“Simon. Simon. Simon?” they called. “Arise.
“Simon?”
Just then, the swords fell, startling Karen, who, horrified at the thought that Daddy might awaken, rise up, and walk again, screamed at the top of her voice, betraying everyone’s fright. The whole church jumped. Then quiet blew through the sanctuary. The walls froze.
“Why you walking on the backs of your shoes?” Simon Jr. asked Lynette. Her feet were hurting. He lifted her up over the casket to peer down on her father, who, for the first time in her life, offered nothing back.
Even though Daddy played in Doc Paulin’s brass band, there was no jazz funeral. Doc Paulin wanted one, but Mom, overcome by the thought of yet another detail, said no. She regrets this now. I, too, wish she had said yes to this request and have sometimes felt that the absence of that detail somehow disturbed my own personal narrative. It would have been nice, for instance, to tell the following story: I am rhythmic because I have come from musical lineage. My father was so great an artist that he was honored with a jazz funeral. Horse-drawn carriages moved through the streets of New Orleans; people danced behind. To be able to say: “I have come from that.”
For the repast after the funeral, most of Dad’s family met at Corrine’s house, less than a mile away from the house on Wilson where our immediate family gathered. All the big, important people went to Corrine and them house. Already, Mom harbored self-consciousness about her own home, and this only grew with my father’s death, his absence illuminating the house’s frailties.
After my father died in the small bathroom, the room folded in on itself: its dark-blue-painted walls peeling, the tub transformed into a storage bin, the socket hanging from the wall with pieces of electrical tape showing, the sink collapsing.
No one tried to fix it back up. The house becoming, around this time, Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
III
The Grieving House
Daddy did not, of course, wake to those funeral pleas (“Simon, Simon, Simon”) or any of the ones that came afterward in the quiet of grief. The house at night was full of half-hidden sobs. Byron, the youngest boy, took it hardest, clinging to Mom wherever she went and then, after a time, going mute. When he started to speak again, weeks later, his body held his father’s stalwart positioning, as if during the silence he had decided on a permanent way to be. As a boy, Byron wore the same fortified face he would wear seven years later as a marine.
Mom moved me from my bassinet in the living room to the space in the bed that Simon had occupied. I was a small dot lying where the great mass of my father used to be. During these cruel nights, Lynette woke from nightmares about the small bathroom where he died. The house, on some nights, would become a byway full of sleepwalking children on a voyage to Mom’s king-size four-poster bed, which at times held all of us, sweating, splayed, entangled.
Dad’s NASA coworkers had gathered more than a thousand dollars, the most money collected on behalf of any employee, but the relief would not last long. Mother was now keeper of the house. She had six adult children, two teenagers, and the youngest four who required constant attention.
Simon’s death was one of the most horrific things for me, but I had you. You were just six months old. So that was work to do. If I had gone to pieces …
The time when I would have really been mourning, really been sad, I was turned toward you. What more therapy can you get, running behind this one and that one?
Simon was her second husband dead. I figured I had two husbands and both of them died so it was time to do the single thing or people would be calling me the men killer. I had God on my side, that was my friend. I didn’t have human friends. I was relying on Him.
Her prayers became even more intimate: Father God, she began, you know my heart, like talking to her best friend.
My main goal after Simon died was to raise all my kids and I didn’t want anybody to help me. Another man wouldn’t want to raise them like I wanted to. I said to myself, “It’s up to you” and tried to do the best I could.
And so she—a woman so striking that men routinely ran after her when we were out in public together—remained alone and forever untouched by another man. Deep down I think she, too, had come to believe that she, in her power, killed men.
In Simon and Ivory Mae’s nineteen years together, Mom had never learned to drive, never managed money or bills. That suddenly changed. She worked small jobs, catering parties or helping at Corrine’s home nursery. The Lafon nursing home, of the Sisters of the Holy Family, on Chef Menteur, where her sister, Elaine, already worked, hired her as a nurse’s aide, but she would study to become a practical nurse like her mother.
When the reality of her new world was still fresh, she’d say aloud, Simon will come round, he will be here any minute, Simon will be here after while.
But he never came around the bend.
It was the survivor’s season of firsts:
The Friday after the funeral, she shopped alone at Schwegmann’s, seeking Simon in the aisles as she would a misplaced child, longing to hear his chatter, wishing for the ice cream to be melting in the basket while he spoke too long to every single body. I wish, I wish, I wish.
Everything we did together we held hands. He was my friend.
At the end of Simon’s death month, Darryl turned nineteen. Weeks later, he was arrested for stealing computers from Livingston Middle School. Darryl went to jail; Mom could not afford to bail him out. When Simon was alive she’d tell him to get on the boys, tell them to do right. “No, you need to learn how to tell them,” he would always say. By dying, he forced her to do so.
Her form of discipline emerged from a keen sense of morality and a spiritual compass. You didn’t blame others. Her voice never rose much, but her language and tone bent. When she was upset she cleared her throat. Enough, or All right now you’ve run out, she would say and that let you know. I am your mother. My job is to instruct you on right from wrong. What you do with that is up to you. But I’m always going to tell you the truth.
The August after Simon died, Carl turned seventeen. “Mr. Broom number two right here,” he had started calling himself. He took a job at Morrison’s cafeteria where Valeria also worked, washing dishes in the evenings after high school classes let out. He was a junior. Morrison’s was the first of three jobs Carl would have in life. “Daddy had trained us. I wasn’t worryin’,” says Carl now. “You don’t depend on nobody for nothing, you make your own money. Daddy had then built his clan.”
A week after Carl’s birthday, Lynette turned six. At the start of summer, just before her father died, she’d graduated kindergarten. Mom made her a white dress with ruffles at the bottom. She posed with her teacher, Ms. Serraparoo, in front of a bulletin board where “1980” glittered in teal, as if it were a year to be proud of. But the photograph Lynette actually carried around was the last one taken of her with Dad in which she appears as his musical sidekick, dressed in a colorful jean jumpsuit, her lil bush perfectly round, wearing oversize sunglasses and a heavy red necklace. On her feet, white Buster Browns, polished. Earrings gleaming, hands in pockets. Dad next to her in a black Kangol hat, playing the banjo, his body arched toward Lynette. Both of them singing. Her lips like ooooooooh. They pose on the front porch, the door to the house wide open.
Who captured them, I wonder, in this special light?
After Dad died, that banjo stood alone in Mom’s closet, behind all of the clothes she had made. Sometimes, when crouched in there, I’d lean against the cold banjo case.
In September, Karen turned sixteen. No birthday passed without a celebration; grief and celebration sometimes look alike. There was always a homemade cake and a gallon of Neapolitan ice cream sitting on a pretty tablecloth, always a small party around the kitchen table.
At first, Mom caught the bus everywhere she needed to go: to work; to church on Sundays; to Charity Hospital downtown for doctors’ visits with the children; to Krauss, a department store on Canal Street
for the home sales; or to the well-baby clinic on Almonaster Street. Or else, she waited for the older boys to give her a ride, but that felt too much like the past. I was a little pathetic at first. I needed to make myself know things.
Eddie, by then twenty-two, tried teaching her to drive, using the lid of her red beans pot as a steering wheel, but she tired of that ploy. Put me in the actual car, boy. He lost patience once they were behind the wheel: He was the worst teacher in the world. She enrolled at Victor Manning Driving School and made her way around town in a small red student car with a neon warning sign. She was a careful student, both hands on the wheel, thrilled that she would no longer have to wait for anyone or anything. It was my Independence Day.
My mother had always made a pilgrimage to Webb’s grave on All Saints’ Day, and after Simon Broom’s death she continued that tradition, visiting her two dead husbands, leaving flowers on their headstones, mere feet apart. But a few years beyond Simon’s death she decided to stop, feeling that some aspect of the dead men’s spirits might accompany her in the car on the drive home.
The first Thanksgiving arrived, four days after Troy’s thirteenth birthday.
Then came Christmas. The children retrieved the fake tree from the attic, carrying boxes of branches down the stairs, dropping them in a heap on the living room floor, before getting to work matching the color-coded stems to the base. Mom’s job was to fluff the branches so that the tree looked full, so that the tree looked real. Afterward, she draped gold garland around it and hung balls made of golden threads that were always unspooling. She spread a white satin cloth underneath to hold the presents.
The ceramic statue that grandmother had made of our cat, Persia, was parked under the tree. This cat was a replica, a stand-in, for the beloved dead cat who had been white and fluffy with green eyes. I never met the real Persia, but the replica was white and hard with green eyes. Mom moved it around the living room whenever she felt like it, but it never traveled beyond. At Christmastime, Persia’s likeness was always near to the tree, a recurring present.
In photographs taken on Christmas Day 1980, Mom and Lynette pose by the tree, leaning against the gold slipper chair that holds a blanket where eleven-month-old me is supposed to be.
But I am a wandering child.
I used to always have to be finding you from somewhere. You never were a kid like Karen or Lynette, satisfied. They were more like kids who would want to be around you. You would play with something I gave you one minute, then throw it away. You couldn’t just color, you couldn’t do nothing in the lines, you would have to do the whole page.
On the last day of December 1980, six months after my father dies, I make one year old. In the six Polaroids of me from babyhood, I am often on a brother’s lap, my hair in three mounds, in the middle and on either side of my head, pout mouthed and trying to get down, eyes looking over at something outside the frame, as if saying, “I’ll be over there, I’m coming.” I am constantly being held against my desire, clinging to the side of the chair, knuckles reddening from holding on so tight, as if I do not trust my adult brothers to handle my baby weight. But when I am in my mother’s lap, I am breaking my jaw laughing so hard, hands clapping instead of holding on. She is in a silk gown, both hands around my bare stomach, still wearing her wedding ring, braless, afro headed, delicate boned, golden colored, her chest and collarbones showing, her legs wide open as if in the act of bouncing me, smiling so that you can see to the back of her tongue.
I had a lil baby. What can a lil baby know?
In a picture taken outside the house, I am returning from elsewhere, barefoot and diapered, holding a decrepit baseball mitt. I am captured midstride, examining my found object, oblivious to the camera. My journeys away from home take shape, I am convinced now, in these early days.
IV
Map of My World
My growing-up world contains five points on a map, like five fingers on a spread hand.
This world of mine, it must be said outright, is a blur. I can see, but only up close. This is how my big brothers, hiding in plain sight, can jump out from the open, yell boo and still make fright in me.
I hide my eyes’ weakness from my mother for a long time. It is not hard, she is busy making her new world. My poor sight and the hiding of it shapes my behavior and thus my personality, becomes me in a way only time made me know. I needed, I always felt, to get out in front of things (people and circumstances) before they could yell boo. In photographs from these blurry years I wear a vacuous look, turned in the direction of, but not seeing the eye of the camera. My mother discovers all of this, the poor eyesight and my cover-up, when I am ten. But that is five years away from now.
The farthest dot away from me in this universe (the thumb) is Grandmother’s house in St. Rose. We call her house the country even though there is little open land except on former plantations. In St. Rose, I see certain things for the first time. Like giant horses ridden on sidewalks or on top of the levees.
To get to the country, we drive on the interstate for thirty minutes, then down a narrow three-mile road that we call “long road,” with swamp on both sides and no shoulder. We cross two sets of train tracks where every time I pray Mom’s banana-yellow Aries won’t give out the way Uncle Joe’s car did when he was a young man and had to push his car off the tracks seconds before a train arrived. This is likely one of Uncle Joe’s tall tales: One of his stories, Mom says. Grandmother always says, “Don’t tell stories” when she means don’t tell lies. I keep trying to know the difference.
After escaping the train, I latch onto other fears in the moving yellow car. We speed through night, Lynette and I in the back, Mom alone up front. In the dark, peering out the back window, my eyes make horror out of all they cannot see. This is the time of Swamp Thing and Jason from Friday the 13th. “ChChChHaHaHaHa, ChChChHaHaHaHa,” Lynette is always taunting me, at home after we watch the horror movies where I sit right in front of the screen where everything is scariest. These are the days of burnt Freddie Kruger and his red-and-green stripy sweater, The Thing and Gremlins, who I am convinced live underneath my bed and in the kitchen at night.
When I think of Grandmother’s house, I recall her in the bathtub, heat rising from underneath the door crack and moving into the hallway. I remember her sky-blue Daniel Green slippers, how her toes hang off the front. How in the bathroom mirror she dabs her face with a red puff that smells like canned cream. And her kitchen: Grandmother bakes a Bundt cake; Lynette and I fight over who gets which utensil from the leftover batter. I like the metal whisker where I can slide my tongue through the maze. Or else we—all of the grandchildren—are outside in the fenced-in backyard, pecans falling on our heads.
A skinny, burnt-looking man named Diggs lives in Grandmother’s spare room with the twin beds. Grandmother calls him her friend instead of boyfriend, which is what he is. Whenever he sees me, Diggs riffles through a painted white drawer and gives me quarters, mumbling something I don’t stay around long enough to hear. What happened to Diggs? I don’t know. He disappeared from the house either by dying or by walking out the door. The same thing, he was gone.
The banana-yellow Aries that we take to the country is the same car we take to Schwegmann’s Super Market on Gentilly Boulevard (pointer finger of spreading hand), which is one of my favorite places to act a fool. Getting there from our house requires that we drive down Chef Menteur and over the Danziger Bridge, which raises up like a backhanded slap when boats pass by underneath. One of Mom’s friends kept driving even when the blinking lights warned cars to stop and plunged into the Industrial Canal below. That is the real-life scary story that grips me for the entirety of 1985. The woman survives; the woman becomes rich; but I still do not want to plunge into deep waters.
Each year I gain a new fear related to blindness or to water or to falling or to the soft ground that we live on, until I am older and shame mixed with wildness beats out fear.
The other three points on my map (middle, ring, and pin
kie finger) are clusters: our house and the short end of Wilson Avenue where we live, Pastor Simmons’s house-church where we go now that Mom is feeling more Pentecostal than Catholic, and Jefferson Davis Elementary. School is just across Chef Highway and church is just down Chef Highway, at the corner where the SkyView drive-in movie theater used to be but where the great big brown post office is now with our zip code painted across its facade in enormous numbers so that we can never forget: 7 0 1 2 6.
These are the places that make my growing-up world.
I become Sarah on the first day of kindergarten. My mother and I stand in the circular parking lot, just short of the entrance to kindergarten class. This Jefferson Davis school is shaped funny, like a split horseshoe. Each classroom has its own elevated ramp, like porches. Everywhere is painted royal blue and bright yellow. I am wearing the school uniform, a pressed white button-down shirt and a blue A-line skirt with ruffled socks.
My mother says to me: When those people ask your name, tell them Sarah. Those people is the phrase she uses for strangers (mostly white, mostly men) who decide how the world works.
I hear the big children pouring into the main entrance—which is where Black Santa Claus will sit for pictures in December—four doors flanked by a pattern of yellow and blue metal triangles pointed like arrows.
Up until this moment in my life, I was Monique. But now I wear a navy JanSport backpack with a blue mat for naptime sticking out from it with s. BROOM written in my mother’s oversize print.
The Yellow House Page 11
