The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  The East, in general, especially post-Water, provided good cover for snakes and for people. The large majority of its streetlights had not yet been restored, and this is why men have led cops on wild-goose chases through the East’s marshlands, and why an escaped prisoner from Orleans Parish Prison hid out in the rafters of the abandoned Versailles Arms apartment complex. This is partly why Carl loves living there—because the only people who can find him are the people he already knows. Living where Carl does requires Maroon-like levels of self-sufficiency and independence. There are, of course, more populous areas of the East, neighborhoods with associations and monthly meetings, neighborhoods where city services are provided regularly, like those subdivisions closer to the brand-new Walmart on Bullard, whose opening was the biggest news the East has had in years—but where Carl lives is not one of them.

  The East’s minuscule lighting budget prompted its city council representative, Jon Johnson, best known as the operator of subpar Burger King franchises, to complain in a council meeting that eastern neighborhoods were so dark at night that coyotes were running through them. I tried, in the course of my investigations, to ask about the coyotes, to discuss the East’s past, present, and future with Jon Johnson, calling his office in city hall, but for months he put me off. It was hard, as it turned out, to find anyone who was willing to speak in any official capacity about the area where I grew up.

  After five months of phone calls to Jon Johnson’s office, I read in the newspaper that he had pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges for fabricated invoices related to the rebuilding of his East New Orleans home.

  If Carl was not on Wilson, babysitting ruins, I’d take Chef Menteur to Read Road to Old Gentilly Road, the same Old Road on which Carl taught me to drive. What you mostly see now though, driving down the Old Road, are eighteen-wheelers speeding recklessly or cars with their emergency flashers on, cars that are breaking or have already broken down, cars whose drivers wave their left hand from the window for you to pass—go, go, go—but carefully because the road is pocked and lopsided, and it is one shared lane. Whenever I crept down this road in my car I fretted over the seemingly inevitable flat tire.

  Businesses on the Old Road included Colt Scrap Tire Center and Metro Disposal and Topiary Sculptures by Ulness. The Gentilly Landfill and JMA Trucking, Acme Brick, Southwest Freight, and Richard’s Disposal. The corner of Old Gentilly Road and Michoud Avenue, closer to NASA, is where you went to get lucky at the Palace Casino.

  The dead are relegated to the Old Road, too. Alvin, my best childhood friend from Wilson, is buried on it, in Resthaven cemetery. One day when I was driving to reach Carl, I stopped in on a whim to visit Alvin. It was overcast when I drove underneath the cemetery’s white archway. Seeing that cemetery was like recalling an old dream. I had not stepped foot in there since Alvin was buried twelve years earlier. No groundskeeper was present the day of my impromptu visit or any other day, I later found out, for six years, ever since the Water. The small white house where a grave tender would have been was deserted. Inside, waterlogged books containing handwritten names of the dead were overturned everywhere. A few of them sat opened, looked rifled through. Other people had been trying to find their lost ones, too. On foot, I roamed the flat plain of the cemetery reading tombstones in search of Alvin’s burial plot. I could barely remember where we had all come that rainy day, but I thought I knew the general vicinity, behind and to the left of a stone mausoleum. Searching alone in the great big graveyard made me jittery. Slightly paranoid. I heard every flap of every bird’s wing. A black car pulled in. I watched it. A man stepped out and knelt down by a grave.

  I called Rachelle, Alvin’s sister, to ask his whereabouts in the ground. “He don’t have no headstone, Mo,” she said. I had believed with absolute certainty that he did, but how would I have actually known since we do not stick around to see our dead deposited into the ground? Nor do we stick around when headstones are erected. The machines do that.

  Rachelle suggested I ask the grave tender. I didn’t tell her that there was no tender, his post having been abandoned. The man who had pulled in earlier came over to me, said he was visiting his mother. He gave me a number to call for information. I wrote it down. For months afterward, I called Resthaven’s main office, leaving the same voice message that was never returned. “Looking for the location of an Alvin Javis, J-A-V-I-S,” I would say. “In Resthaven Cemetery. Please call me back. Thank you.”

  At my feet lay stuffed animals someone had placed on a child’s tombstone. The wind had picked up and now flowers that would never decompose, no matter how much time passed, blew from grave to grave.

  I left to find Carl on McCoy Street, less than a minute away. One of two short streets off the Old Road, the rare residential section amid industry, McCoy loops around to draw a horseshoe, running parallel at its bend to the Louisville and Nashville tracks—the same train that passed behind the Yellow House—linking up with Darby Street where fifteen years before I was born, my mother lived briefly with her first husband, Webb, and his mother.

  Carl called this place where he lived his “lil room” or sometimes “chicken shack” or “my studio apartment” when he was trying to be funny. It wasn’t his full-time residence, more like a getaway. He mostly slept nights in the poorly named Chateau d’Orleans apartments on Chef Menteur Highway with his girlfriend, Lisa, with whom he had a son. We called this boy, who was barely one year old when I moved into the French Quarter, Mr. Carl for how grown he acted. Carl’s possessions lived among these three places: Grandmother’s house, the lil room, and Chateau d’Orleans.

  Besides Carl on McCoy Street were two shotgun houses. When the women who lived next door to him pulled out of the drive, they raced down the short street. Carl waved as they flew. Across the street sat a house with boarded-up windows and no front door, suspended in green marshland, like a houseboat.

  At night, the one streetlight illuminated a metal box enclosed in wire fencing that belonged to the electric company. Otherwise, McCoy Street at night was completely dark, full of croaking frog sounds coming from the direction of the houseboat.

  Carl’s house was white wood plank, a tiny house long before the fad. Beside his front door, a single exposed blue bulb dangled. The one room inside held a small kitchen and bathroom with a shower. The blinds in the front window have been irreparably damaged from Carl bending them into peepholes.

  Carl seemed to rearrange the furniture weekly, a king-size cream-colored four-poster bed and a kidney-shaped love seat. On my visits, I drank flavored vodka (even though I most loved bourbon) out of a blue Las Vegas cup that someone gave to Carl and he has regifted to me, with blinking lights that power on whenever I take a sip.

  There was also a bullet hole in Carl’s wall, a small circle above his bed, to the right of the window that held the air-conditioning unit, just beneath a Raiders flag. A man on Darby Street tried to shoot another man but missed. I found the headline in the newspaper one morning while sitting on my French Quarter balcony: NEW ORLEANS POLICE INVESTIGATING … MALE SHOT IN SHOULDER … 4200 BLOCK OF DARBY.

  When my mother tried to ask Carl about the dead Vietnamese man deposited on his street he became heated and enraged. “I don’t know about no damn killing,” he said and then hung up on her.

  This prompted Mom to want to visit Carl. I drove her there one day. Inside the car, Mom tapped her finger on the window toward the spot of land where Webb’s mother, Mrs. Mildred, used to live. The men who stood around outside did not know that she was trying to recall the world before them.

  This is worse than Wilson, Mom said of McCoy. Her voice dropped to a mumble, her dissatisfied, thinking tone. We pulled up to Carl’s lil room, which was directly behind where Ms. Mildred’s house used to be.

  That door keep somebody out of here? Mom asked Carl once we were all seated inside on the kidney sofa.

  “Anh hanh,” Carl said.

  They got lights back here at night?

  “Yeah. They just
got some new lights up on that post,” Carl lied.

  Carl, you ain’t got no full-sized refrigerator and no microwave?

  “Unh unh. Nah, cuz I don’t really be in here.”

  You better get you a lil microwave.

  “I don’t need that.”

  This is what you call one room, huh?

  “Chicken shack with no chicken,” Carl said.

  At least it’s kind of clean.

  “Oh yeah, it’s clean.”

  They got a lock in that bathroom?

  I asked Mom if she needed to use it, trying to redirect.

  No, I was gone clean up a lil bit.

  “Oh no, it’s clean in there,” Carl said, seeing where she was headed. “Y’all go,” he told us. “Y’all go bout your business. I don’t want y’all to get caught in all this rain, it’s about to storm. Y’all go head on, beat that rain out of here.”

  You ain’t got nobody hiding in the bathroom, huh?

  “I’m saying, it’s about to storm.”

  You don’t have no place to take a bath, wash off?

  “Got a shower in there,” he said as we walked out the door.

  Back in the car, Mom did not attribute Carl’s eagerness to see us leave to her interrogation. He probably had some gal coming over.

  On the drive back, she remade Carl’s place without lifting a finger. He can get a little table and put in there…. He act like he don’t know how to make things home. Put a little curtain up at the window.

  We stopped on the short end of Wilson Street and walked up and down the empty lot where the Yellow House used to be. Mom sought out whatever grew, found half-dead flowers that Carl had brought and abandoned. We took the plants with us. It felt good, leaving with something from our land in our hands. Mom planted them in Grandmother’s backyard where, in no time, they flourished.

  V

  Photo Op

  “Be a tourist in your own hometown!” reads the ad posted on the blue-painted door of the shop on Royal Street that sells expensive French linens. The advertisement is a visual mishmash of cartoonish delights and local iconography: streetcar, swaying oak trees, riverboat, streetlamp, French Quarter town house with ferns hanging from its upper balcony, the St. Louis Cathedral, people leaping and running wild, arms up, gyrating. The sign prompts: Go to touristathome.com.

  But I have already been that, I thought, a tourist in my native place. It would bore to list all of the times we visited this one square mile for special occasions: Karen and me standing in front of the Café du Monde sign, dressed in our best sweaters and jeans, hair recently pressed. Mom and me with Lynette and Michael posed on a bench with St. Louis Cathedral as backdrop. That time Lynette and her boyfriend visited from New York City, how her boyfriend bought an alligator head from a trinket shop on Royal Street, not ten steps from where I now lived. The pictures confirmed that we came from an interesting place and thus were naturally interesting people. Now, I rented these experiences for ninety-nine dollars a night to strangers on Airbnb to whom I pitched a “super charming room … historic … LaBranche … famous building … one of greatest corners … location,” I wrote in the apartment description, “is DAZZLING.” And also, I was careful to include: “super safe,” even though it was not.

  I left a stack of brochures by the bed. Often, guests asked for advice on where to eat and where to hear music. Never once did they ask about New Orleans East, where I grew up. “That’s why I always say New Orleans will survive without the East,” Eddie said when I told him this. “They don’t even know it exists. What does New Orleans East have to hang its hat on?” Arguments some residents of New Orleans East would make in future years when neighborhood leaders threatened secession under a new name: East New Orleans.

  At first my mother visited often. She liked the lemony smell of the street-cleaning soap in the morning. I’m seventy-one, she announced from the balcony the day after I moved in. And this is the first time I’m sleeping in the French Quarter. She turned to me. What does living here do for you? I talked about how living here helped me examine my braided, contradictory ideas about the city. Then said, I don’t know yet; I’m trying to know the answer.

  Mom’s visits reminded me of how I was in the apartment at first, noticing every sound. From the bed where we were sleeping, Mom would lift her head and look around the dark room, say, They are really partying. Is that a parade going on? It was. When I first moved in, I used to jump up and run from wherever I was to look at the parades passing down below, but over time I learned to know and distinguish the sounds even with the windows closed, could tell whether it was a hired wedding band or an actual second line with tried-and-true New Orleans musicians.

  My mother’s delight was recognizable. I understood it. It was the same delight I had on my first trip to Paris, but here she was in her own hometown.

  In the mornings, Mom sat at one end of the narrow balcony facing Royal Street and I at the other, facing the Mississippi. She polished her nails and drank coffee at the same time, hiding her body behind the lemon tree, peering around its branches to watch me. Sometimes when we were playing out our morning ritual together, she stuck out her tongue at me and giggled, grabbing every simple pleasure. Look at how they clean the streets every day. Look like it’s so different, a whole different set of rules. Other neighborhoods they don’t give a damn about the streets, but here you have different galleries and things, right in the neighborhood.

  Together, Mom and I explored. We went to house museums and followed the audio tours and to the New Orleans Museum of Art where Mom read every placard; we spent entire days at music festivals—Satchmo and French Quarter and Jazz—and walked to exhaustion. In these explorations l could, for the time an adventure takes, make Mom forget her uprootedness, which she likened to my own. I never thought you would become a nomad, she said to me one day. Which hurt. How, I wondered, was a person with a year lease still, in her eyes, a nomad? Looking back, I think she meant that I seemed untethered, had no place where I was required to be.

  Carl’s calls always jolted us out of our adventures. “Y’all heard from that Road Home yet?” Carl would say. “Mom needs to get out from Grandmother’s house, get back to her own house, get back to that East. Mo, why don’t you help Mama call them people?” But I was calling. The new attorneys assigned to Mom’s case kept changing. The lawyers had, once again, lost some of our paperwork, which we were in the process of re-collecting from siblings scattered everywhere, rephotocopying, renotarizing, re–priority mailing for eleven different people.

  Even seven years after it launched, Road Home was, for most applicants, a dead end, a procedural loop, bungled and exhausting, built to tire you out and make you throw up your hands. Nothing moved forward no matter what we did. No amount of effort seemed enough to unpause Mom’s life. In the summer of 2011, a discrimination case against the state for racist practices was settled. Black people were more likely than whites to receive Road Home grants based on premarket values lower than the actual cost to repair their houses. One person received a grant for $1,400 when the cost of rebuilding was $150,000.

  Those fortunate enough to escape the injustice of Road Home were often faced with crooked contractors who had a glut of construction work. This was my cousin Pam’s story. Child of my father’s brother, Pam was caught up in years of litigation over her birthright, a small cottage uptown. Her mother, Ms. Lavinia, intended for Pam to inherit the house where she grew up, which had been in the family for fifty years. When contractors began renovating Ms. Lavinia’s house, post-Water, she was ninety-one years old. When she died, seven years later at ninety-eight, the house was still uninhabitable.

  On her deathbed in her daughter’s spare room, Ms. Lavinia wanted to know whether her house was ready.

  “Not yet. They are still getting it together,” Pam told her.

  “OK. As long as they get it right,” Ms. Lavinia said back. In fact the house was already finished, but the house that the contractors rebuilt in place of Ms. Lavini
a’s destroyed home would not pass muster on a movie set. It could not even pretend to be a house. You knew this just from looking at the outside where only one side of each of the front windows had a shutter affixed, because the windows weren’t measured properly. The structural engineer took one look at the foundation and declared the home uninhabitable, suggesting Pam “return this piece of trash to whoever made it and get your money back.” That simple advice was unfeasible, a losing battle that Pam, to this day, still mourns.

  “I can relate to what Carl is going through,” she said. “Because we would go by the house even though we hated seeing that monstrosity of a structure there, would go by just in hopes that we would experience some sense of justice and then we realized, ‘Hell, ain’t no justice, Mom is gone.’” Would this be my mother’s fate, too?

  Not yet Thanksgiving and already Doreen was singing Christmas carols. “Come on, it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you.” It was still scorching outside. As if reading my thoughts, someone on the street below yelled, “A Christmas song never hurt nobody.”

  At this time of year, Living History characters, people dressed as historical figures in the costume of the past, roamed French Quarter streets playing free people of color, Marie Laveau, and the war general, Andrew Jackson. This year, there was also the pirate Jean Lafitte and Madame Josie Arlington, who ran a Storyville brothel. These characters stopped and had discussions with random people on the street, whoever had a vague interest, their past mores clashing against the present: “Where is the bottom of your dress?” the Madame, who I had passed countless times on the way to the gym, asked me. I was wearing black leggings and a sweater that reached my waist. Feet away, an actor playing a free man of color held forth in a brown three-piece suit and halting staccato to a growing crowd. A tourist wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a Hawaiian T-shirt interrupted to say how he couldn’t believe that there were free people of color who were not slaves before the Civil War. “BEEEE-LIEVE,” the man who played the eighteenth-century free man implored. I wanted to dawdle, hear what else the free man of color would add to the story, but I was rushing to get to St. Rose.