The Yellow House

by Sarah M. Broom

  And then Carl: “Catch her when she run into that fucking house with that mutherfucker.”

  Michael said, “That girl don’t know how to cut no damn grass.” Lisa thought my problem was that I didn’t have a hat. Carl said, “She need more than a sun hat.” Carl called over to me: “Monique! That thing got reverse, yeah. Cut all that round there.” He pointed in the direction of Ms. Octavia’s house.

  I had lost sight of Carl and Lisa up front, but Michael came to me in the back, wearing his pressed khakis and a white undershirt, to pick up stray pieces of rock and sticks that could have blinded my unguarded eyes, which had not occurred to me then. I was high on the new experience. I felt like a child again, doing something for the very first time, with my guardians nearby if I needed them but not hovering. I wore cutoff jean shorts and flat leopard-skin shoes with gold studs. I wore a polka-dot shirt and gold hoop earrings to cut the grass.

  In the back where I was cutting, the view changed: the vista opened up in a way I had never seen. From back here, behind Ms. Octavia’s house, all of the lots ran together to make an endless yard, leading me to imagine the time before the houses, back when this was marshland and dense cypress swamps. I thought of the stories we made as children, how we called the ground quicksand, the nature of our world evident. We didn’t need scientific fact. We were on sinking ground and knew it as children and still we played. This made me think of Alvin, how just before I’d arrived to cut the grass, Resthaven Cemetery called after many months of silence to give me his location in the ground. “HC3-2 is where you can find him,” the woman on the voice message said. It was a cold message, puzzling to my ears. Alvin: HC3-2.

  While I was thinking these things, I was not considering the grass. A lot happened while I was dreaming. Michael left for where Carl was up front. I realized I’d missed large patches of grass and circled, trying to catch them, when Michael ran back to me. From where I was in back I could see Rachelle’s spilled trash cans lying in the street. I had not yet seen Poochie lying down alongside them.

  “Get back in front,” Michael said taking control of the mower’s steering wheel. “We ain’t got no weapons back here.”

  I was confused. I hurried up front, saw Carl sitting sullenly at the table. He drank from a beer can and spoke in a baby voice to Mr. Carl.

  Michael told me the story: Poochie was in the background talking the whole while I was cutting grass. Saying he’d give me money if I would cut his grass, of which there was very little.

  “We ain’t worrying about cutting over there, we cutting over here,” Carl had said.

  As long as Poochie stayed on his side of the street, in front of the brick house, Carl didn’t mind his talk. It was when he crossed the street to come over to where we were that the difficulties arose.

  Animosity had been building for months. Poochie had seemed to want to control the street, positioning himself as watchman. When I came around looking for Carl, Poochie would run over to the car to greet me first. If I rang Rachelle’s doorbell, he reported on where she was. Poochie’s yelling for me to cut his grass irritated Carl, who said, “I’m cutting over here mutherfucker, you worry bout over there. Don’t worry about over here. That’s why you ain’t got no friends now. That’s why you over there by yourself.”

  Carl approached Poochie, who wandered into Rachelle’s yard and was headed in my direction. “Man you don’t worry about nothing over here. What the fuck you worrying about over here? Ain’t that your property?” Carl said, pointing to the brick house where Poochie squatted.

  Poochie said something inaudible.

  “What happened?” Carl asked. It was a rhetorical question.

  Poochie mumbled.

  “Man what the fuck you worrying about my sister for?” Carl had said. “You ought to mind your business. That’s your fucking problem.”

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with me,” Poochie said.

  “What’s your problem, bruh?”

  “What I’m doing, Rabbit?”

  Lisa yelled, “Hey, hey, hey,” but by then Carl had already punched Poochie out so that he was rolling on the ground alongside Rachelle’s spilled trash cans.

  That was when Michael disappeared to the front, then ran back to me. “Get back in the front,” he had said. “We ain’t got no weapons.”

  Back at the table, Carl kept talking, explaining in his way. “Every time my sister come over here, he got something smart to say.” Michael was our big brother. He talked Carl down, tried to re-steer his thinking and buoy him at the same time. “We want to live our life like we living our life right now. We allow him to live here,” he said.

  “My nerves bad,” said Carl.

  “My nerves are real bad,” said Michael. “Now he den fucked up the whole grass-cutting shit.”

  “We don’t mess with nobody and nobody don’t mess with us. Ain’t bothering nary mutherfucker out here,” Carl said. “Mutherfucker, you ain’t got no business in that house. Anyway, you a tragedy, you a homeless mutherfucker.”

  “He a transient, that’s what he is,” Michael tried to correct.

  “No,” said Carl. “He a tragedy. He a hobo.”

  Here was what it came down to now: the thing Carl was holding on to—overgrown land needing a cut—and Poochie, new to the street, but finally the owner of something, however precarious and fragile. You could see it as coming down to the old and to the new. One person’s inability to let go, to see the thing shift. Cutting grass was ritual; it was order. Me and Michael and Carl, we were all on the lot for the same reason, tethered to the place we knew best. The house was the only thing that belonged to all of us. We seemed like the only ones who could still see.

  Cutting grass could seem so simple an act, so light that Carl’s friend Black Reg once made fun of it. “I ain’t never cutting no damn grass, not ever, no sirree,” he had said, but there was a precision to it. Carl knew this. You had to be OK with being alone, riding, knowing that underneath you the blades were doing their work. It was what Carl did day in and day out at NASA, a lone man in a field of 832 acres. We had all inherited from our mother the tendency, the need even, to make the things that belonged to us presentable, but even Carl could not put the house back together again. Instead, he stood watch, a sentinel, letting the space transform and be the place it always was. He was the keeper of memory, like the old man I once met in Cambodia at the killing fields, the man who had been polishing a boat carved with the names of the dead for twenty-five years, since the day after the Khmer Rouge was forced out. And now, Carl, drawing a line around what belonged to us, what was ours. Protecting it from name-calling and from dismemory. As long as we had the ground, I took it to mean, we were not homeless, which was Carl’s definition of tragedy. This is what we entered into when we showed up to keep him company.

  I dismounted the mower.

  All quiet now.

  I looked to Carl.

  “Did I do good?” I wanted to know.

  “For your first time,” he said, “you did pretty good.”

  AFTER

  Eleven years after the Water, Road Home finally settled our case. Too much time had passed to claim victory.

  Mom was seventy-four, and her only sister, my Auntie Elaine, had died one morning in Grandmother’s former bedroom in St. Rose. I had flown home days before with a bad case of pneumonia, was sitting on Mom’s bed, eating popcorn, when Mom burst in and extended a hooked finger. Come now.

  I ran to the next room in time for Auntie’s final exhausted sigh. My mother, baby sister of Joseph and Elaine, laid her head on Auntie’s right arm, lifted Auntie’s slack left hand, rested it atop her own hair, and cried. The hand lay there unmoving; Auntie was gone.

  One day, not long after Auntie died, Mom signed away the Yellow House and its land, which she had owned for more than half a century, in a small office—the same one we had visited so many times before. To still my mind, I took photographs with my phone of Mom’s oversize signature, the act of her signing, the mounds of p
aper. We made small talk with the bald man behind the desk who pushed the papers forward. We didn’t read the fine print.

  Afterward, we ate lunch at Antoine’s Restaurant in the French Quarter, on St. Louis Street. Imbibed twenty-five-cent martinis, the two max allowed per person. I took a photograph of Mom holding the menu. She smiled off-key, said she would take the paper menu with her, as a keepsake.

  She had a small grant and was free to move on, but she would keep on living in Grandmother’s house with the door to Auntie’s former room shut. She was afraid to touch the money. As if too high a price had been paid.

  The land that once held the Yellow House will be auctioned off to become something else. At lunch that day, I wondered what would happen when Carl found out that the land was no longer ours. Would he still babysit it now that it no longer belonged to us? Did I need him to? Where would he go now, to remember and recount? Where would I? There are always, I have come to know, more questions than answers. I wanted to ask Mom these specific ones, but we laughed instead. About small nothings: the waiter who was flirting with her, the way her hair had drawn up to small knots in the humidity, the sloppy look of the Oysters Bienville. We laughed and made light because, what else? The story of our house was the only thing left.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First I want to thank my mother, Ivory Mae, whose name I love to say. For your appreciative and kind and loving heart. Your soft hands. For telling me the story and trusting me with it. You, poet, raised twelve individuals who know how to be themselves. May I be so lucky to do that even once. You show me how to be. And you always tell me when I’m wrong. Thank you for always bearing me up.

  This book was written in and among many communities—inherited and made:

  My brothers and sisters, who help compose me and without whom this story could not exist:

  Simon Jr./Deborah/Valeria/Lynette/Karen/Byron/Eddie/Michael/Darryl/Carl/Troy—eleven (intriguing!) examples of who I could become in the world. Thank you for letting me speak your real names aloud and in public; for telling your stories and forgiving me for telling mine.

  When I started writing this book, there were Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory. Now there is just Ivory. Uncle Joe: cake and ice cream man, the best teller of stories. How hurt I am to have suddenly lost you. Auntie Elaine: I wish I had read this book to you when you asked. I’m sorry I was afraid.

  My just-like-real brothers and sisters: Manboo, Judy, Muffy, BeBe, Goldy, Pickle, Black Reg, Arsenio, Randy, Rachelle, and Herman Williams, all of the Davis family. Alvin Javis: rest, dear friend.

  My greatest friends and most intimate congress: Liz Welch, who has known me from the first line and inspires me to be a better human; Jaynee L. Mitchell, who never lets me forget or get lost; Rachel Uranga, the best question-asker and heart mender I know; Daffodil J. Altan, my sister; and Walton M. Muyumba, who always picks up the phone and delivers profound intellect and humor.

  Marie Brown nurtured and prodded and kept and taught me that eldership is a full-time job. Her encouragements and reality checks are largely the reason why this book exists today. Deb Shriver appeared (always fashionably chic) at crucial times and did everything she promised. Dale Djerassi’s allyship and friendship nurture me and inspire me to dream beyond. Gratitude to my Oprah Magazine family, my first true writing home. J. J. Miller, Nick Leiber, and Tari Ayala lit a path. Pat Towers taught me discretion and nurtured my love of reading aloud during countless midnight galley-reading sessions. Thank you for teaching me to write stronger sentences. Amy Gross gave me the shot and the advice I needed to keep earning more of them. Thanks to Gayle King for her support and early investment of time.

  My writing teachers throughout the years: Karen Braziller and her amazing coterie of writers like Daphne Beale and Catherine McKinley. Hettie Jones in whose 92nd Street Y workshop I first began writing formally about my best childhood friend, Alvin; and Joyce Johnson, under whose careful tutelage I continued. Cynthia Gorney, Michael Pollan, and Mark Danner were my writing professors at UC–Berkeley, along with the late Clay Felker who rammed into my head three words I shall never forget: point of view. My work with Gail Sheehy taught me how to organize and put together a book. Amy Hertz gave me my first (and only) book-editing gig, which kept me on the right side of the fence. Abigail Thomas, one of our great writers, invited me into her home and into one of the warmest circles of writers I have known.

  My incredible and reality-checking agent Jin Auh at Wylie signed me in 2005 to write this book, then waited six years for the proposal. More than an agent, she’s an incredible editor, necessary grounding force and friend. The Grove team who believed: Amy Hundley, Elisabeth Schmitz, Morgan Entrekin, Deb Seager, Justina Batchelor, Sal Destro, Julia Berner-Tobin, and Gretchen Mergenthaler. Designer Alison Forner made iconic cover art. Scott Ellison-Smith, photographer, friend, humanist, edited the photographs. Michael Taeckens, a great human and publicist, took me and my work on.

  Judy Stone pored over every single word of this manuscript (sometimes with only one eye working!), and prodded—with clarity and brilliance—until I faced in the right direction. David Remnick took my out-of-the-blue call and accepted my pitch to write something for The New Yorker‘s Katrina anniversary issue, which gave me an incredible psychic boost and refocused my work. The Oxford American feels like home and published early snatches when I was still finding the story.

  Research assistant Lisa Brown, then a Tulane undergraduate, transcribed hours and hours of Broom family interviews for a pittance, trusting that one day it would become something. My favorite geographer, Richard Campanella, literally rode alongside me, narrating long eastern-winding drives. He has helped me see and integrate the disparate pieces in ways I otherwise might not have. This book needed all of the books he has written.

  So many have watched me grow up in the course of writing this book. Sarah Dohrmann met me in Burundi just like she said she would. Adam Shemper, my southern brother, has accompanied me with compassionate, rigorous inquiry into mind and heart. Bilen Mesfin urged me to apply for a job in Hong Kong and has always been my steady warming light. Poppy Garance Burke, Chee Gates, Randa Chahine, Shea Owens, Christina and Paul Graff, Kim Roth, Maggie Cammer, Louise Braverman and Steven Glickel: thanks for keeping the faith. Other artist friends in the struggle and fight: Jamey Hatley, Robin Beth Schaer, Kiese Laymon who read and read me, Jana Martin, Evo Love and Romaine Gateau, Heidi Julavits, Leo Treitler, Marco Villalobos, Linda Villarosa, Jami Attenberg, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin.

  My cousins: Bryant Wesco, Michelle Wesco, Lisa Trask, Edward Wesco, Pamela Broom, and all the others. My more than fifty nieces and nephews who always know the right name to call. Melvin and Brittany Broom who also grew up in the Yellow House and Alexus Broom who spent her early life on the short end of the street—love you all down deep.

  For the future: my niece Amelia Miriam Gueye. You’ll always be the baby on my hip at the party. I love you. Bella Grace D’Arcangelo in whom I see so much of myself: you reach and inspire me.

  I started making scratches and scribbles toward this book shortly after leaving New Orleans for college, more than two decades ago. This book was formally begun at one of my favorite places on earth, the Djerassi Residents Artist Program in Woodside, California; continued at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire; UCROSS and Jentel in Wyoming; and I-Park in East Haddam, Connecticut. A year of it was written during a fellowship at the William Steeples Davis House in Orient, New York. Pieces of it were written in New Orleans; Paris (over eight visits); Cambridge, Massachusetts; Raceland, Louisiana; Rome; Milan; Los Angeles; New York City; the Catskill Mountains; London; Kenya; Uganda; Israel; Dominica; Washington, D.C.; Laos; Cambodia; Vietnam; Egypt; Berlin; Istanbul; Burundi; and places I’ve now forgotten or wanted to forget.

  Immense thanks to Courtney Hodell and the Whiting foundation for awarding me the inaugural creative nonfiction grant, which buoyed and spurred me through the final draft of this book.

  Visual artists and friends Mary Frank
, Joan Snyder, and Myrna Burks invited me into their studios over and over again. For the many spiritual (and spirited!) conversations about process and art and family and grief—over the best bourbon.

  And finally,

  My One: Diandrea Earnesta Rees, for the most incredible accompaniment of my life. Without you, I would never have finished this book. You, artist, make me know. You are the wish and all I never knew to wish for. I love you. I see you. I admire you fellow f.a.c. Keep busting the sky open. No home absent you.

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  All images courtesy of Sarah M. Broom and the Broom family except where indicated.

  p. iii: Dedication

  Amelia Lolo Gant Williams

  Elaine Soule Wesco

  Ivory Mae Soule Broom

  p.18: A young Amelia Gant, Magnolia Studio.

  p. 22: Joseph Gant at junior high school graduation, Magnolia Studio.

  p. 22: Elaine Soule (l), Queen of McDonogh 36, with classmate in 1946.

  p. 22: Fourteen year old Ivory Mae Soule in 1956 at eighth grade graduation, Magnolia Studio.

  p. 26: Women riding in a parade.

  p. 38: Edward Webb and Ivory Mae after their wedding, September 1958.

  p. 40: Ivory Mae on Roman Street.

  p. 47: A young Simon Broom.

  p. 50: Eddie, Michael, and Darryl Webb as young boys on Dryades Street.

  p. 53: 1863 lithograph, downtown New Orleans in foreground with eastern marshes in the far distance. Credit: Virtue & Co., courtesy Library of Congress.

  p. 80: Outside 4121 Wilson, from top, l to r: Karen, Simon Sr., Byron, Troy and Lynette Broom in 1977.

  p. 85: Carl Broom in 1971.

  p. 95: Lynette Broom and Simon Broom outside the house on Wilson in 1976.

  p. 97: Ivory Mae and Deborah Broom, before her wedding in 1975.

  p. 101: Sarah M. Broom in living room mirror.

  p. 149: Family at Beecher Memorial Church, From top, (l) to (r) Byron, Troy, Karen, Ivory Mae with Sarah M. Broom on lap; and Lynette Broom.