Simon rarely seemed content with leisure. Except for when he was playing golf in Pontchartrain Park with a used set of golf clubs that “he used to hock every time we needed money,” says Eddie. The other time was on Mardi Gras day when he wore his gorilla mask or dressed like a hobo with torn clothes and a briefcase with rags hanging out, the case filled with the alcohol that put him three shades in the wind. He would drop Ivory Mae and the children off at Grandmother’s sister Lillie Mae’s house for Carnival, retrieving them at the end of the day. Mom, who did not know how to drive, prayed for safety the entire way home, her children in the back seat.
In the house at night, Mom often dreamt vivid scenarios where her sister, Elaine, and her brother, Joseph, were in mortal danger and she flew above them wanting to rescue them, except she couldn’t figure out how to land.
She was still “God’s kid,” she knew, but she sometimes felt not so different from the household fixtures, those immovable, bound things hanging on the walls that could not speak: golden angels and flying cherubs with cutouts underneath their wings for candles and dry flowers. A wall mirror half the size of the wall. To look at yourself in. Things with which to make a home. Delivered by messenger’s hand to the front door of 4121 Wilson, after she had chosen them from the Home Interiors catalog.
She was not a fearful person, except when it came to crawling things with tails. When she was home alone with the kids, without another adult in the house, and saw a lizard, she called Ms. Octavia to come over and search up and down until she found the thing. Mom might stand back by the door to the bedroom and point and yell about how the thing was somewhere in the closet, crawling on and between the hanging clothes. Ms. Octavia would bury her head in among the clothes Ivory had made, bang her hand against Simon’s golf club bag to scare the lizard up, and not stop until she rooted him out, dangling him between her thumb and index finger, dropping him outside in the yard.
The adults on the street stayed out of each other’s houses for the most part, unless there was good cause: Mom would go inside Ms. Octavia’s house when her husband, Alvin, died and Ms. Octavia would return the favor.
Big changes, the ones that reset the compass of a place, never appear so at the outset. Only time lets you see the accumulation of things. At the start of the seventies, the following stacked: An advertisement appeared in the Times-Picayune with the headline LOUISIANA PURCHASE 1971. “The biggest land deal of 1803 was the Louisiana Purchase,” it read. “The biggest land opportunity in 1971 is New Orleans East.” More than a decade had passed since the dream of New Orleans East Inc. had first been launched. Since then, Clint Murchison had died and Toddie Lee Wynne, feeling defeated, withdrew from the venture after his riverfront hotel deal fell through.
Nothing about the dream of New Orleans East Inc. had come to pass. The area contained 8,000 residents in 1971; 242,000 fewer than its original goal.
In 1972, the Apollo missions ended, reconfiguring things at NASA’s Michoud plant, which had, most notably, built the first-stage Saturn V rocket that launched astronauts to the moon. Though the plant added $25 million to the local economy and Simon kept his job, the 12,000 employees, counted in 1965, dwindled to 2,500.
Residents in Pines Village, one of the earliest eastern neighborhoods, minutes from Ivory Mae and Simon’s house, were threatening lawsuits against the city’s Sewerage and Water Board for “mental anguish and anxiety suffered during floods and all heavy rainstorms.” The city, they claimed, approved developers’ plans even though they knew elevation was too low for sufficient drainage, a problem exacerbated by new communities that further taxed the substandard drainage systems, “negligence … that is injurious to our health and safety,” one prophetic-seeming letter writer said. “What happens in this area will make New Orleans prosperous and strong financially or else it will cause the city to strangulate itself,” he wrote. “Undeveloped it is a chain around the city’s neck…. This area to the east is not a mirage. It will not go away if you ignore it. It will stay and haunt you if you do not start thinking of it as a part of the city.”
In its design—more apartments and trailer parks than houses; more streetlights than trees and parks; more paved roads than walkways—certain parts of the East were best driven through. Landscapes communicate feeling. Walking, you can grab on to the texture of a place, get up close to the human beings who make it, but driving makes distance, grows fear.
The Red Barn on the corner of Chef and Wilson that before blasted Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” became the Ebony Barn with Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine” coming off the stereos, serving a new clientele. Around this same time, construction began on a public housing project, a scattered site some city planners called it, on Chef Menteur Highway just next door to the Ebony Barn. Its proper name was Pecan Grove, but on the streets it was just the Grove. Before it was all the way finished, the children on the short end sold Ms. Schmidt’s fallen pecans to the construction workers. Ms. Schmidt couldn’t have cared less; she was leaving the East soon anyway. The Grove would house 221 apartments in a reddish-brown brick, two-story compound. According to the newspapers, it was an “experiment” meant to bring residents from several different downtown housing projects closer to New Orleans East, which soon-to-be residents would call the country. From the start of the complex’s going up, Simon Broom said it would infest everything around. He pointed to Press Park, where Ivory Mae’s sister, Elaine, lived, another scattered site, more westward. Press Park had been built on top of the Agriculture Street Landfill, ninety-five acres and seventeen feet of cancer-causing waste.
By the late 1970s, the racial composition of the East had flipped. Within twenty years, the area had gone from mostly empty to mostly white (investment) to mostly black (divestment).
The street transformed, too. In 1972, Samuel Davis Jr., eldest son to Mr. Samuel, married and left the short end of Wilson. He was the first child raised on the street to do so.
My sister Deborah was second to go. She had graduated from Abramson High School in 1972, and was expecting to go to college, as her father had promised her mother before she died, but now Simon Broom had different ideas. He couldn’t afford it, he said. He thought she should get a job and help support the growing family. Deborah would not do that, she told her father. Even though she was eighteen years old at the time, she was spanked. No, she was beaten by Simon Sr. with a sugarcane and then afterward, because she was raised to be obedient to elders, Deborah ironed his work shirt for the next day, ironed it the best she ever had, packed her bags, and waited for her mom’s sisters to arrive and take her away with them. Despite him, she enrolled in college at Southern University of New Orleans days after leaving home.
Shortly after that, Karen was run over by a car on Chef Menteur Highway while trying to get to third grade.
Karen and Carl were one year, one grade, apart. Sometimes, the two of them walked alone to Jefferson Davis Elementary on the long end of Wilson. They were told to hold hands and cross together; they had done it often enough to take it for granted. Carl must have run ahead. Karen was a silent child, which was just the thing to get you forgotten.
Either the car ran up on the neutral ground while they waited for the light to change or else Karen was running against the light. No one wants to recall the details and no one wants to lie. However the way, a car dragged eight-year-old Karen by the tail of her dress, pulling her past several businesses down the highway, past Jack’s Motel and Arbor Bowling Lanes. Eventually, the driver realized what he had done, that a child was caught on the fender of his car. At which point, he stopped to release her. Then tore away.
Now Karen was lying shoeless alongside Chef Menteur. Carl left her to run down Wilson to get Ivory Mae, who was inside the house doing something forgettable but who ran outside wearing clothes because when you have small children you always dress with the start of the day. But she was barefoot, outside running to Karen who was lying in the middle of Chief Liar road, cars whizzing
by, not noticing her at all. You could see all the way to her arm and leg meat straight through to the bone. Karen, lying there in shock, said, “Mah, can I still go to school?”
In one of the cars that happened to be speeding down Chef when the ambulance arrived was Mrs. Mildred, Webb’s mother. She stopped and thrust a coin purse into Ivory Mae’s hand. Here, take this, she had said. In case you need it. My mother didn’t resist.
Karen was rushed to Charity Hospital, downtown, where the doctors insisted that Mom should have brought the skin that had been torn off Karen’s arms and legs; it could have been used, put back in its place. If we had thought to look for the piece they could have sewed it back on. Instead the surgeons cut skin from elsewhere on Karen to make the skin grafts.
They prophesied, the doctors did, that Karen would never play again. Her arms and legs would never be in motion; too much of the muscle had been damaged. But Ms. Sarah, the deceased Dr. Martin’s daughter who now ran the Divine Mission of God, called their projections human folly, the work of feeble minds, and said it would not be so. This word, what Ms. Sarah said, was what Ivory Mae believed.
Karen would use her arms again. She would move them as though nothing had ever happened. The only evidence of the hit-and-run to remain was the skin itself, which had raised up to form islets on her arms and legs that she would forever hide underneath long sleeves and pants, which she wore everywhere, and still does, even in summertime.
Michael and Eddie and Darryl had by now been moved from St. Paul’s private school to Jefferson Davis. Eddie wanted to go to another school and the adults complied. The tuition for the three could go toward something else, they must have reasoned. But this shift was traumatic. It changed Michael forever. Jefferson Davis had only recently tried to integrate. There were few black children in the school. Michael, Eddie, Darryl, and Karen were four of them.
In 1970, the mostly white teachers still called students niggers. Things like this still happened: Michael, ten and in fifth grade, scored a perfect grade on a math test. “They put a big ole zero on the thing,” he said. “And so I’m checkin’ it, going … I don’t know what’s wrong. It wasn’t nothing but adding and subtracting. So I’m saying, this supposed to be right. I said something must be wrong with my brain that this look right to me…. They gave me a zero, so it have to be wrong? But everything was right.” The white girl sitting in front of him—teacher’s pet—turned around to look. “I was embarrassed for her to see my paper. I kept on checkin’ it. I couldn’t believe it. She said, loud-like, ‘Gimme that paper, nigger’” and snatched the test from Michael’s hand.
“I had my pencil in my hand, so I just jumped up and stabbed her a couple times with the pencil.”
Mom and Dad were summoned to the superintendent’s office downtown to discuss Michael. He was given an IQ test and scored off the charts, was deemed one of the smartest children in the school system, but he was suspended and punished for his actions. In the meeting, Michael kept insisting that the teacher show evidence—his perfect math test—but no one ever produced it.
“After that I just felt like, well, shit, I had everything right and they marked it wrong, so even if I’m right they still gone make me wrong. I was like, that shit had failed me so I’m not even worrying about that no more. I’m trying to learn everything on my own, doing what I need to do to survive. And I didn’t figure it out till like maybe twenty years later. I said, ‘Boy, you just as stupid as they come. Them people did that to you and you let that affect your life for all those years.’”
School was over for him, but the streets rewarded smarts.
The completion of Pecan Grove imposed a territorial fervor on the area where before there was none. You belonged to either the Grove, the Goose, or the Gap, gangs that claimed three or four streets (at the most) as territory.
Those relocated to the Grove belonged now to a turf that, as they saw it, needed defending. The streets west of Wilson in the direction of St. Paul’s became the Gap. Starting at the Sisters of the Holy Family and running all the way to the highway was the Goose. You identified yourself as being from one of those three. Or else you were from Flake or America, single streets but gangs unto themselves. America Street produced the most crime.
The short end of Wilson did not, according to this map, belong anyplace, but the boys on the street (who were mostly my brothers) sided with those in the Grove. Carl met his best friend, Manboo, who lived in the Grove, in a minor fight of sorts over a game of football where the Broom boys were in a match against Manboo and his nine brothers. “They hit us,” Carl said. “But we broke out of there. They chased us across Chef Highway, but everybody on the street ran them back. They were throwing bottles at us, but we had been here before the Grove was built.” This lent an air of superiority. “They could never run us. They could never scare us.” By virtue of this, my brothers fought on behalf of the Grove even though they went to school in the Goose.
Now that Michael was out of school, he wielded his body on the streets like a weapon. He had scoliosis, it was discovered, which required that he wear a body brace, a metal-and-plastic contraption beginning at the base of his neck and ending around his waist, to straighten his spine. There was no hiding it and no removing it before fights unless he had time to plan, and fights rarely came with warning. Getting the brace on and off required the assistance of another person and this would cause a show, draw the wrong kind of attention.
Inside the brace, Michael was straight up and down. When it was off—Michael spent more time outside of it than in—his body slunk down into a floor of excruciating pain. The cast was not well suited to his lifestyle; he made enemies and had to watch his back, which he literally could not turn his neck to do. In fights, he tried to grab his opponent’s head in order to bang it into the metal sheathing on his body: that move could end a fight quick. The brace became a part of his mythology on the streets, spoke of the lengths to which he would go, making him a legend among the Grove, the Goose, and the Gap. Someone on the block said Michael damaged his back during an aggressive play session, when he was younger, playing Wolfman, his favorite version of hide-and-go-seek where he hid high up in Ms. Octavia’s oak tree and jumped down on top of the heads of kids passing on the ground below.
Or maybe he got hurt the time he and a friend were breaking into the Municipal Auditorium on Rampart Street and the friend let go of the rope, plunging Michael five feet through a window.
These were the stories perpetuated by Michael and his brothers and his friends. They were better than saying he was born with scoliosis, a defect not gained by virtue of street heroics.
If Michael had worn the brace as the doctors had suggested, he could have avoided having a metal rod put in his back when he was a teenager. The metal rod was supposed to have been removed eventually, but it never was.
He punched hard, too, the hardest, so that people ran from his knuckles. He approached each row as his last—his punches let you know that—which is how he came to be called Boom, short for Tick Tick Boom. His always trying to release his body from its constant hurt gained him a reputation as wiry, snappy, liable to go off at the slightest. Family members said he was like his father, Webb, in that. When he laughed it was a fusillade, a gurgling back in the throat that sounded like a DJ scratching a record. Sometimes when he spoke to a person they felt cursed out even when he had not uttered a single profanity.
While Michael fought, Eddie moved back and forth between the house on Wilson and Lolo’s house in St. Rose where he could act like the man of the house. He was tall and lean with a massive afro, had made it to eighteen without dying, and was spoiled rotten by Grandmother just as his uncle Joe had been. He was more comfortable in her house. For one thing, fewer people lived there, which made it neater. Eddie liked order and was easily embarrassed. The “millions of children” in the house on Wilson bothered him. “All my friends lived on the other side of Chef. All my friends had nicer homes,” Eddie says. “That house and the East was a place wh
ere you grew up and you grew out. There was no staying for me. I think I got a sense of entitlement from my real dad’s people. Because I know they had … I knew they had … you know what I’m saying?”
He knew they had money.
Eddie belonged in a distinct way to his father’s mother, Mrs. Mildred, and her three daughters. They claimed him. He grew up, it could be said, a different class from the rest of his siblings and from his mother even. But it was Lolo who gave him the attention he needed that Mom did not have time for. He worked instead of going to school, supported at first by a small inheritance left by his father to all of the Webb children when they hit a certain age. Grandmother was the kind of woman Eddie admired, hardworking and concerned with having nice things. She had two cars parked in the garage of her house on Mockingbird Lane even though she could not drive (cars for people to drive her around in). She was contained but occasionally mercurial. She could go off on you in a split second. When the presentation of the body stands in for all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother was that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together.
Lynette Broom was born in 1974 just when everyone thought Ivory Mae and Simon were done having children. There were ten children already; the youngest, Byron, was school-age. Lynette was the sole baby in the house—for five years. The first girl since Karen ten years earlier, Lynette was pampered by Simon. He dared not approach the door to home without having something in his hand for her. If he was empty-handed, he’d turn back. A small thing—a single candy, a flower, a pretty rock, he knew—was always better than nothing at all.
The Yellow House Page 9
