “If I was you,” Eddie said, “I’d have a small gun. Almost all your brothers had guns growing up. If you were a New Orleanian then, you had a gun. It was like putting on a belt.” But that was once upon a time, when the sight of a gun led to fistfights instead of shootouts. Carl had a more ingenious idea. He suggested that from time to time I don the Michael Myers mask he would wear on Halloween night so criminals would think I was insane and leave me alone. He bragged about how the mask’s hair was “one hundred percent real.” It looked it; when he put the mask on to demonstrate, he was terrifying. Carl reasoned that if I wandered onto the balcony a few times wearing this mask, whoever had a thought to hurt me would be too scared to attempt it. We all laughed, but Carl was serious.

  Crime in the city was no more out of control than it had always been. What had changed was the brazenness with which crimes were being committed in the formerly sacrosanct French Quarter. “The French Quarter used to be off-limits; it was an unspoken rule. You did not go there with that shit,” said Eddie. But the city wasn’t that big. That the criminals would target the French Quarter was only a matter of time. They knew, too, that the people with the most money were from out of town. Boys were riding through the streets on bicycles snatching bags as they went. Days before I moved in, a man forced his way into a house on Dumaine Street at one in the afternoon; the owner hit him on the head with a statue and the robber fled, but many more victims were less fortunate. On Dauphine Street, a doctor was found dead in a pool of blood. The newspaper article described the man as “out of his element” in the French Quarter. On Halloween night, there would be a shootout on Bourbon Street—thirty-two bullets, hundreds of police standing a few feet away. Warnings to tourists now hung from placards on fern-covered balconies: CAUTION. WALK IN LARGE GROUPS.

  Michael leaned over the balcony, smoking and talking nonstop about how he was trying to get back to New Orleans to live closer to his pregnant daughter in New Orleans East. His shoulders were more noticeably uneven, the scoliosis advancing his lopsidedness. The metal rod placed in his back when he was a teenager was still in there: “Feel it, Mo, feel it,” he told me one day. When I failed to find it, he grew annoyed: “Girl, you can’t feel that thing?” I seemed unable to tell the difference between metal and skin. “Oh I see, I feel it,” I eventually lied.

  The next day, Michael said, he would start looking for restaurant jobs in the Quarter. Carl participated in the conversation by saying, “Yeah, Mike, yeah, yeah” from inside the apartment. From time to time, he stooped and poked his head out onto the balcony. His refusal to bring his body all the way out was how I discovered that Carl was afraid of heights. I laughed and joked and drew attention to this, as baby sisters are allowed to do. How could it be, I railed on, a man who survived days on top of a roof, a man who is routinely launched thirty feet into the air to change a lightbulb at work, how is this man afraid of heights!

  This visit to St. Peter Street would be Carl and Eddie’s first and last. “Not everybody meant to be in them Quarters,” Carl would say all the times I pleaded with him to visit.

  By the time Doreen broke the band down at 8 p.m. everyone had left except for Mom and Michael, who were staying the night. Mom set up her sewing machine and made a shower curtain out of bright yellow Burundian fabric. Even though I would live there for only a year, I dressed the place as if it were forever. The apartment was furnished, but I had brought my own linens, books, and art to set around or hang from the brick walls. I scrubbed every surface of the place with Sure Clean. Over her reading glasses, Mom watched me go, go, go, go, go.

  It was after midnight when Mom finally slept in my bedroom and Michael behind a fortress of boxes, his sharpened knife set close, on the love seat in the living room instead of on the bed in the slave quarters because according to him, the lock on my apartment door was shabby, and there had been strange people in the building earlier—the property manager and her brother, a white-haired, nervous-looking man with a mop bucket. I surveyed the apartment alone. The two rooms and sliver of balcony in the main apartment could not be considered great. But the additional room that overlooked the more private interior courtyard gave the place heft. That small room had been remade so that the walls were partly yellow stucco with splotches of expose
d brick. The full-size bed swallowed the space, forcing me to navigate sideways around it to get to the tiny toilet room next to the recessed shower. These openings in the room—minor cutouts—offered the illusion that there were places within the room to go. Only after you’d stepped inside and closed the door behind you, as I would do hundreds of times over the course of the year when I welcomed Airbnb guests, could you see the entire room—the lime-green settee against the wall and the small closet that contained cleaning supplies, but also a mysterious black hole leading to nowhere, a former chimney? Often, while cleaning, I’d open the closet and turn my head upward to peer into its vast nowhere. How far above, I wondered, did it reach?

  To indicate my settling in, I composed a container garden on the balcony facing St. Peter. Hung bougainvillea plants with bright-orange and neon-pink flowers from the ornate railing. My mother donated a hibiscus plant from Grandmother’s yard and Michael, a jasmine vine that knotted around the wrought iron. I bought a Meyer lemon tree that would never make fruit.

  I made my rituals, waking in the morning dark, the sliver of time between the last party and the early morning shift, which seemed the only time to catch quiet on the street, which was the same as in the apartment. At this early hour, I sat on the balcony with coffee and the Times-Picayune enjoying whatever breeze blew in off the Mississippi. As the day rolled in, I watched pole dancers dressed as purple bunnies, just off their Bourbon Street work shifts, getting into their cars, and the petite stooped woman in all white I’d met one morning on the sidewalk who has, for thirty years, worked in the powder room of Brennan’s restaurant where she said she makes her “good tourist tip.” The metal doors of the delivery trucks rolled up and banged down. Water poured down off balcony plants onto the streets and the heads of cursing people walking down below.

  From inside the apartment, I marked and planned my days. I wanted to remember, to revisit the places I had only glanced at. I wanted to collect the story of me and of my father, Simon; to research the story of my mother’s last name; to find out what happened to my childhood friends and what the land that once held the Yellow House was before. I wanted, I wrote in my notebook, not to avert my eyes.

  After Michael replaced the lock on the apartment door, he took up residence in the slave quarters for a week while he searched for restaurant jobs. For lunch, he made impromptu dishes with whatever was in the tiny fridge—delicious granola-crusted chicken with yogurt one day; charred sweet potato another. When he left the apartment for the job hunt, I relished my aloneness. Once, he knocked at the newly secured door and even though I heard him from the bedroom where I sat alone reading, I did not move to let him in.

  When I was truly alone, after Michael returned to Texas having not found acceptable work, I wished for him to be back.

  I met my neighbor Joseph—the only immediate neighbor I would meet in the course of the year—the day he began spraying my thirsty plants from his balcony in the building next door to mine. Joseph’s apartment was the apartment where the angry LaBranche widow and mistress lived. I learned this from the Haunted New Orleans walking tours that began nightly at dusk; crowds gathered underneath my balcony where guides dressed in Goth told and retold the story of how Joseph’s building was haunted by LaBranche’s widow and his former mistress, who was pissed about having been chained to a wall by Widow LaBranche and starved to death. Guides said her ghost made residents nervous and jumpy—not by throwing things, but by turning you so crazy you’d do it yourself.

  Joseph and I spoke through the balcony grates.

  “Brother Joseph,” he said, introducing himself. He wore a tan fedora.

  “Sarah.”

  “You here for six months?”

  “A year,” I said.

  “Long time.”

  Mine was an apartment for transients, he said, for people who do not plant flowers. The people who lived here before me danced in Bourbon Street clubs; the balcony was for suntans. I assumed Joseph was from New Orleans, judging from looks—midsixties likely, light skinned with one strip of curly hair beginning in the middle of his head and running down the back like a runway—but Joseph was also a transplant, having lived in New Orleans for three years. Home was a brick mansion in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where his two adult daughters lived. He ran an art gallery a few doors down from us that promoted local artists in a way that other galleries on Royal Street did not. That gallery had another courtyard, lush with fountains and oversize foliage, Buddhas sitting among the palms.

  Joseph was the kind to prophesy over Saints games, calling the score in advance. Often, he was right. When it rained, he walked down the street with what he called a parasol but was actually a patio umbrella, massive with a thick wooden pole. When Joseph strutted down the street stomping in his cowboy boots and holding the green-and-white parasol, everyone made space.

  On the day we met, he told me of his likely departure from his apartment, imminent because his landlord wanted to sell the building even though he had tenants with leases. “He don’t know I ain’t no Southern Negro,” Joseph said. “You want to go to court, I’ll take your ass to court all night long. Oh, you don’t want to mess with no Northern Negro.

  “Yes, sir, no sir,” he mocked, changing his voice to female and afraid.

  Joseph elocuted as if always onstage. His lips pushed out to form a canopy above the bottom half of his mouth when he made important points. I spent most of our talks on the balcony mesmerized by how his mouth moved. When his stories meandered—he specialized in tangents—I hurried him to the point. He hated this tendency of mine.

  “Jesus Christ, darling,” he would say. “Will you find some patience?”

  Besides Brother Joseph, the only other person I knew in the Quarter was Manboo’s brother Henry who passed through the streets to work maintenance at the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, which in the 1800s was the Sisters of the Holy Family convent and St. Mary’s Academy, the city’s first secondary school for black girls. In 1965, it moved to its current location on Chef Menteur Highway in the East, which is how Michael and Eddie came to attend their boys’ school, St. Paul’s Academy, and how my mother came to retire from the Lafon nursing home, where St. Mary’s sisters lived in their old age. I saw Henry, whose job required that he hose down the hotel’s sidewalk, only when I was walking to my car. “Monique,” he called. When I heard him, I’d run to hug him. If not, he’d run after me, which he complained caused him to “dirty up his black uniform.”

  “I been calling your name, girl, you didn’t hear me saying, Monique, Monique, Monique?” I was not accustomed to anyone in those streets calling me by my familiar name.

  If I were to scream from my third-floor apartment, my voice would not stand a chance against Doreen the clarinetist and her band playing on the street in front of Rouse’s grocery store, below. In the libraries where I undertook many of my investigations, I found pictures of Doreen playing on the exact same corner in the early eighties when I was in kindergarten. On certain days, Doreen’s youngest daughter appeared, wearing All Star sneakers, to play the drums. Joseph, who has stories on everyone, said Doreen’s sidewalk concerts put all of her children through college.

  Doreen’s music had become the soundtrack to my days. On Sundays her set began at 11 a.m. “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, sho been good to me” always came first, followed by “Wade in the Water.” “Over in the Gloryland” preceded “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” a crowd favorite. If Joseph felt moved enough during the time we were sitting on our balconies talking through grates, he would pretend to speak in tongues and go the three floors down to tip Doreen’s white bucket on the sidewalk.

  Except for me, the five-apartment building where I lived was empty most of the time. People owned these places, but visited only from time to time—say, for big football games when suddenly I would hear doors slamming and find the evidence in the morning, vomit and beer cans alongside the trash cans in the courtyard.

  IV

  McCoy

  Almost daily, I
abandoned my French Quarter apartment to drive to Carl in New Orleans East, where he could reliably be found. I’d take Orleans Street to Rampart Street and Rampart to the interstate. Ten minutes later, I’d have hit the apex of the High Rise and from there cruise down Chef Menteur to where Carl sat his watch.

  If Carl was not at the Yellow House I knew to find him on McCoy Street. McCoy is the kind of street where murderers think to dump the bodies. Where Lien Nguyen, a forty-year-old Vietnamese store owner and father of three, was driven, tied up, and shot in the face. News reports said Nguyen’s body was discovered in the “grassy area along the road,” which was described as “remote,” an eastern New Orleans “no-man’s-land” where things and people go to disappear. But this was the street where Carl lived now. In the police photograph that ran in the newspaper, behind the metal fence sat Carl’s small house.

  Neither location is imminently findable, unless you know the geography of the East. No one happens upon the short end of Wilson or Old Gentilly Road, nor do they simply find themselves on McCoy Street.

  If the French Quarter is mythologized as new-world sophistication, New Orleans East is the encroaching wilderness. The East is less dressed up; it’s where the city’s dysfunctions are laid bare. And wild things do happen there: canebrake rattlesnakes, one of the most poisonous in North America, are routinely discovered slithering around neighborhoods or in the abandoned Jazzland theme park, sometimes measuring over five feet long, which gains them the name “monster.”