VII
The Crown
After the floodwaters receded, the Broom clan got to work removing carpets and waterlogged furniture, turning the house upside down, letting it air-dry. Nothing could be saved. Ivory Mae and her children stood on the curb watching the house, just as her mother had stood with her after their house had burned down. She was too young to understand loss then, but she knew now.
For weeks, the family stayed with Lolo on Dryades Street, applying for every possible voucher, the children getting typhoid and diphtheria shots, while Simon saw in the ruins a chance to build up. He recruited his brother-in-law Ernest Coleman and Ernest’s son Lil Pa, skilled builders. Uncle Joe, who had become a detail-obsessed carpenter, helped, too. Mr. Taylor, the electrician from NASA, rewired the house, but badly. They poured a slab of concrete in the back and set about expanding upward, mistrusting the ground. This is how the shotgun house with two bedrooms became a camelback shotgun house with a second bathroom, a den, and an upstairs bedroom rearing toward the sky in the back, a crown that did not run the length of the house. If you looked at it from the side, it drew a boxy, backward lying-down L.
Simon salvaged much of the wood that was used from teardowns of perfectly fine buildings around the city, a tendency that Mom hated. Maintaining a house, she felt, was just like cooking: detail mattered. Everything Simon did it would last for a minute. Even if he painted you would see some places where he missed it. He was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Simon thought perfect work like Uncle Joe’s took too long, which butted against Mom’s constitution as Lolo’s child. But she did not always say so. She had evolved from saying everything that came to mind to feeling everything and abiding it. When she spoke up, she and Simon fought mightily over how the house was rebuilt. Do it yourself then, he would say, furious. She couldn’t, even if she might try. When the addition was close to finished, Dad thought he could save money. After the men had installed temporary stairs, he vowed to finish them alone to show Ivory Mae that he could. But he never would.
The family grew into all the spaces of the house: all rooms were multipurpose; all were lived in, the family’s traces everywhere. Everything was used; nothing existed solely for show.
Every step you took in it was an important point on its map. And the house, fancier looking than before, drew people to it. This was why Uncle Joe always returned during his low times. And why there were always raucous parties; big booties squeezed into the den of the house; highballs aplenty; arms striving for the new ceiling, timed to musical beats; people milling about in the yard, telling stories, lying, and smoking.
Ivory and Simon made their bedroom in the nose of the house, closest to the street, their room separated from Valeria, Deborah, and Karen’s—the girls’ room—by the kitchen. It was the closest thing to privacy. They installed wicker accordion doors that did not lock. Michael was always barging in at the wrong moment. “Get out of here boy,” Ivory Mae was always saying.
The girls lived in the back, as if to hold the house down. The boys made their place in the newly built crown. The upstairs window looked down upon the narrow space of yard between our and Ms. Octavia’s house that now sat higher, on bricks, post-Betsy. Simon or Ivory Mae never ascended those temporary steps to upstairs, granting the boys a right to privacy that no one else had. Upstairs, Eddie, Michael, Darryl, and Carl made for themselves a private kingdom with boy rules and boy systems.
If the house was Mom’s beginnings, if the house was her world, she had to find within it a seat. She set her sewing machine on a table underneath the windowsill in the kitchen just feet away from her bedroom. The window looked out onto Ms. Octavia’s house and the lawn in between. Specifically, her window faced Ms. Octavia’s bathroom window. That would have been her view, except she sat too low to see anything.
When Mom was sitting in her chair, crocheting or making clothes or curtains, the small bathroom original to the house stared at her back.
Carl Broom hated that small bathroom, said it seemed eerie from the start.
“Certain kind of window in there, when you look through you could see a cross way up in heaven, some kind of reflection,” he says now. “I was scared of that son of a bitch.”
By the time he left it, he would have sprayed all the walls of that bathroom with piss from trying to finish so quick.
The windowpane had a numinous quality that drew congregants from the Divine Mission of God who came to the house on Wilson, as if on pilgrimage, to see what Carl was nervous about. They stood three or four at a time in the small bathroom, fitting themselves in among the towels and cleaning supplies, supplicants lined along the bathtub where Eddie, Michael, and Darryl took a bath every night. “Three kids to a tub,” says Darryl, “just like Adam and Eve before they knew they was naked.” Dr. Martin proclaimed the window a sign from God, a blessing that had befallen 4121.
But then the blessed sign began appearing in other houses too, becoming a small phenomenon, a miracle for ordinary people owning a certain brand of windowpane, a human interest story on nightly newscasts.
There was something in the material of the glass, it was eventually decided, that sunlight drew out. The manufacturers had used a new material. They were sorry for the hype and for Carl’s fear. You could call a certain 1-800 number for a replacement. It just disappeared after they said that. Thus retaining its magic.
Mom’s seat was also near (every place was near another place in the shotgun house) the refrigerator, which was at first a humming monstrosity and later a grunting monstrosity with a lock to ward off the boys’ growing hungers. Her seat was steps beyond the side door where the familiars knocked. If neighbors needed to borrow sugar or rice or salt, they went away satisfied, the goods wrapped in a paper towel.
From her seat, she made the clothes, every single piece that everyone in the house except Simon wore. This custom continued until the boys were teenagers and too embarrassed to wear pajamas made from the same bolt of fabric. The girls were teenagers and embarrassed, too, but they never had their way.
Sitting in this seat, she made new curtains for every room to match the coming in of seasons. She made curtains for the cars, too, for the white van and for the blue van that replaced it, the one she and Simon drove for many years before passing it on to the boys, who replaced the back seats with a twin bed, making a motel room on wheels that could be used for dates, Ivory Mae’s curtains pulled shut.
Later, I would peer from this kitchen window and watch the van rocking with the motion of my brothers and their dates, but that is running ahead. The boys are still children. And I am not yet born.
Those vans, the white one and then the blue, were driven around town to Schwegmann’s Super Market, to school graduations, to Zulu balls during Carnival time. Those vans were driven to meetings of the Pontchartrain Park Social Aid and Pleasure Club to which Ivory and Simon belonged. They were driven to Atlanta following behind the Saints who lost every time. Simon—a Freemason—made the social calendar; Mom made appearances.
The curtains made the van pretty, but Mom wished for a smaller, sportier car. New. This desire ran deep, but a two-seater would not match her current life. Mom longed for what now came to feel impractical, what wishes are made of. She loved, above all, beautiful things. Simon cared about affordability. His going-to-work car, a Buick Skylark, did not even go in reverse. Rather than spend the money to fix the car once and for all, he simply had the boys come and push it out from the driveway.
As Simon and Ivory settled into life in the rebuilt house, time moved in the usual distinct increments (morning, afternoon, evening; weekends and weekdays), but after a while, everything new turned old and they stopped seeing time as composed of moments. The years blurred.
Two years later and the temporary stairs were still temporary. During the building-up years, no new children were born, as if the house itself were the baby being raised. But then Deborah noticed the gray maternity dress hanging above the kitchen doorsill. The oldest three—Debo
rah, Valeria, and Eddie—moaned. Not another one. A new baby affected the girls’ lives especially; they were the babysitters and the assistant housekeepers, picking up after the older boys and the younger children: Michael was seven, a year older than Darryl. Karen was three to Carl’s four. Eddie thought things had gone too far: “I was wondering when the hell it was going to stop,” he said. “I thought they was just going to the hospital and picking up kids.” One more girl would have evened the score, but Troy was born on Thanksgiving Day 1967, which meant Uncle Joe made the holiday meal, memorable for not being Ivory Mae’s cooking. People took this Thanksgiving anomaly out on Troy for years. But he was the first child to come home to the reborn house.
He was a quiet baby and would be a quiet man. Too quiet, Mom sometimes thought. He could go deadly still in his bassinet on the living room perch. Mom would come rushing, lifting and shaking him vigorously like a can of frozen orange juice. She later thought this shaking might have ruined him. Or else it was the cigarette smoke she blew into the soft spots of all of her babies’ heads thinking that would cure the colic. She learned mothering by doing and by Lolo. I didn’t have friends. Mostly it was y’all, my children. And my mom. I called her every day, three or four times a day. Often, she thought of these conversations while walking Eddie, Michael, and Darryl to private school at St. Paul the Apostle on Chef Menteur Highway. Their tuition was paid for by Webb’s mother, Mildred, who never wavered in her promise to support her dead son’s children. They wore starched white shirts and starched khakis pressed by Deborah and Valeria, who went to the only black public school in the area at the time, McDonogh 40. Valeria complained daily about her hair: “Miss Ivory put it in a million little plaits, a million barrettes sticking out everywhere.” But what she hated was passing by St. Mary’s Academy where the light-skinned girls flaunted their coloration, long hair, and class. Valeria was a seeing child; she noticed the way Eddie and Michael’s aunts and grandmother treated them like small kings. “They ate up Eddie and Michael. We watched. We just … we just couldn’t understand. Until later, when we were older.”
Jefferson Davis Elementary on the long end of Wilson was still segregated, which was why in a letter to Mayor Victor Schiro, a tax consultant referred to the East as “safe” from school integration. As in: “Of course Lakeview, Aurora Gardens, East New Orleans … and part of Gentilly is still ‘safe’ but what about other parts of New Orleans?” Another letter writer made the case this way: “By integrating the schools of New Orleans there is a potential loss of sixty million dollars yearly in purchasing power, plus the loss of much revenue which have to be made up from some source. Will the negroes foot the bill with their welfare checks????”
Eddie, who was nearly ten, scored badly in all his subjects at St. Paul, including physical education. After learning his father’s story, Eddie felt that he was biding his time, waiting to die at eighteen just as Webb did.
Michael was an academic star. His class assignments were always perfect. He finished them earlier than the other children, then, out of boredom, taunted the kids who still worked. Darryl’s behavior was the polar opposite. On report cards, teachers called him “everyone’s favorite.” “Darryl is just a wonderful example of what an ideal student should be! He’s loved by all his teachers, and he seems to just do the right thing most of the time. It has been my pleasure to teach him; I anticipate a fine future for Darryl,” one teacher wrote.
Around the time school let out and the four-o’clocks bloomed, Mom would be at the stove finishing a meal that tasted as good as it looked. Simon would have arrived home by now from his work at NASA, coming down Old Gentilly Road and turning right onto the short end of Wilson, his car the first in a long procession that took the same shortcut to avoid traffic on Chef Menteur Highway. When Simon pulled into the drive, the other men following him yelled out of their car windows, “Simon, you son of a bitch, working so close to home.” The men kept on across congested Chef Menteur to their lives. Simon went inside for maybe a minute, then was back out in the yard, which was the room of the house he loved best. Sometimes, for no reason, after the kids were asleep, Ivory and Simon danced on the grass between the houses, Mom looking up at him, her arms stretched to hold on to his neck, her head buried in the middle of his chest. He still couldn’t believe the sight of her. His pretty little wife. He felt powerless against her.
On nights such as this they sometimes found themselves sitting on the edge of their bed, Simon sometimes with his head in his hands—either he had a headache or he was thinking something through. No one can know now. He was always a young-acting old man; she seemed always a grown young woman.
Mom would say, I love you, Simon.
I said I love you Simon.
When he stayed silent, she pressed. You don’t love me back?
“You’re my beautiful, pretty little wife,” he would always say. It was not enough, no, but nothing ever was.
One time, in 1969, two years after Troy, Simon turned to Ivory Mae and said, “We don’t need to be having all of these children.”
You’re right, she had said.
And then?
Byron Keith was born.
Her children’s births were not the main way Ivory Mae measured time passing. She recalled the particulars of births only if they were wrenching enough. The children born from her body were all one big delivery to her mind, mostly indistinguishable, the results nearly always the same. But Byron was born in springtime, unforgettable because her mother, Lolo, my grandmother, had bought her first house in St. Rose, minutes from Ormond Plantation where she was born. Preston Hollow was a U-shaped subdivision built for black people atop former oil fields, surrounded by petroleum processing plants, but this detail was not in the official sales pitch. The house on Mockingbird Lane was the fulfillment of a dream, a place where Grandmother’s family could routinely gather, a place where she could unpack her beautiful things and give them a permanent geography. But her husband, Mr. Elvin, was against it, preferring city living. Lolo bought the house anyway. “He went to work a renter and came home a homeowner,” says Uncle Joe. It is said that Grandmother gave him an ultimatum, declaring her love first, then telling him she was moving to St. Rose with or without him. So which was it?
With, his actions said. With.
Byron took his position as the baby boy of the male kingdom, but quietly. Michael was forever taunting him, sometimes dangerously. Once, he tried to hang Byron (like a shirt or a pair of pants) from Mom’s clothesline in the backyard. Joyce Davis, the neighbor, saw it go down and tells a heroic story about how she was standing two houses over in her back door when she saw Michael lifting Byron onto a trash can, how at eight months pregnant she ran and climbed the fence into our yard to stop Michael, who she thought was playing but who kept at his work on Byron even after she called for him to “stop that boy, stop it now.” He was tying a rope around Byron’s neck and looking ready to remove the trash can. “If it were not for me,” she says now, “Byron would not be here on this earth.” But the Davises are prone to hyperbole. Joyce’s mother, Mae Margaret, was said to have rescued Simon Broom, who was stuck underneath a car that had been poorly jacked up. Mae Margaret was sitting on her porch, the story goes, saw the car fall on Simon, and bounded over to singlehandedly lift it, releasing him from death’s grasp.
Simon’s life—which Mae Margaret had allegedly saved—consisted mostly of work. On weekends, he banged violently on the faux-wood paneling leading to the boys’ room in the crown, his voice booming: “Come down.” Any time past 5 a.m. he considered oversleeping. The boys—Eddie, Michael, Darryl, Carl, a too-small Troy, then later Byron—scurried and pouted on the way to whatever job he had found for them to do. “When every other kid in the world was sleeping,” Eddie complains, they were already crisscrossing the city. “We either painted something, tore something down, or did pest control.” In the evenings, they sometimes catered parties. Other times, they assisted Mr. Taylor on electrical jobs.
“The
white Mr. Taylor,” Carl says, “was Daddy’s white best friend, but he also had a black best friend. His name was Mr. Taylor, too. We used to go around his shop and clean up.” The black Mr. Taylor owned a barroom in back of a barbershop. Simon bartered his and the boys’ services for haircuts. Every Friday night, the boys arrived to empty the black Mr. Taylor’s trash barrels onto the back of Simon’s old black Ford, which announced its arrival everywhere it went. On their drives, Simon related his philosophy on how everything should be done well, how what they started they needed to finish, wisdom he didn’t always follow.
The boys sometimes went to Saints games before the Superdome was built, back when they were held at Tulane Stadium—but to work—entering the stadium against the wave of fans filing out. Eddie found this deeply embarrassing, but Michael made fun of it, throwing Carl into the massive dumpster and rolling him down the ramp that led indoors.
Carl was Simon number two except he could be wild in his appearance, his hair uneven and patchy, his skin dry as if he had fled the moisturizing sessions that came after Mom’s bathing.
“I used to always get Daddy’s trumpet ready for him,” says Carl. “Just wipe it off for him and try to play it. He’d say, ‘Boy, give it here, let me show you how to play that thing.’”
Of all the children, Michael could be counted on to make Simon mad. “I used to taunt him and mess with him. I thought I was so smart. I’d say, ‘Time to cut the grass. Gr-ass.’” Doing things like taking his shotgun and sawing it off. “That really pissed him off.” But when they had the yearly job painting “a big old house right off City Park” that took several weekends, Michael was a fearless helpmate, a tiny but capable boy who would climb to the highest part of the house and, perched there precariously, paint. “I ain’t know that I could fall down and break my goddamn neck.” Byron saw the boys doing their work and even though he was too little for much he begged to do his work, too.
The Yellow House Page 8
