The Yellow House Read online

  Lolo’s eldest boy, Joseph, tested the women. “I could get spankings, but as soon as the hurt stop I’m doing something else they didn’t think I had no business doing,” he says. “That was just part of my personality.” Elaine cried whenever her mouth wasn’t chewing on something. “I want Lolo,” she moaned over and over again. “Give me Lolo.”

  From Chicago, Grandmother heard reports that Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory weren’t well fed. Out of all the things to go wrong, this one thing seemed untenable. “I promised when I got to be a man I wasn’t gone eat no more weenies and spaghetti,” Uncle Joe told me. “TeTe wasn’t no good cook and that’s what we used to eat every day.”

  And so Lolo came back.

  No one likes to dwell on her going away, for it speaks too loudly and reveals too much. It could be said that she almost escaped this particular story. I imagine her in Chicago wearing a great fur-collared overcoat, fighting freezing cold, her fingers and ears tingling then going numb. Chicago was the possibility of a life shorn of her fragmented past, the chance to make a new story from start to finish, but leaving her children was also the repeat of an ancient pattern.

  Back in New Orleans, she cleaned during the day so she could afford night classes at Coinson’s School of Practical Nurses, where she was best remembered for her uniforms: frozen-white bleached dresses and matching nurse’s cap with freshly polished shoes and stockings that were a clashing veil against her dark skin. It was a white you were afraid to touch. She was determined to finish, and she did, working eventually at Charity Hospital downtown and in private homes everywhere around the city, sometimes for employers whose houses she had once cleaned.

  Sometime after Chicago, Grandmother began to whisper under her breath how even if she didn’t have a pot to piss in, she wasn’t ever leaving her children again. My mother heard her say this. And, too, she started talking to her community of women confidantes about how she was actually mother to six children, how there was a set of twins and another lone child who died before Joseph was born. These stories of Lolo’s were overheard, “caught” by her children like wisps, then held inside for them to tell much later.

  By the time Ivory Mae was seven years old, Grandmother was firmly planted in a double house on South Roman Street uptown, between Second and Third Streets. She had married a longshoreman thirteen years her senior whom the children called Mr. Elvin and who is described by most people as some version of what Mom remembers: He used to talk to the television. Easygoing guy. More like a little common man. He went along with the program. He liked to drink.

  The 2500 block of Roman where they lived was hemmed in by two bars and a small grocery store that seemed to hold the block down like paperweights. Whites ran the grocery stores, blacks the barrooms, unless it was a “real classy joint,” says Uncle Joe. But this was New Orleans. Black and poor lived in eyesight of rich and white or white-looking. The projects, for instance, stood blocks away from St. Charles Avenue’s mansions; a different social world always lay just around the corner. Also just around the block from Lolo’s house, on Claiborne Avenue, was the Rex Den, a massive warehouse where Mardi Gras floats were made. Some blocks down the street, on Jackson Avenue, lived Aunt Shugah’s daughter, TeTe, on whose porch it was tradition to watch Zulu and Rex krewes—social clubs with fake kings and queens and real social hierarchies—parade by on Carnival morning.

  In 1947, Elaine and Ivory Mae posed at Magnolia Studio for their only remaining childhood photograph. They were dressed like twins, in identical white dresses with pouffy sleeves, real flowers pinned on their chests. Each wore black patent leather Mary Jane shoes with ruffled white socks. Elaine was already mean mouthed, her hair in long plaits that reached the middle of her back. Ivory stands awkwardly beside her, leaning away, her weight on the side of her outer foot. But Auntie holds firm to her baby sister’s waist, using her height as heft. This would be the last time in their lives when Elaine, who never rose above five feet, three inches, would be taller than her baby sister who grew to five feet, eight inches. In the photograph, Mom’s small plait sticks up in front, and her mouth is wide open in a dazed face. She is tugging at the bottom of her dress, possibly trying to cover a visible patch of skin that shines just above her knee.

  By this time in their lives, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were like lil maids, waking up and making their beds first thing, sweeping and dusting, the house would be shining. We were brought up with cleanliness. All of Lolo’s children knew how to clean, including the boy. “Guess who be out there windin’ them clothes through that wringer? Your big uncle,” Uncle Joe told me. When two of Lolo’s friends whom the children called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Agnes arrived at Roman Street for the annual Mardi Gras and Nursing Club balls, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory pressed their gowns and laid them out on the bed for the women to slip into after they had taken their baths. When they returned from their parties, they found lamplit rooms, their slippers by turned-down beds, their nightclothes already laid out for them.

  After school, while Lolo attended nursing classes, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory grocery-shopped from a list their mother had made, the three of them toting bags down the street. Elaine always finished her chores early while Ivory lounged, watching her sister and the clock until time wore down, close to when their mother would appear, at which point she would run around the house frantically. I had to be made to do things.

  Even at Hoffman Junior High School, Ivory Mae resisted working in the garden because only the girls were required to do so. Look like I was always in a beating way. Ivory Mae was sassy mouthed. “She’ll answer back if it kills her,” Grandmother was always saying. Elaine was the tomboy, playing marbles, climbing trees, breaking her collarbone and leg. “I was a whip.” She could fight the boys, too, defending her baby sister who she thought “let people walk all over her.” When Elaine was not fighting, she was shy. “Elaine had more of a quiet personality than Ivory,” Uncle Joe said. “But when she came out of that quiet it was like terror. Ivory and I both had them flip mouths and thing. That helped bring us into either being liked or hated according to what side you was on. Elaine was quiet and didn’t say nothing, but Elaine would do so much fighting you didn’t need to say nothing.” Still, Elaine and Ivory were always chosen for major parts in spring plays at Hoffman, whether or not they could sing or dance. They were light skinned, “pretty colored,” teachers would say. Elaine was chosen for Queen of McDonogh 36 when she was in second grade. Elaine had all that hair, which never was good, but they had combed it and it was all sticking up. She wore a lil tiara, looking mean as hell. Elaine also wore an aloofness that could disappear you. You could sometimes feel, speaking to her, that she was physically there but had walled herself up somewhere inside.

  Joseph was spoiled by women from the start. His grandmother Sarah McCutcheon was the first to buy him a two-wheel bike. He preferred to spend his time at her house in the Irish Channel, which proved a more adventurous life for a young boy. Sarah McCutcheon lived in front of town on St. James between Tchoupitoulas and Religious Street, just across from the rice mill, a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks near to the Mississippi River. Joseph was responsible for finding wood for the stove and for the fireplace, and this would lead him to the railroad tracks where he’d salvage discarded wood once used to line the boxcars that transported goods all across the country. Sometimes, if he showed up at the wharf when the ships were unloading, a longshoreman might bust a bag of sugar or rice or coffee or bananas and Uncle Joe would hold them in his shirt to carry back to Sarah McCutcheon on St. James Street.

  Woodson Elementary, McDonogh 36, Hoffman Junior High, and Booker T. Washington—Joseph’s, Elaine’s, and Ivory’s schools—were segregated for all of their school years and long after 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, the results of which were not seen in New Orleans until November 1960 when three six-year-olds, Tessie Provost, Leona Tate, and Gail Etienne, dressed in full skirts and patent leather shoes, with massive white bows atop their heads, arrived at an all-
white McDonogh 19, where they would remain the only three students in school that entire year, taught in classrooms with brown paper taped to windows, blocking sun and jeers from white parents raging outside. The same day in November, first grader Ruby Bridges, a lone black girl surrounded by three US marshals, integrated William Frantz Elementary, spending half a school year as the only student. A decade later, on the eve of the 1970s, integration in New Orleans high schools would still cause riots. Four decades later, it would remain factually incorrect to describe New Orleans schools as fully integrated.

  Lolo always told us we could be whatever we wanted to be. When we were growing up, we never thought of white people as superior to us. We always thought we were equal to them or better.

  But Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory had only to walk to the curb outside their Roman Street house to see Taylor Park and its sign: NO NIGGERS, NO CHINESE AND NO DOGS. It was a strange sight, the mostly empty, fenced-in park in a black neighborhood. If the neighborhood children wanted a park to run around in or a pool for swimming, they had to travel to Freret Street’s Shakespeare Park, several miles away. “It seemed most of the black people in New Orleans had to go over there,” Uncle Joe said. Getting to Shakespeare Park required a ride on segregated buses.

  But there was an added complication in New Orleans, a city fixated on and obsessed with gradations of skin color. My mother, Ivory Mae, understood from a young age the value in her light skin and freckles and in the texture of her wavy hair, which she called good. The favoritism came through in the double-standard ways of all prejudice, in the way people lit up when they saw Ivory but did not come alive so much for Elaine, who wondered why she was a few shades darker than Joseph and Ivory and with thicker hair that she herself described as “a pain to comb.”

  As a child, my mother internalized this colorism, the effects of which sometimes showed in shocking ways.

  One day Ivory, Elaine, and Grandmother’s sister Lillie Mae were sitting together on the Roman Street stoop watching people. Mom was eight years old. A schoolmate, whom Mom called Black Andrew, walked by. He was headed to Johnny’s Grocery store. This was not unusual. Andrew passed two, three, sometimes four times a day, whenever he raised a nickel or a couple of pennies for candy. When he went by he stared, sometimes winking at Ivory Mae, who glared back from the porch. She was always taunting: Black Andrew, hey lil black boy. The neighborhood children on their respective porches urged her on without needing to. That lil black boy ain’t none of my boyfriend she remembers telling them.

  He never did look like he was clean. I mean he was really a little black boy, nappy and everything. She meant that he was dark skinned, the color of her own mother, the color of her mother’s sister Lillie Mae, who was sitting right beside her.

  “You have cheeks to call that boy black?” said Lillie Mae. “Look at your ma. What color is she?”

  My mama not black, small Ivory Mae had said then.

  She wasn’t black to me. She was my mama and my mama wasn’t black. Looked to me like they was trying to make my mama like the black people I didn’t like.

  “I guess we saw it sort of like the white men saw it,” says Uncle Joe now, trying to explain his baby sister. “As people being lower than us.”

  Joseph roamed, but his sisters played in sight of adults, except for weekends when they were given a quarter, which could go far at the ten-cent stores on Claiborne Avenue. We would buy our barrettes. I used to always pick nice colors. We were always neat kids. We used to look like we were more kept than the other kids that would be around us, like little rich kids. When we were little bitty children, five years old or maybe seven, we ain’t wore nothin’ but Stride Rite. Lolo believed you put good shoes on your feet.

  “Hold your heads up,” Grandmother was always saying. If they didn’t have a penny in their pocket no one had to know that. “It’s how you carry yourself,” she would say. They were to hold something of themselves in reserve, to never ever give it all away, to value each other more than anyone else, and to stay out of other people’s houses where anything could happen. We were sheltered. We couldn’t go by people house. I never had a whole lot of friends. People stood to themselves. We were just Elaine, Ivory, and Joseph and a few people who came along.

  The children wore the color white on special occasions: for picture taking, church services at the Divine Mission of God on Sundays, and then every May, on John McDonogh Day.

  John McDonogh was a wealthy slave owner who in 1850 bequeathed half of his estate to New Orleans public schools, insisting that his money be used for “the establishment and support of free schools wherein the poor and the poor only and of both sexes and classes and castes of color shall have admittance.”

  This “patron saint of New Orleans public schools,” as city officials sometimes called him, had other requirements too—that the Bible be used as the main textbook and also “one small request … one little favor to ask, and it shall be the last … that it may be permitted, annually, to the children of the free schools situated nearest to the place of my interment, to plant and water a few flowers around my grave.”

  Students who attended schools named after McDonogh visited his grave site yearly, some of them taking a ferry across the river to where he was buried alongside his slaves at McDonoghville Plantation. Even after 1860, when his family had his remains exhumed and moved to his native Baltimore, schoolchildren continued to gather at his emptied grave to honor him. They did so until 1898 when a statue was erected in New Orleans’s Lafayette Square, facing Gallier Hall, which was then city hall. McDonogh’s bronze head looked straight ahead while a chiseled boy scaled the monument, reaching with one hand to lay a garland in perpetual honor at the base of McDonogh’s bust. A sculptured girl with cascading hair stood at the base of the monument, holding the boy’s free hand, looking up.

  On McDonogh Day, all the children of the more than thirty McDonogh schools wore their best white clothes to the segregated event. Black and white students arrived by separate buses. The black children waited in the sun while the white children completed their procession to honor John McDonogh. We would be standing up there for hours and hours sweating inside our pretty white dresses.

  A school band played as the white children gathered around McDonogh’s statue to sing McDonogh’s song:

  O’ wake the trumpet of renown

  Far echoing a hero’s name

  McDonogh: let the trumpet blow

  And with the garland twine his brow

  Extol him with your voices now

  Praise to him; all praise to him!

  Mayor deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison awarded the key to the city to one sixth grader from each white school; then the black students had their turn. By the time they arrived at the middle of McDonogh’s song, several black children would have fainted from the noontime heat bearing down, dirtying up their white. Those still standing sang on, holding wilted flowers for John McDonogh’s replica. Those passed-out students would have missed the bestowing of the key on one sixth grader from each black school.

  It was not surprising then that in 1954 black students, principals, and teachers protested John McDonogh Day for years of what local civil rights leaders called “countless unpleasantries of humiliation and shame.” Only thirty-four of the thirty-two thousand black students citywide appeared before the statue that year. Ivory Mae, who was then thirteen, and her siblings were not among them.

  After that, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory wore their white only to church. Sarah McCutcheon introduced Lolo and her young children to the Divine Mission of God. Its sanctuary was a double shotgun house uptown on Soniat Street that was church on one side, house on the other. The minute you walked in there, you could imagine being in a part of heaven. There was a little porch you went up on and then into the church. Nothing else would exist. Services were held in daytime; you left them at night.

  The mission had no more than twenty-five congregants, all of whom believed their leader, Dr. Joseph Martin, was a prophet, th
e kind who could speak to the rain and tell it to stop. On several occasions he did so, several people claim, holding back thunderstorms so his church members could make it to their cars without getting soaked. He was said to turn back terrible hurricanes and calm the winds. His prophecies exceeded the meteorological. He told of the little people who would come across the ocean in droves, which he later claimed were the Vietnamese refugees who started arriving in 1975.

  Congregants called themselves Holy Catholic. The church drew from Catholic rituals but was not listed in any directory, nor were the congregants ever visited by the archbishop. Strict Catholics who visited, like Joe Gant’s friend Harold, said congregants were ridiculing Catholic traditions, practicing hoodoo. “It was an individualized thing,” Joe Gant said.

  Inside the church, four days a week, otherwise ordinary people transformed themselves. The women kept their white cloaks in a wooden armoire in the church; the men wore long white robes with wide sleeves and kingly crowns made of felt. Some people wore headbands patched with golden stars. The children of congregants marched down the aisles like future prophets, holding royal blue banners that rose high up above their heads.

  The entire congregation was the choir. Everybody singing together sounded like the trumpets. We used to all get up and march a circle around the church.

  Oh Daniel he was a good man

  Lord, he prayed three times a day

  Oh the angels opened up the windah,

  just to hear what Daniel had to say

  For I thank God I’m in his care

  In a lifted moment, singing this song or another one like it, Mom was first saved at the Mission. One minute she was singing about feeling the fire burning then jumping up wildly the next. Elaine went over and held her sister around the waist as if she were a tree. “Don’t hold her, let her go,” people were yelling. Elaine did let go, after a while, and Ivory Mae kept on at her salvation. After this, Ivory Mae began to develop a keen sense that she was God’s kid. That’s what she would call herself, in a possessive way, as if she were an only child. This annoyed Elaine. Ivory Mae now addressed God directly in regular prayers. Father God, she began, and he became for her (and would forever stay) the birth father she never had.