Mom saw in Lynette a vision of her earlier self—except for the hair, a short afro that Mom called lil bush. Lil bush factors in most stories Mom tells of Lynette’s childhood. Lynette had ringworm in her scalp, forcing Mom to cut her hair just when it was growing beyond lil bush status; how lil bush made its world premiere in the backyard of our cousin Geneva’s house at a fashion show; how Lynette was so pretty even with her lil bush.
Deborah was wed not a year after Lynette was born, her reception held in the backyard of the not-yet-yellow house that she had left in haste a few years before. The morning of Deborah’s wedding, Dad woke before the house to cut the lawn between our house and Ms. Octavia’s. How many times had he had said jokingly to Deborah: “When you get married I’m gone run you down the aisle?” But now the day had come, and he was not happy to give his first daughter away. He fixed his sadness outside, while his sons, who were mostly young men now, set up tables and chairs for a hundred guests.
Ivory Mae and Deborah had spent hours together preparing for this day. The walls gleaming white after Simon had painted. Lynette’s crib moved from the living room perch, replaced with a short bookshelf that held the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Auntie Elaine brought the flowers. Ivory made the food—stuffed eggs and fried chicken. She made the look of the place, too—sewing cloths to dress the tables and the entire wedding party’s attire, adding special touches (some with lace, some with collars, some without) to some of the bridesmaid’s cloud-blue dresses made of fabric that looked like it itched. She sat at her seat beneath the kitchen windowsill working up these dresses until the moment the bridesmaids stepped into them. That was her way. Once her fire was lit she refused sleep and food to see her creations through, the entire kitchen transformed into a sewing room, her cutting board spread out over the table, pieces of cut-out patterns everywhere you looked.
A cousin had lent Deborah a white wedding dress and veil. In this way she and Ivory Mae were alike, wearing borrowed outfits at their weddings, but they did not speak of this. Nor did they speak of all that had come between them before that day—how Ivory didn’t defend Deborah against Simon, for instance.
The smaller boys—Troy who was nine and Byron who was seven—shuffled through the rooms of the house meeting everyone else’s demands, while the older boys stayed upstairs lifting weights, polishing shoes, touching up haircuts, whatever else.
Ivory Mae readied Deborah as she has not readied a daughter since, as she had not been readied on either of her wedding days. In photographs, there are only glimpses of her, half into her light-pink dress, foam curlers still in, hidden behind Deborah’s veil.
Eventually Simon would dress, and someone would snap a photo of him posed with Deborah where he seems in a playful mood. Deborah in pale white next to her father in his slate tuxedo with a black bow tie larger than his pale-blue corsage. Like Deborah, he, too, had a narrow face. He had the hands that Carl has now, meaty, dirty, oil stained, balled up in a fist.
Dad’s white best friend, Mr. Taylor, sat in the wooden pew of Rosemount Missionary Baptist Church crying like a man at a funeral, as if Deborah were his own child walking down the aisle. He carried on like this through the entire service: before Deborah could make it down the aisle, her father’s, my father’s hand gripping her arm, both her hands strangling the bouquet. In the photos, Simon wears a look of confused surprise, his mouth slightly ajar. I have worn this same face.
While Mr. Taylor cried as if he knew something others did not, Deborah stood taking the hand of Henry Cooley in matrimony. She was tall and thin with an oval face that held seeking eyes and controlled lips that seemed to be clamping down on something soft.
The photos tell the story: My father in front of the window posing with Deborah. Walking Deborah down the aisle. At the wedding reception in the backyard of 4121 Wilson posing next to Ivory in her cropped jacket worn over her dress, her hair long and fluffy, coal black. They pose before a wooden fence that separates the houses from cottages behind, beyond which is a cargo shipment creeping along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks on the Old Road.
There was dancing and music and Deborah was feted. It was a wedding reception like many others, except more so. Deborah had come back home to be married in the very spot that was sinking and needed to be constantly built up but that her father had made precisely for moments like this.
The reception mostly held to the outdoors, but people still wandered inside, to the bathroom, and then others went in just to see what we had, Mom was convinced. She had grown to believe that the objects contained within a house spoke loudest about the person to whom the things belonged. More than that, she believed that the individual belonged to the things inside the house, to the house itself. Maybe what bothered her was the large crowd, many of whom she had never seen before or had seen but did not know. Now they were traveling through her house. People coming inside had never bothered her before. It all felt to Ivory Mae like the start of something new, sticking underfoot, her first time feeling embarrassment about the condition of the place where she lived, the place she owned and thus belonged to. Here came the shifty settling in of shame.
MOVEMENT II
The Grieving House
Strange house we must keep and fill.
House that eats and pleads and kills.
House on legs. House on fire. House infested
With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house.
Tracy K. Smith
Whatever nature do, this house do.
LeAlan Jones, age thirteen
This house is made of bone.
Yance Ford
I
Hiding Places
I am five.
This small bathroom where my father sat on the toilet after work and died and where, before then, Mom took baths with green rubbing alcohol and Epsom salts to eat the weariness, is for me a playroom full of things no adult ever touches. The sheetrock leaning against the wall, smelling of mold, is my chalkboard, and the neon-green lizards crawling in and out through holes in the screen are my students. Standing on two bricks lifts me high enough to see out onto the alleyway running behind our house and over the fence that separates where I live from where my friend Kendra lives in the trailer park next door. Careful when coming down that my lavender jelly-sandaled foot does not step into the medium-size hole in the floorboard that will eventually become a large hole letting in more sound and outside creatures.
After this was the room where Daddy went quiet, it was a room with a washboard in the tub and then an actual washing machine, but Mom says the plumbing was never right.
Those plastic white tubes, contorted limbs twisting through exposed walls, are still here for me to look at, but the machines are not. The tub is gone, too.
There is still a heavy door that closes, with a hole for a knob where I have stuffed tissue paper for privacy. I like best to hear the voices in the house calling for me and not being able to find me where I am, here, where I can wait anything out until the night.
The other bathroom is in the second half of the house, in the add-on that Daddy started but never finished, next to the den with the wood-framed TV of my height, where the Flintstones and Jetsons live. Everyone uses this new bathroom just beyond the girls’ room that is pink and mine since I am a girl, too. This bathroom is the only room in the house with a lock. I take full advantage of this, especially when I want to get away from my big brother Troy whose nerves are always bad. His right ear points and I fixate on it. The more his leg shakes when he sits watching football, the madder I can make him. I’ll get up close to his arrow-shaped ear and yell, “Ear, ear, ear!” to rile him up and sure enough he (a seventeen-year-old boy) will chase me through the house from front to back—from the living room through Mom’s room, through the kitchen and the girls’ room where I sleep and into the second bathroom.
“That’s why you Ear,” I’ll yell from behind its locked door. And since Troy will wait a long time outside it saying, “Wait till you
come out lil gawl, you gon see, you gon see,” I memorize the room’s insides, learning right then and there the geography of hiding.
The second bathroom is also where I take my baths. The whole time I am in the tub, Mom is asking me whether anyone ever touched me down there, in my privates. I don’t care who it is, it could be your brother, your sister, your uncle, your cousin, your daddy, whoever, if anyone ever touches you down there you make sure to let me know right away. That is your and only your privates, that belongs to you, that is off-limits. I don’t care who it is. The preacher or the teacher. You hear me. No one is ever to touch you in your privates. She tells me this nearly every time my body touches the water. When my big sister Lynette is sharing bathwater with me, she hears it, too.
Mom’s voice, when she is worried, has the same girlish sound as it does when she’s entertained by whatever small thing I am finding hilarious.
Your daddy, whoever.
But I don’t have a daddy, I think but never say.
It takes a long time for me to know why I don’t have a daddy, but I am the babiest, I am told, last and smallest. Babies don’t need to understand.
II
Origins
In the story told to me and in the story I tell of myself, my father dying and my being born are the same line. I am born; my father dies.
One day, in my adult years, I tell my mother I want to know the story of me: “When you told Dad you were pregnant again, did he say something?”
No.
“What did he say?”
Nothing.
“Not a single word?”
Here we go again!
You were born in seventy-niyen. They say you were in distress. All them children I had, ain’t none of them ever been in no distress. And you been in it ever since.
On the day I was born at Methodist Hospital, my father’s brother, Junius, was buried in Raceland. It was New Year’s Eve. Auntie Elaine stood witness in my father’s stead, my mother silent in labor as she had been with all of her eight deliveries before. She didn’t believe in making a show.
“You gotta holler, you gotta make some noise or them people won’t ever come do nothing for you,” Auntie kept saying. You make enough noise for the both of us, my mother said back.
Of all the children to appear from my mother’s womb, I was her only cesarean section. My having been born this way relegated her to bed rest for two weeks, the longest she ever sat still after a birth, the longest she sat still in her thirty-eight years. Normally she’d deliver a baby, rest for several hours, leave the hospital, head to Schwegmann’s Super Market to collect baby formula, then go home. This time, someone drove her to Grandmother’s house in St. Rose where I could be handed over to Mom in the bed where she lay. Doctors had instructed her not to lift me or anything my size; at seven pounds, I was too heavy a lift. My mother prided herself on her high tolerance for pain, but no part of her had ever been torn or cut, not even for pierced ears. Over two weeks of immobility, her body seemed slow to heal. The bed takes all your strength, she started saying. From then on, she’d avoid it, except for sleep.
Simon Broom stayed back in the house with the older children, preparing the next youngest for school. Lynette, who was then five, remembers wearing torn underwear underneath her dress, which never would have happened had Ivory Mae been there.
I have the notion that a new baby come into the world ought to be cause for celebration. I imagine, then, that my father saw me and said what fathers say at the sight of their twelfth child. But I cannot know for sure because no one who came before me, the people on whose memory I must rely, has a thing to say about my father’s reaction to me for the six months he and I lived in the same house, which is technically the six months I knew him, which happens to be the time when babies begin to see and hear the world, which is the time when they sit up alone, roll, rise up on hands and knees, eat solids, are smiling, laughing, and babbling. I have heard it said that a person is emotionally stunted at the age when major trauma hits. But what can the mind or body know at six months?
It was the summer of 1980. Simon Broom came home late that one night with ten pieces of Popeyes chicken (spicy) and apple pie for Lynette. On his way inside, a bottle of Old Grand-Dad slipped from his grasp and burst itself on the pavement. He sat down on the bed and told Ivory Mae he had a terrible headache. Unusual, him speaking about his body. He stood up from the bed. Went to use the blue-walled bathroom just off the kitchen. Stayed much too long. Mom went to check. She found him slumped over, head in lap, fedora upside down on the floor, and hoisted him, my father, Simon Broom Sr., onto her back. She, five feet, eight inches of woman, carried six feet, two inches of comatose man, saying not one word at all.
To hear that much man be so silent scared me half to death.
Hear the sound of her pulling him through the narrow shotgun house. Out of the bathroom, five gliding steps on polished linoleum, then left past the refrigerator with the lock on it, eight winded steps through their carpeted bedroom where Daddy’s American flag sat folded in the bottom drawer, and into the living room where six-month-old me lay in the bassinet on the perch.
She eased Simon down onto the gold brocade slipper chair where he rested in his coma.
You were a tiny baby, but you were the only one to witness me dragging him like that.
I called Deborah. I guess he was breathing. He had to be breathing. His eyes were crossed.
Simon, Simon.
Octavia came over.
I said, Let’s call an ambulance. Deborah said, No, we’re not waiting for no ambulance.
Deborah and her husband, Henry, arrived at the house and drove him to the hospital.
At Methodist on Read Road in New Orleans East where I had been born six months before, it was determined that Simon Sr. had suffered a massive aneurysm. Now he was connected to a breathing machine, his room a swarm of family members summoned by his younger sister Corrine, whom Mom found overwhelming, having always been slightly distrustful of people she perceives as biggity or trying to be too much. It was not the too much part that bothered her, just the obvious trying. She liked to use the word “humble,” silencing the h. Corrine, she felt, was the opposite of umble.
Mom shrank. Looking and knowing but not saying. The doctors sought her out and pulled her aside. She was Simon’s wife. If he recovered, they needed her to know, he would be a vegetable.
She spent all of the first night there by his side. On the second day, Simon Jr., his eldest, arrived from North Carolina. It was his thirtieth birthday. Dad died shortly after 1 a.m., the next day, Saturday June 14, almost Father’s Day.
There were too many people for privacy, but Ivory Mae was there standing next to him when he took his final breath, which she would not have noticed at all except for the trickle of blood running out from his left ear.
Whatever it was, it had burst.
His death certificate lists intracranial hemorrhage as cause of death, a brain aneurysm.
Blood built up. He had too much blood.
I just kissed him and walked out the room.
And I said, That’s it.
He was fifty-six years old to Ivory Mae’s thirty-nine. They had been married for sixteen years. The obituary in the Times-Picayune puts his death on June 14, 1980, at 1:35 a.m. Daddy is one of twenty-six deaths listed in the newspaper on this day, but because his last name begins with B he has the good fortune of appearing second on the page, his life summarized in one short column of newsprint, enough to fit between your pointing finger and thumb if you were to open them wide in the shape of an L.
After Simon Broom’s death, Auntie Elaine went back to the house on Wilson, climbed the steps to the crown where the boys were, and told them that their daddy had “left for heaven.” Carl, who was sixteen then, says he ran down those stairs “like oil spreads fire.” Ran to Daddy’s former room, but he was not there.
Simon Broom died on a Saturday (the day after Simon Jr.’s birthday) and was buried on a Monday (Valeria
’s birthday). Beecher Memorial Church on North Miro Street, where he was a sometimes member, was packed with friends from NASA, jazz musicians, and people Simon knew from around town. Strangers who only knew of him lined the perimeter of the church, leaning against the walls; others congregated outside its doors.
Mom dressed like a widow. Simon Sr. was dressed as if headed to a jazz gig. Mom had chosen for him a tie with red spots on it, but the Masons intercepted her desire, something about Masons and the color red at funerals, one of the men taking the tie from around his own neck and tying it onto Dad’s corpse lying in the casket. This made a small commotion, getting a tie onto a dead body.
Simon didn’t look anything like himself. He looked ashen. They weren’t fixing people up back then.
Simon’s and Ivory Mae’s children took up the entire front pew. Simon Jr. was thirty. Deborah was twenty-six. Valeria, twenty-four. Eddie was twenty-one. Michael, twenty. Darryl was eighteen. They sat alongside Carl who was sixteen and Karen, fifteen. Troy was twelve. Byron, eleven. Lynette was five.
“Daddy bought all us boys a black suit before he died,” says Carl. “Daddy said every man s’posed to always have a suit. Wore those same suits to his funeral … I wonder if Daddy knew he was gone die?”
Cousin Edward, Auntie Elaine’s middle son, sat among the siblings wearing a brown suit—as if to break up the monotony.
I am told that of the twelve children, I was the one not taken to Daddy’s funeral. Nobody wanted to be holding no baby. I stayed home with Joyce Davis, our neighbor on Wilson.
Except for a reading from Mom’s favorite psalm: “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” the service was overrun by the Masons whose Sir Knight, Ezekial Frank, “32 Degree Most Wise,” took out a separate advertisement in the newspaper that called for members of “Amitie Axiom Chapter of Rose Crox” to attend funeral services of “our late Sir Knight SIMON BROOM.” The attending men wore aprons and cloaks and wielded swords. “They were wearing little skirts,” Darryl says. A cross of two swords lay on top of the coffin. As part of the ritual, they turned off the lights. One of their members rang a bell and intoned my father’s name:
The Yellow House Page 10
