The Yellow House

  The next day I took my mother to visit her half brother, Joseph Soule. I had only just heard the name Joe Soule for the first time in my life, after he came up in a recent conversation with Mom. She told me this: Joe Soule was Lionel Soule’s firstborn. His mother was a woman named Cora Jones, who had come from Raceland. I learned that this Uncle Joe, who also knew my father (they shared the same birth date and were in the navy together), lived uptown, minutes from the pink camelback where I lived during my city hall job, in the house he inherited from Lionel Soule in 1977, which happened to be the same year that Joe Soule took his three half siblings—Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory—to court in order to gain sole possession of his father’s house. Joe Soule had the “big lawyers,” Auntie Elaine remembered him saying. They didn’t need to worry about anything, he had promised.

  He would handle their father’s bequests and they would divide ownership of the property. Elaine and Ivory signed over to him their power of attorney. “Hoodwinked,” Uncle Joe Gant says now. Next thing they knew, they were being served with subpoenas, which neither Auntie nor Mom remembers holding, but the papers exist to prove it. Because they didn’t respond to the request to appear in court—my mother had eleven children at the time—Joe Soule was granted sole ownership of the Willow Street address in the case of Joseph Soule v. Joseph Gant et al.

  We were driving down Carrollton Avenue on our way to Audubon Park for a walk when Mom said out of the blue: I was trying to see. We might be somewhere around Joe house. Mom wanted to dwell not on who he used to be but who he might be now. We crisscrossed the street to jog Mom’s sight memory. She was directing the car from the passenger side, telling me where to go, but she had been to her father’s address only once, sometime after his funeral in 1977, and even then she’d stayed outside the house, on the sidewalk.

  I stopped the car in the middle of the street. Excuse me, Mom called to two men sitting on a porch. Y’all know where Joe Soule live?

  They had not heard of him. After more slow driving, a man appeared at Mom’s passenger-side window and pointed out a blue-and-white cottage sitting close to the sidewalk. Let me out, she said.

  I parked the car across the street and watched Mom knocking at the door. I could hear her talking, but she was not waving for me to join her yet. You know who I am, huh? I heard her say.

  “Well, you look familiar,” a man’s voice said. “I’m trying to get who you are.”

  It’s Ivory. I’m Ivory. Your sister.

  Mom waved me out of the car. The tall man stood behind the screen door in a red robe with flannel pajamas hanging out the bottom. He wore socks in slippers. This is Joseph Soule, my brother. He was eighty-nine years old now and frail.

  Joseph, that’s my baby girl, Monique.

  “How do you do,” my uncle Joe Soule said.

  We went inside. Mom’s first time inside the house of her father, Lionel, the man she hid from, who never came back to try meeting her again, whom she never met. I scanned the room, saw the garbage can holder with a cross inscribed into its wood, the gold mirror hanging from the ceiling by a thick gold chain.

  It was like strangers meeting—Mom had not seen Joe Soule in more than twenty years—until we sat at the kitchen table where Joe Soule asked me: “What’s your name again?”

  This was a spur-of-the-moment thing, Joe, nothing planned.

  “Sarah,” I said.

  Joe Soule was a stranger I had just met and Lionel (my grandfather, my mother’s father) was a stranger I had never known. That made me an interloper. Joe Soule lit the stove burners for heat. He asked me to make coffee in the two-cup pot. The phone rang in the bedroom and Joe Soule shuffled off to catch it.

  They might think we’re here for an ulterior motive if that’s his children on the line. I focus on the coffee. You got to make sure they got cups and things that are washed. I nod yes.

  Joe Soule returned, seeming reenergized.

  “Where are you now living?” he asked Mom.

  Saint Rose. My mama’s house.

  Right away, I wanted to tell him the whole story of the Yellow House, argue how his past actions hurt Mom in the present, but I stayed quiet, kept on with the coffee.

  Mom looked around the kitchen. The ceiling sloped above our heads, making a boxed-in feeling. It was a dark house, without much natural light. This is where him and Ms. Bessie, this is where they lived together? Wasn’t she killed here?

  In the summer of 1977, Lionel Soule’s wife, Bessie Soule, was murdered in what was likely a robbery. She was found lying on her bed, hands and feet bound, mouth gagged with a pair of stockings. She was seventy years old. When Lionel Soule heard about his wife’s murder, he said to family members, “Yesterday was the worst day of my life. I cannot bear to think about it,” then suffered a heart attack right there on the spot and died, exactly one day after Bessie. They say he died from a broken heart, my mother says.

  Lionel’s quotation above, which appeared in a newspaper article, are the only words my mother can attribute to her father. It is, of course, possible that he was misquoted in the retelling, his words and the timing of his words reimagined for dramatic effect.

  His obituary told the story he had lived by, not the reality: “Lionel Soule,” it read, “is the beloved husband of Bessie … uncle to many … Father-in-Christ to Sister Mary Jacinta … survived by twenty great nieces and nephews, a host of other relatives and friends.” According to the obituary, he and Bessie had no children.

  Still. Lolo thought that the three children she and Lionel made should attend their father’s funeral. My mother was thirty-six years old when her father died. She’d given birth to eight children and was mother to eleven when she saw her father for the first time, at the double funeral, lying dead next to Bessie, his wife. I don’t even remember the woman’s coffin. I must have just been concentrating on him.

  He was a big man in the Catholic Church, man of the year in 1962 for his “outstanding qualities,” the newspaper announced. But when Lionel Soule’s children met with the priest before the funeral service, explaining that they carried his last name and thus belonged to him, the priest said because Lionel had not recognized them when he was alive, he could not take it upon himself to recognize them after he was dead.

  “I stood in line,” said Uncle Joe Gant, “like I was one of the friends of the family. I was there. But not in no official capacity.”

  My mom’s recounting of this led Joe Soule to revisit, of his own accord, the painful saga that my mother and her siblings have wanted to, but have not been fully able to, forget. “These two lawyers,” Joe Soule tried to explain, “after Father died, said they found out I was the closest relative my daddy had living.”

  At the time, he explained to Mom, he already had a house across the river and wasn’t thinking about Lionel Soule, who was never really in his life, either.

  “The lawyer said we gonna continue our research but it looks like the property will go to you. Now this is what he told me,” Joe Soule said, speaking only to Mom. “He said my daddy had these other childrens on his wife, when he was married, said when I was born to Cora Jones out in Raceland, when I was born—”

  He wasn’t married to Lolo, Mom interrupted.

  “Right. They told me he’s legally your daddy because of that fact. Now we looking at some illegal children those lawyers told me. They can’t be classified as legal.”

  I watched Mom. She was wearing her all-black workout outfit with bright red lipstick and Nike sneakers. Her hair was slicked into a ponytail. Her hands were folded on the table. She looked closely at her brother’s face. Joe Soule, stirred, I think, by her quiet, said he thought Grandmother had their last names changed so that they were no longer Soules.

  My mother finally spoke.

  We all rose up as Soules. Even Joseph.

  We have never not been Soules, Mom said, from the deepest register of her voice.

  She told me to retrieve her purse from the car. When I got back, she opened her tidy wallet an
d pulled out a photocopy of her birth certificate. This is how I learn that she had, since the Water, carried her “papers” around. If she had to flee again, the evidence of who she was would be on her person.

  Monique, you got your glasses? Read it.

  My voice was unsteady. I kept my head down. “Female child, Ivory Mae Soule, colored, unlawful issue of Lionel Soule, a native of Louisiana, age thirty-nine—” “Unlawful issue,” I said again and stopped.

  “Who was thirty-nine?” Joe Soule wanted to know.

  Our daddy when I born.

  I read on.

  “Occupation, laborer and Amelia Gant, native of Louisiana, twenty-six.”

  Mom wanted Joe Soule to review the evidence with his own eyes, but he said he didn’t need to do all of that. Mom did not push. After some time, they moved on to talk about Joe Soule’s ailing health, his thriving children. When it was almost time to go, they discussed my father, Simon Broom. Mom put me into context for Joe Soule: She didn’t know her daddy at all, only what we talking about.

  After the visit, Mom and I rode in silence back to St. Rose where Mom debriefed her siblings, Joseph and Elaine, around the kitchen table. He said we weren’t natural children to our daddy. “Yeah, you were natural,” Joe Gant said. Auntie Elaine, always the fighter of the three, argued for equal ownership of the house, saying, “This house we in right now is for family. We are the owners, the three of us, and that’s the way it should be with the house Joe lives in.” But my mother was allergic to the idea. Y’all can have it. I’m not going through that. Let it ride. It should have been done years ago. I don’t have a house. I mean I’m sharing this house. And one day I do want …

  “Well you do have a house, how you saying you don’t have a house?” Auntie cried in a fit of rage.

  My personal, I mean my own, Ivory’s house, my mother said on the verge of tears. I’m still hoping one day to have my own house, a personal house for Ivory.

  “I’m hoping for your ass,” says Uncle Joe in the kindest, most deflating, big-brother way.

  A month after that visit to Joe Soule, all of Lionel Soule’s children gathered at Grandmother’s house. Joseph Soule and Joseph Gant posed for photographs in which it is clear how natural they actually are—the same faces, noses, and coloration. Joe Soule and Joe Gant both have as first names their father’s middle name; the same massive hands, which are the last hands on earth you want to fly across your face. They drive the same Ford Explorer. They are each six feet, four inches. The only difference is age—the ten years between them. The case of the Willow Street house did not come up again, but I continue to think of it as strange irony for Mom who, of all the things she ever desired, wanted to make a new world with Ivory Mae rules. That is what it meant for her to own a house.

  And what, I wonder, would owning a house mean for me?

  My father is six pictures. There is my father playing the banjo, with Lynette in the frame; my father at a social and pleasure club ball with grandmother Lolo; my mother sitting on my father’s lap; my father walking Deborah down the aisle; my father in a leather coat and black fedora, sitting at a bar with Uncle Joe, raising a beer, mouth open, saying something to the picture taker; and my youngish father standing in front of an old Ford, pointing his finger at the camera’s eye. Someone wrote “Mine” in red ink on the hood of the car, and beneath the image: “He knows the score—.” Did my father, Simon Broom, write this? I wonder.

  These photos can be shuffled around, pinned up on my wall in various configurations, held up high in the palm of my hand, and then dropped to the ground, and still they are only six pictures. I met with clarinetist Michael White, who had performed with my father in Doc Paulin’s brass band. He told me how, rather than wear the structured, more expensive hats like the rest of the band members, Simon donned a sailor’s cap. He told me that many of the band’s parades were filmed, that he actually thought I could find my father in motion pictures in the Historic New Orleans Collection archives, mere blocks from my apartment.

  The day I went there to search the archives for the visual evidence of my father was memorable. Local musician Lionel Batiste, who we called Uncle Lionel, had died. His funeral was historic because of what Uncle Lionel and his music meant to New Orleans but also for what happened when mourners arrived at Charbonnet Funeral Home: some people walked in, saw Uncle Lionel seeming to lean against a French Quarter streetlamp wearing his customary sunshades, and ran out thinking Uncle Lionel was alive again and walking. The undertakers had made embalming history by presenting the corpse upright, it was reported in the local news, a coup for the funeral home, whose competitors all came by to figure out exactly how it had been done.

  But I had skipped the funeral—for the archives. Seeing my father, Simon Broom, in motion would change everything, I kept telling myself (though I couldn’t say exactly how). This notion on repeat stirred anxious feelings in me. I felt on the verge of discovery, which was my favorite place to be, and also felt I had a secret. I signed in downstairs and stored my belongings in wood lockers. Up the marble staircase and inside the ornate reading room, I sought out the film I needed from metal cabinets and sat hunched in front of the TV monitor, watching.

  Michael White, the clarinetist, told me that because Dad played trombone and because the bands marched in formation, he would have been first in the line of men walking.

  How would I know him? I thought to go back to the apartment, retrieve the photographs, jog my memory. Instead, I ran through my mind the six pictures I knew. Part of me was afraid to see him alive. To see him moving would confirm that he was not always dead, as he was in my particular story. In the world of dead parents, logic fails. It is only ever about feeling. When it came to my father, I didn’t know the most basic things. Recently, I’d asked Byron, to whom I could pose any question, “What’s the difference between a father and a brother?” He tried to explain, but his words fell short. “A father was tougher, more responsible for steering the child …” He trailed off. I could tell he didn’t really know how to answer, but he couldn’t say that. I thought his description of a father was similar to my definition of a brother.

  I watched the movies.

  Here was a dark woman in a white head wrap and dress wearing nurse’s shoes, dancing in front of a row of shotgun houses. She took off her shoes so she could dance right. Other women in golden-hued blouses gathered around her like a protection.

  And then there he was. Almost before I was ready for him. Was this my father? A man playing horn, not trombone, but with Carl’s rough alligator hands, a yellow flower tied to his instrument. The camera lingered on those hands; my eyes fixed on them. The man with gray in his hair, beat-up dark knuckles, turned to face the other band members. Showing off. My father, I decided, would likely do that. The man’s hat was different from the others, a sailor’s cap, slightly yellowed instead of clean white, just as Michael White said. He was different, set apart.

  I saw the same man in another reel, the man who was my father. Leaving city hall by the front steps, playing in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, wearing a big wool overcoat, one massive hand playing the horn. My father was heavier than the six pictures showed. Cooler.

  There was Dad again with the flower on his horn.

  Young boys danced in the camera’s face. They gave a good show. A woman strutted with pink foam curlers in her hair; one of them was coming loose like the parade, the hair unwinding itself. Serious faces everywhere matched the upright postures, lips sucked in like a fish’s gasping.

  After looking at all the films, I relocated to a table, pored through binders of stills from the same video collection, and found ten of the man with the flower on his horn. Excitedly, I approached the research staff behind their tall wooden desks. Photocopies of these! I asked. I have found him! The man working at the desk showed no emotion and did exactly as I said. I paid ten dollars for ten photographs and left the building, elated, my father riding along inside a manila folder. I have searched—I thought to
myself—and I have found. It was a spiritual feeling, as if an important inner light had been restored. My entire year of investigations—the reason for this return—had been only about this moment, I thought.

  I traveled around the city with these black-and-white photocopies in my tote bag, meaning to show them to my brothers, meaning to show them to my mother who said she was excited to see. But many weeks passed before anyone else saw them. When I was at the Yellow House or on McCoy Street with Carl, I always forgot to show him, or I didn’t think the time was right, but then my mother came to visit. She was sitting in the living room of my apartment reading Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act when I handed her the folder and turned away to make a salad for lunch. I could hear her thumbing quickly through the photocopies.

  Her silence spoke a world.

  She was gentle.

  No, daughter, you have not found him. Not yet. But keep looking.

  She looked through again.

  Now, see, this look more like him, she pointed behind the man with the flower on his horn to a shadow of a man far in back of the procession. See the way his hairline recede? Your daddy hair looked more like that. That might be him. But we could barely make out that man’s face.

  Your father had very keen features, my mother said to me.

  He mostly played a sliding trombone. Not the horn as did the man in the pictures.

  Your father had a very sharp nose. He wore his hair low to the head just like Carl. No gray because he always dyed it black. He was strikingly tall, my mother said again.