The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  This was normally the time of year when Mom began decorating Grandmother’s house for the holidays, but she wasn’t in the mood. Sitting at the table in St. Rose with Uncle Joe and Auntie Elaine, she had broken down at the mention of Grandmother. I’m sorry for ruining the mood. I just don’t feel like my normal self. Where is Ivory? she wanted to know.

  I pulled up a chair next to her and rubbed her back, which I had never done before. She laid her head on my shoulder for an instant but quickly raised up and grabbed the side of my head as if to right the natural order of things. This moment reminded me of how so much of her life was still a shambles.

  We kids had recently pooled money to fix up Grandmother’s house, to replace floors and knock down a wall in the living room to create more space, but Mom took this to mean that she would live out the rest of her life in her mother’s house. At Grandmother’s house, instead of Christmas decoration, dust blew everywhere while the contractors worked. Nothing was in its place, not even the live Christmas tree that had been moved to the garage for the renovation. Mom’s blood pressure skyrocketed. I accompanied her to the doctor for a stress test and an EKG. The doctor thought Mom might have a leaky heart valve, but it was really low-thrumming anxiety. When the doctor asked her family history, Mom told him her father had died of a broken heart.

  For the longest time, Mom couldn’t hear out of one ear, but none of us knew it. We discovered this after the Water when several of us noticed how her eyes bored into us when we spoke. She was reading lips. We bought her a hearing aid in 2011, and Mom was still getting used to hearing well. When I got my hearing aid I really heard my own voice for the first time in a long time. My voice is not a distinguished voice. And the world just sounds too loud.

  I spent New Year’s Eve, my thirty-second birthday, alone. The year before, I’d spent it riding a camel in Cairo, but I did not long for that distance or for adventure of any kind. I craved togetherness. My siblings said they didn’t come to where I lived because the parking was bad. They said they didn’t come because they didn’t like crowds or because they didn’t want their cars towed, as happened to my cousin Pam when she came over to help me with my container garden. When I visited Manboo, Carl’s best friend and Henry’s brother, on Franklin Avenue, to complain about Carl not coming over, he gave me the truth: “Carl don’t like the Quarters. Hell, we live here!” When I asked Manboo to stop by, he pointed to his neighborhood, full of abandoned houses. “It’s quiet around here,” he said. “Them Quarters not safe.”

  My mother, having recently decided that she would no longer drive after dusk or on highways or in rain or in fog, refused to meet me on my birthday because of a thick mist. I drove to Jean Lafitte National Historical Park alone and spent the day, the only person on a tour led by a park ranger obsessed with pirates, their booty, and an alligator named Trash Can for where he tended to hang out.

  After this solo journey, I tried Carl, but his phone only rang. In the apartment, I slept my birthday away while the street made its noise. Only after 2011 had become 2012 did I sit groggily on the balcony and see the HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloon Joseph had left. This cheered me. I was not totally alone. Spotting me dazed on the balcony, Brother Joseph started up complaining about the “Mickey Mouse fireworks” that made a show on the river. I was glad for the sound of his voice. He talked me into meeting him on the sidewalk. I appeared on Royal Street in a black catsuit with pointed shoulders. Joseph, more than twice my new age and a total gentleman, wore long coattails under a short blazer. Wearing something long that hung down on New Year’s Day was part of his spirituality, he said. He had explanations for every single thing.

  Walking the streets, Brother Joseph and I ran into Goldie the Bourbon Street Cowboy who said it was his first night back on the job. Everything on him was spray-painted gold, including his sideburns, which had the texture of Astroturf. He wore gold beads around his neck and a cowboy hat. On his feet were gold-painted orthopedic shoes. He and Brother Joseph praised how God had brought Goldie through surgery to remove four bones from his leg. Even with the missing bones, haranguing pain, and a slight limp, Goldie reported, New Year’s Eve was not a bad “money night.” “It wasn’t a three-hundred-dollar night,” he said. “But it was OK.” I asked what he did, whether he was one of the men who stood frozen still for a tourist tip.

  “Nah,” Goldie said. “I walks around. I’m a photo op.”

  In Joseph’s Royal Street art gallery that night, grown men stooped before his water fountain as if bending to something extraterrestrial. “All the way from Europe for pictures of bubbles,” Joseph said. The magic? Joy dishwashing liquid, ninety-nine cents on sale. Sometimes Joseph, in his slapdash style, put in too much and the bubbles overgrew the fountain, making ever-widening concentric foam rings that burst their fragile stickiness on someone’s sandaled foot. The bubbles drew customers in a way the local art hanging everywhere did not. “Someone told me I could find bubbles here,” a person with a camera said one too many times, which led Joseph—needing to make money somehow—to charge people for the privilege of photographing bubbles. The summer I lived there, bubbles blowing through French Quarter streets was a thing. Whenever there was an event in the Quarter, and there was always an event—manufactured or real, just time going by was one—the neighbor in the building opposite mine launched her bubble machine, pointing it in the direction of the river. Down below, people traipsing through the streets took photographs of the thin, iridescent circles. “Is today a special occasion?” asked a man on the sidewalk. A few of the bubbles landed on the thorny limbs of my dying bougainvillea plant and popped. One time a bubble floated inside the apartment where I sat at the desk planning my investigations, the clear bubble aiming for the spot between my eyes. I stood up and backed away.

  Sometimes, when I was watering my plants on the balcony, someone down below would snap a photograph of me with a zoom lens. I fixed my pose for the camera’s eye, becoming for it whomever. Believing, even against my will, that to be photographed is to be present, alive, confirmed. “You never know how you look until you get your picture took,” my mother says my father, Simon Broom, was always saying.

  I imagine the stories that might get told about that image of me on the balcony: Here is a Creole woman watering her flowers. Or here is the descendent of an old New Orleans family, free people of color. Or else, here is a wrought iron New Orleans balcony, the lens meant to catch the object, having nothing whatsoever to do with me.

  The historicized past is everywhere I walk in my daily rituals—to get to the store or to the gym on Rampart Street or to my car to visit with Carl. Historical markers are everywhere you look—underfoot and on buildings. The Vieux Carré Commission was sanctioned in 1921 by the city to “protect, preserve, and maintain the distinct architectural, historic character, and zoning integrity” of the French Quarter. It is nearly impossible to legally demolish an entire building. The official, preapproved paint colors for buildings, colors with names like Paris Green, Cornflower Blue, Sunwashed Gold, and Sea Green, are coded. The more important houses in the Quarter, according to the commission’s Guidelines for Exterior Painting, have purple and blue tones; the least significant, orange and brown. Those in the middle have pink, green, and yellow. This attention to detail, keeping the French Quarter trapped in a calcified past, requires money and wherewithal, of course, that other parts of the city, languishing and decaying, do not have.

  Meanwhile, the present does whatever the hell it wants to do. Almost everything here, in terms of cultural appropriation and feel-goodness, can be bought or sold for the right amount. Actual parades were banned from the French Quarter in 1973, but an impromptu-seeming second line parade costs between $500 and $1,500, not including police and permit costs. The French Quarter’s tourism site makes it plain: “You don’t have to be dead and/or famous to get a second line parade. You don’t even have to live here. Organizing a second line is not hard, though it requires a few hundred dollars and some advance planning.” For the
right amount, Jazzman Entertainment will give you a second line for your bachelorette party. Want to buy a Mardi Gras parade on your day off from the education conference? The right number gets you a float pulled by a pickup truck down French Quarter streets from which drunken people throw beads and hit random passersby in the head. Seeing these bought carnivals in the streets makes me curse.

  The present, commingled with this prettified past, can sometimes feel unsightly, even crass. The Black Indian wearing a dirty purple suit, posing on the edge of my block for photographs with a Home Depot tip bucket hidden behind his feathers, feels like a transgression. The Black Indians are generally seen only twice a year—on St. Joseph’s Day in March and on Mardi Gras morning when they appear to show off the costumes they have made with their own hands, sewing and gluing down beads for 365 days in a row. But now, you can be photographed with a man dressing up as one for a dollar, at your command.

  The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city. Or those layers get oversimplified as in Treme, the HBO show, which never achieved the depth of The Wire, precisely because writer-producer David Simon’s love for New Orleans crippled his ability to break down the city’s dysfunction. The story he ultimately told was, on the whole, romanticized, more concerned with trotting out all of the city’s tropes (Hubig’s pies, WWOZ, street musicians, Black Indians!) than with actually examining the ongoing corruption, a failing criminal justice and health system, poverty, education, and lack of economic possibilities that create for the average local the life-and-death nature of life lived in the city. A city where being held up while getting out of your car is the norm, where many children graduate from school without knowing how to spell, where neglected communities exist everywhere, sometimes a stone’s throw from overabundance.

  This is also why when the nonprofit New Orleans Data Center published a census story about how 92,348 black people—a third of the city’s total population—had yet to return to the city after the Water, the image accompanying the story was a Black Indian in full regalia, yet another romanticization of the displaced, who even if they were not Black Indians should be able to return home. Even the great writers succumb to this magicalizing of the city, as the otherwise searing (on the subject of Sacramento) Joan Didion does in her notes for South and West, writing sentences like “In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless,” which does little to explain why it takes so long to get things done—Road Home, for instance.

  In conversations with friends, I have described New Orleans as a city of feeling. It has taken me a long time to understand what I meant when I said that. Sometimes, people’s response to my being from New Orleans is a sound—moans, gasps of re-memory—which generally precedes their own story (usually characterized as wonderful, singular, sometimes magical) of the city. In these instances, they imagine Garden District, Marigny, and French Quarter charm while I picture New Orleans East. Most often, when you ask people what they love about New Orleans, they describe the way the city makes them feel—to the exclusion of all else. Feelings are hard to localize, to intellectualize, and thus to critique. One’s relationship to the city of feeling is personal and private, and both states are to be protected at all costs, which makes criticizing New Orleans difficult.

  Why do I sometimes feel that I do not have the right to the story of the city I come from? Why, when I want to get down to it, just say the damned thing, do the thoughts pool and ring out in a loop in my head a childish chorus of “Oh, oh, oh, don’t tell on your place.” Telling on. Like giving it all away. Giving what all away?

  Often, the focus of criticism becomes not the dysfuntion itself, but rather the person who speaks against the city of feeling, against New Orleans. To criticize New Orleans is to put one’s authenticity at stake. But I resist the notion that if you have left the city for better things, if the city is not testing you, if your life is not in danger, you ought to stay quiet.

  Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?

  VI

  Investigations

  When I wanted to know the story of the French Quarter apartment where I lived, I checked into the Williams Research Center in the Historic New Orleans Collection on Chartres Street where the entire lineage of every address in the French Quarter is organized digitally.

  In the time it took for me to type in my address, I discovered its history going back to 1795. “A lot forming the corner of Royal and St. Peter with an irregular depth.” I learned that it was originally owned by a free woman of color, Marianne Brion—“(f.w.c.)” the papers read per the law—and a portion was transferred to another free woman of color, Adelayda Pitri. Marianne Dubreuil dite Brion was daughter to Nanette, a former slave who was sold along with her four children to a French-woman and her husband. Nanette received manumission “because of the loyalty and constancy they have served me and my husband,” the records show. Under Spanish rule, free people could receive property from whites. This is likely how Marianne inherited the property.

  I discovered that Cecile Dubreuil, Marianne’s daughter, began accumulating property soon after she was freed in 1769, buying several buildings on Royal Street. In 1795 in New Orleans, seven free people of color owned more than five slaves. They were all women, and one was Marianne Dubreuil dite Brion, daughter of Nanette, who owned the apartment I rented and also owned seven slaves.

  That same afternoon I learned these facts I visited a used bookstore on Orleans Street in search of books about New Orleans East. The owner told me there were none. The East, he said, was too young for history. But this was faulty logic. We are all born into histories, worlds existing before us. The same is true of places. No place is without history.

  What is true is that few things have been written about the East, except for sentence- or sometimes paragraph-long descriptions in books about New Orleans that describe the area as “rakish” or “barren” or “distant, charmless.” Nothing had, at the moment I asked, been written about the lives of the people who lived there. The East was not too young for history; it was just that in the official story of New Orleans, its stories and people were relegated to the sidelines, deemed not to matter as much, the place not having earned—through demographics or economic success—a spot on the cartographer’s nearsighted map: a situation not dissimilar to the exclusion of Native American tribal lands from early maps of the Americas.

  To find the history of the Yellow House, I had to search original deeds, chains of titles, successions. I stalked the Conveyance Office, the Office of Vital Records, the Real Estate and Records Office in city hall, the Notarial Archives, and libraries. The search was full of cross-referencing and confusion.

  I arrived many mornings at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library in the business district, just across from city hall, and waited in line for the doors to open. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the city was full of people eager to read, but actually the line was full of homeless people who had slept outdoors and were trying to get to the bathrooms. This sight prompted a letter in the local newspaper: “The atmosphere outside the library is so off-putting … unkempt people sitting or lying on the steps or wandering about aimlessly. Inside the library was just as unsettling … large numbers of people with their heads down on the tables…. Perhaps some police presence is needed to ensure the safety of library
visitors and to improve the view for tourists.” So this is what the homeless and health care problem all boiled down to for this one citizen: striving to always be a good photo op.

  Once inside the library, I rode the packed elevator to the Louisiana Division on the third floor and trained my eyes on the sign that spelled out the rules. Disallowed behaviors, it let us know, included: “Stalking patrons; using or exchanging drugs; bathing; shaving or washing clothes in bathroom sinks.”

  “No bad smells,” it read. “No oblivious transmission of germs or excessive coughing. No washing up in the bathroom sink. No preaching or forcing your ideas on others. No shopping carts and no weapons.” Most of these things still happened anyway. These conditions were, as the library’s slogan said, “Speaking Volumes.”

  On the third floor, I shared tables with the mentally unstable who sometimes had conversations aloud and sometimes read quietly just as I was reading. The library staff spent much of the time policing, which made it hard to get research assistance.

  I spent a day at the City Planning Commission Office in city hall. If it hadn’t been for my time in the mayor’s office, I would not have known such a place existed. But this was the office responsible for creating zoning policy, and this zoning policy was responsible for how neighborhoods looked and how people lived there. Lenient policy led to McCoy Street and Metro Disposal Garbage Collection Service being within sight of each other, to the Yellow House being across from a junk business.