The Yellow House

  I met with a kind, timid man, so new to city planning that he still believed the textbook theories. His diction was academic, as when he said, speaking of zoning classifications: “After six months if they are inactive they resort to the baseline zoning district.” I nodded, but for most of our discussion had no idea what he meant. He had the knowledge but not the bedside manner. I wanted to know how it came to be that houses abutted trailer parks, then junk lots and tow centers after the trailer parks had gone. I asked him how the street came to be, but I suppose I meant the question in a more existential way: how we, my family, came to be there. The man didn’t know. During our half-hour conversation, his inability to answer my questions upset him so much that he kept berating himself: “I just failed planning school,” he said more than once. He had not yet learned to say, “I don’t know.” Not his fault, really. My questions did not belong there in the City Planning Commission Offices, for they were, at base, unanswerable.

  In a presentation to the Louisiana legislature in 1981 when I was two years old, Barton D. Higgs, New Orleans East Inc.’s president, addressed some aspect of the question I was now trying to resolve. “With careful planning, you maximize value by avoiding conflict. You don’t, for instance, put a factory next to a school or in the midst of an elegant neighborhood without expecting to lower the fair market value of the surrounding property,” he said.

  In the “Planning for Living” section of one brochure, the ideals of good city planning were laid out: “The home … is the point from which the family unit takes form and branches out in various fields of endeavor…. The objective of planning is to provide for these normal functions and to promote the greatest convenience, safety, and general well-being in a pleasant and attractive setting.”

  But here in the city planning office, on the matter of trailers the kind man said, “Every trailer park I’ve seen has been in areas off the way.” He was trying to sort it out. “Trailer parks are different because they are transient. Hmmm. The majority are in industrial-type areas.”

  I tried to paint for him a picture of what I meant, what had driven me to his office. I kept saying trailer parks and houses and junk lots and train tracks and zoning. “I’m trying to figure out how a residential neighborhood became an industrial one,” I said.

  “I’m trying to build up an image,” the man said.

  I said again, “New Orleans East, just off Chef Menteur.”

  “I actually had that in my mind!” he called out, seeming pleased with himself, as if he had passed a pop quiz.

  He seemed to know what to do after that. Together we read the map of the city. I asked about our specific address. He gave me abbreviations that I looked up alone later: IZD (interim zoning district), HI (heavy industrial), LI (light industrial), CZO (comprehensive zoning ordinance), RD2 (single family), RD3 (rural development), MCS numbers, base maps, quadrants. Wanting me out of his office, he instructed me on what I might do for myself, schooling me on the nature of documents I might find and request from yet another office, the clerk of council, “for a nominal fee.”

  When we were nearing the end of our talk, which mostly consisted of him looking at the square where the house used to be and calling out numbers I could further investigate, a woman appeared in the office and pulled rank on him simply by holding her voice steady. It was a loud voice. Whereas he hesitated, she spoke boldly. Whereas he responded to the emotional tenor of my questions, she spoke like someone doing a routine. I put to her many of the same questions I had already asked.

  She explained that unattended houses in light industrial zones reverted back to the zoning classification light industrial, but users, as she called residents, could fight to get the zoning classification changed back to residential, or people living in the houses near one another could team up and rally to regain residential status. She spoke of fighting and advocating and teaming up. I asked for the definition of a residential area.

  She stayed silent, waiting for me to reframe this.

  If you have three houses can you argue that the block is residential?

  “That might be more complicated,” she said.

  I suddenly felt baffled in a way I had not felt in a very long time, like a grieving person unable to reconcile a loss. I had not shown photos of the short end of Wilson, but they both knew the area. These employees, I felt, had bigger fish to fry than what I was coming into their office with.

  Ms. Octavia’s house in the light industrial district on Wilson is what city planners would call a legal nonconforming use of space. It was, legally and literally speaking, an exception.

  I finally said, “But what if only one person lives on the street?”

  She did not entertain the possibility, letting it be known that we were wrapping up. “In this case it’s different. You’re trying to protect the users from all the surrounding development.”

  We, the houses, were the exception, it was clear. Not the trailer parks. I repeated it back to myself: We lived on an industrial-zoned street where the houses were the exceptions.

  The woman left saying, “We don’t have the liberty of going around and examining things the way we think makes sense.”

  VII

  Phantoms

  Three weeks into the New Year, Carl called from New Orleans East to tell me that the marshes were burning. He said they had smoke instead of sun in the sky. “They got us afraid to breathe out here,” he said. As he spoke, I watched Doreen and her band set up below. It was as if he were calling from another city.

  I had read a newspaper story several mornings before about a man killed at Mondo restaurant in the Lakeview neighborhood. He was shot seven times, in broad daylight, by the grandfather of his only child, outside the restaurant where he had gone to retrieve his paycheck. The dead man’s mother had accompanied him there; she had also watched him die. I tore out the newspaper image of this man lying facedown, his dreadlocks splayed on the sidewalk like a star, and put it in a file folder. I didn’t think about it again until Carl called to talk about the smoke and said, “You know our cousin was killed out here.”

  Our cousin, Antonio “Tony” Miller, was the man in the newspaper article. He was the only son of my father’s niece. I retrieved Carl one morning from the East, and we drove the hour to Phoenix, Louisiana, where I met Tony for the first time in his casket. It was a terrible introduction. Tony was handsome, with wide shoulders. His dreadlocks had been gathered in a pile at the top of his head. His crossed hands were small and delicate. His lips looked as if they had been spray-painted silver. He had a heart-shaped tattoo drawn in thin lines near his wrist. He was twenty-one years old and the sixteenth person murdered in the first three weeks of 2012.

  Months before, a one-year-old had been killed by a bullet meant for someone else. By summertime, a five-year-old would be shot at a birthday party. Around the same time, Mom would call and say a boy was shot five times while sitting in his car on Mockingbird Lane. The newspaper headlines shouted CITY RATTLED BY A SURGE IN GUN VIOLENCE, and the THOU SHALT NOT KILL signs of my teenage years in the nineties, though smaller now, sprouted along the neutral ground.

  Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who was always threatening murderers with words at press conferences, said that New Orleans had long been “a violent town” and resolved to stamp out the city’s “culture of death.” A big part of the problem, Landrieu said, was a lack of conflict-resolution skills among young people. But that seemed, to me, the very least of it. What about the debilitating inadequacies of the educational system and the paltry job market? An economy based on selling as many elements as possible of New Orleans culture via tourism as opposed to actual industry? Unemployment was at seven percent, and twenty-six percent of those who did work were in the hotel and food-service industry, which was the lowest paid of all professions. Health services were still crippled, and mental health services for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, what my cousin Pam called “Katrina crazy,” were virtually nonexistent.

  In order to curb
the soaring murder rate, Mayor Landrieu launched midnight basketball games and instituted curfews in the tourist-heavy French Quarter and Marigny, restricting those under eighteen years old from being in or near those vicinities after 8 p.m. “Save a tourist and bury a native,” a local columnist wrote in response.

  When none of these ploys worked, community members pleaded with God. PRAYER MOVEMENT GEARS UP IN EFFORT TO HEAL NEW ORLEANS, one headline said. The story described two women driving around and laying hands on the streets, pleading the “blood of Jesus” for protection.

  Tony’s funeral reminded me of Alvin’s funeral more than a decade before. The young men wore the same hard faces that broke into pained grimaces when they saw the dead body, just like we did as young mourners for Alvin, but instead of wearing white T-shirts with pictures of the dead, they wore bright-red matching Dickies jumpsuits with Tony smiling on their sleeves and on their backs.

  At the burial, after the crowd had mostly gone, the grave tender, dressed in green coveralls, drove a tractor with the tomb’s lid suspended by two metal chains. It dangled in the air like a low-flying jet. For many minutes, the sole sound was of those chains grating as the lid was lowered over the tomb. I stood facing this with several of the pallbearers, who were all young men in red jumpsuits each wearing a single white glove. After the lid was on, one of the pallbearers threw his white glove to the ground and stormed off, lifting up his sunglasses, wiping his eyes, sniffling. The grave tender worked at the speed of someone late for his next appointment, removing the Astroturf that had been laid down around the coffin to make a decent presentation, folding each piece like a cherished carpet, and then finally sealing the tomb permanently with cement. By then, the other witnesses to Tony’s burial had left the scene and I stood there alone. I was thinking about how rare it was, our staying to watch Tony lowered into ground, and of how all of my childhood friends were either dead (Alvin) or in prison (James) or, generally speaking, lost to me (Chocolate T, Red). The moment was more wordless than I am now making it.

  On the drive home, after dropping Carl, I thought about James, my sister Valeria’s son, who was now thirteen years into his prison term; and Alvin, as many years in the ground, and without even a headstone. Because I was used to acting on things in lieu of feeling, I called Resthaven Cemetery’s main office even though it was late at night and left another voice mail about wanting to find Alvin’s spot in the ground. When I entered the green door leading to the alleyway of my French Quarter apartment, I slammed it shut despite the DO NOT SLAM DOOR sign and leaned all of my body weight against it, as if I had just escaped something.

  Back at the apartment, I gathered the latest letter from my nephew James.

  To: My Tete—Princess P

  From: Your nephew—Blacky Boo J

  Reason: Just received your letter and glad to know that you got my back [smiley face]

  Request: Never to give up on me

  James never dated the letters, never mentioned holidays or birthdays or time in general, except the length of his prison term, which was the only time that mattered.

  I had tried to professionalize a personal thing, highlighting in neon yellow James’s bold black lines, organizing his letters in a file folder labeled “James Jenkins” that included an underlined newspaper article about the possible closing of Avoyelles Correctional Facility in Cottonport, Louisiana, where James had served the first few years of his twenty-year sentence.

  I can see now that all that was missing from my rude compartmentalizing of James—who was born a month before me, the two of us sometimes sharing a crib on the living room perch, and who is thus not only my family but also my elder; this man who I knew in infancy, in bottle-sucking years and childhood and teenage years—all that was missing from my organizing of him and our relationship was his prisoner number instead of his name on the file folder.

  We are thirty-two years old now, James and I. The six letters I have from him represent for us the entirety of an adult conversation, dispirited and fragmented with no glory, begun when we were twenty. His correspondence has been prejudged, marred with officialdom’s faded red warning: “Mail uncensored. Not responsible for contents.”

  Our correspondence starts and stops. It is always me who stops talking, and it is always me who reinitiates. James never disturbs the silence between us. These fits and starts have mostly been due to one or two lines in James’s letters—requests, declarations, questions whose answers seem impossible to muster. I find it painful, for instance, to try to describe for a grown man who has been removed from the landscape what the view outside my window looks like. This particular torment of prison, the blinding of the curious and seeing, an attempted mass burial of the live—James calls prison “going dead”—makes me feel that I have unlawfully survived.

  James’s handwriting has changed over these thirteen years. Six years ago it was a tight cursive, nearly calligraphic, etched into the paper, but now there is only print, the letters spiritless and grave. The way he addresses me on the envelope changes, too. In the beginning it was Sarah Broom and then all three of my names and then lately just Monique Broom, which implies a familiarity I cannot claim. I do not know what James looks like anymore. I make him a face based on images I have found that are here before me. Photographs of James, placed in random books, fall out at unexpected times. From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road fell a Polaroid that James’s mother, my sister Valeria, had given me of James posing before a fake landscape of clouds forming over high-rise buildings with mountains in the distance. In the photograph, there are thin tattoos like popping veins on James’s skin. He is on one knee in front of the confused city/mountainscape that frames him now but will frame another prisoner next—for a fee. I study this image. “Dear James,” I am moved to write in a new letter, “who I love.” I judge this line of mine. It takes me a long time to know what to say next.

  Over my six months back home, I had come to know Carl in a way I had not come to know others of my siblings. It was not that we spoke in a way that I did not speak with the others. Precisely the opposite. Whenever I related too much personal detail, Carl would say, “All right bey, I don’t need to know all of that.” Carl was a quiet sentinel, but sometimes when I asked a question he told me a story from the world before. Many of his sentences began with “Mo, remember when.” No, I would say. I can’t remember, because I wasn’t born yet.

  I tried once to ask Carl why he visited the Yellow House, hoping for a philosophical take having something to do with the importance of the land. “To cut the grass,” he answered.

  Carl and I did most of our relating while riding together in the car, either Carl driving me or me driving Carl, sometimes with Mr. Carl dozing in the back seat. Carl drives my automatic with two feet as you would a stick shift—one foot hovers over the brake, the other on the gas. We have made countless trips to St. Rose to visit my mother, our dirty laundry in the trunk for washing.

  But of all our journeys, most memorable was Carl’s personal tour, on bicycles, of New Orleans East. At the lil room where we met, Carl’s bike was all dressed up, with a huge front basket lined in green tape that glowed at night. The wheels were lit, too; there were bulbs between the spokes that flashed when you pressed a button. “That’s my baby,” Carl said of the big-bodied bike with chrome wheels. At the very back, attached to the rear wheel, was a solid-red flag atop a skinny red-and-white pole rising nearly five feet.

  At NASA Carl had found me an old blue cruiser that he said was mine to keep forever. Before we took off, Carl weighed down his vest pockets with sand as a way of getting exercise as we went. We started off down Old Gentilly Road, in the direction of the Yellow House, going the way my father did when he worked at NASA, but the closer we came to the Yellow House, the more fallen trees and dumped trash blocked our way.

  Carl and I walked our bikes down the Louisville and Nashville tracks. This was the back way to the place we knew.

  Finally, we crossed outside the tracks and pedaled onto the s
hort end of Wilson, flying past the Yellow House as if we’d never seen it before, racing to beat the light, across Chef Menteur Highway and onto the long side of Wilson. We slowed our bikes to pedal past what used to be Ratville apartments near where the Ebony Barn was, away from where the Grove used to be. Toward where Jefferson Davis was. This silent tour took us in the direction of Livingston Middle School, which, to my surprise, was gone. The new school was now in trailers, the architecturally sound buildings in which I passed my middle school days having been torn down before they could age.

  After stopping to look, Carl and I biked to the apartment complex where Michael lived when he was a young man. Carl rarely turned back to look at me, but a few times I raced up ahead to ride alongside him. Carl wanted to ride farther out, through Lake Forest where the Plaza used to be and into Bullard where Word of Faith used to be and where the new Walmart was, but I vetoed this. Everything we passed “used to be” something else. What, in this landscape marred by Water and neglect, had recovered?

  On the bike ride home, Carl took a different route from the way we’d come, which required we cross Chef Menteur Highway again, but rather than go the back way on the Old Road, we headed eastward on Chef Menteur Highway. For a long stretch there was no sidewalk and certainly no bike lane. I thought of the ghost bikes propped up against light poles all over the city to memorialize cyclists killed by cars. Carl and I were in the far-right lane of Chef Menteur with nowhere to go. He was ahead of me and not turning back to see. I imagined Karen trying to cross Chef Menteur with Carl when she was in third grade, how she was hit and dragged down this road. I thought how I’d better not think too much and I’d better not fall. An RTA bus drove behind me now; it seemed to be gaining speed. I stood up to pedal faster, and the oversize cruiser wobbled from side to side as I powered on. “Whatever you do, Mo, you can never panic,” Carl had told me that time he relayed his Katrina story. But Carl was out of sight now; he had turned right. The bus changed lanes and passed me by. When I finally caught up to Carl, I was cursing under my breath and mad on my face. Carl waited without any outward appearance of fret. We rode in silence back down the Old Road. When we arrived at McCoy Street and the bike ride was over, I was still shaken up by the raging Chef Menteur, pedaling for my life on the boogie-mannish highway of my childhood. I puzzled over this the entire drive home, fixating on the same question: why, I wondered, didn’t Carl ever look back?