The Yellow House Read online

  Michael had been born in April 1960, six months before his father died. Sometime between Michael’s birth and Webb’s death, Ivory became pregnant for a third time. By the time Darryl was born, six months after Webb’s burial, another father was already standing in the first one’s place. This would seem to haunt Darryl all of his life. From early on, he would call himself the black sheep of the family. No one wanted to touch the circumstances of Darryl’s birth in order to fashion a narrative. People were talking, saying that Ivory Mae was running around in the months preceding Webb’s death, that she was seen with another, much darker man, Simon Broom. Everything was all jumbled up; people couldn’t agree on the facts. Darryl, sensitive and sharply attuned, bore everyone else’s uncertainties as his own. The rumor that Darryl was conceived three months or so before Webb’s death while Simon and Ivory Mae—both married—were courting held Darryl in a no-place with no single story of his beginnings, a condition made worse by family members who, out of malice or their own hurt, told him over and again how he was misidentified and thus misplaced. “Just look at you boy. You ain’t no Webb,” Darryl remembers being told by some family member. My mother, the only one to know the truth, shrugged it all off when asked many years later. What’s done is done. Gone. Over and done with.

  She would, in fact, always insist that there was no difference among any of us children—that our having been raised by her made null any paternal or maternal differences.

  About Eddie, Webb’s eldest, there was no such question; he bore a different burden. A year old when Webb died, he was his father’s image—big head and all. Whenever Webb’s mother, Mildred, looked at him she’d say, “Lil Brother never be dead now.”

  IV

  Simon Broom

  Four years later, in the spring of 1964, Sarah McCutcheon died.

  That summer, Mother married Father in the backyard of 4803 Wilson Avenue in New Orleans East.

  Carl, Ivory Mae’s first child with Simon, was not yet a year old. During the wedding he sat perched on Mom’s right hip, his foot kicking against her pregnant belly, knowing nothing of the scene taking place right in front of his eyes. Karen, Mom’s fifth child, would be born that fall and come home to this rented three-bedroom brick house.

  Reverend Ross, who worked with Simon Broom at NASA, officiated. The nice neighbor living in the other half of the double house, who was also the landlord, had made for the reception white-bread finger sandwiches with the brown edges cut off the way Mom liked them.

  Auntie Elaine, my mother’s sister, who was grown up now and had started wearing her signature flaming red hair, stood there as witness. It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t no event. That seems a long time ago now, and Mom closes down passageways to memory when something doesn’t make sense or when the thing or person no longer exists, which is possibly the same thing.

  It was never just the two of them, Ivory and Simon, not even at the beginning of their story. They each came to the relationship with children and with spouses. According to Mom, she first saw Dad in the late fifties at his cousin’s hole-in-the-wall bar somewhere in the vicinity of Roman Street, where he had come to play a card game. Auntie says they first met at her marriage to Webb’s cousin Roosevelt. One of Dad’s brothers said they met at a restaurant where he and Simon were working as busboys. Wherever it was, they first laid eyes on each other while Ivory was still married to Webb, before she had any idea how that would end. Simon had a wife, too, but they were separated, he told Ivory in so many words. He was, in still other words, skirting the truth. Anyway, this was not about practicalities yet but about what flourished between them, those delirious feelings.

  Simon Broom was six feet, two inches and dark skinned with keen features, the handsomest man I ever seen. Opposite Webb in looks and style, he physically overwhelmed her. Projecting an ease that Ivory Mae loved, he seemed a man in possession of himself, if not things. Nineteen years her elder, he had massive hands, gray-stained from years of work, which meant, Ivory Mae reasoned, that he could fix whatever in his and her world was broken. Plus, his diction. He had a proud talk. Like the Kennedy brothers. When he spoke, I felt like I just needed to be listening. His booming voice seduced Ivory, scared some, and led others to want to fight.

  One thing was certain: Simon had not simply happened to her, as had Webb. Simon Broom felt like a choice. She took him on.

  He was born to Beaulah Richard and Willie Broom in Raceland, Louisiana. Beaulah was a Creole-speaking, pipe-smoking woman. They built their own farm in Raceland on a nameless edge of town near a street now called Broom. Simon was the third youngest of eleven children, only three of whom were girls. By the time thirty-eight-year-old Simon met Ivory Mae when she was nineteen, he had already lived several lives. He had spent his childhood working on the family farm. School, held in the local black church, consisted of several classes taught simultaneously in one large room with no walls. Most days were chaos, but Simon finished fourth grade.

  When he was sixteen, cousins brought him to New Orleans, an hour—a whole universe—away from Raceland. People say family friends taught him how to act citified then, and that is how he came to speak proper, learn to dress sharp, and have the high-class bearing that my mother fell for. But this sounds like a story city people tell other city people about country people. In 1943, at nineteen years old, Simon claimed he was two years older in order to join the navy, as had most of his brothers before him. When he enlisted, Ivory Mae was still toddling around Sarah McCutcheon’s house in the Irish Channel, making dolls out of Coke bottles. He served in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater, in what in America is called the Philippine Liberation and elsewhere the Battle of Manila, the brutal fight that helped end World War II. He earned five stars fighting on behalf of a country that listed his name on a roll-call docket as: Simon Broom (n), the (n) for negro or negroid or nigger.

  After the war, Simon Broom was handed a check for $167.36 and set free to make a life for himself. Asked, on discharge papers, about his ideal job, he wrote: “Assistant Manager (half owner) of moving van.” Years after his military release, when Ivory Mae was seven years old, Simon married Carrie Howard, whose large family had come from Hahnville and New Sarpy, tiny towns thirty miles from New Orleans. In 1949, when Carrie and Simon’s first child, Simon Broom Jr., was born in Charity Hospital, Simon the father was already working as a longshoreman. Carrie worked, too, first as a secretary at the naval base and then as a clerk at the Orleans Parish School Board. She was not the type to suffer fools. She was an organist in church, believed deeply in education, and bore for Simon two more children, named Deborah and Valeria, to whom she preached her convictions.

  When Simon and Ivory Mae met all those years later, his age and experience were precisely what drew her. When Simon danced close to Ivory and she looked up at him, her hips rowing the air, he told her about how he had never—as a middle-aged man—had a woman so much younger, not in his lifetime, almost but not yet. He knew how to put the right words together.

  But Simon wasn’t no dating type of man. He wasn’t no going to the movies kind of man, either. He mostly worked. His mantra was “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Like his father, Willie, he played the trombone or sometimes the banjo or the tuba in Doc Paulin’s Brass Band, and he would often take Ivory Mae along with him, the two of them alone together, for once without the children, riding to gigs in his near-to-broken-down car, the instruments between them.

  Simon’s eldest boy would never live with his father and stepmother the way his sisters would. After his mother, Carrie, died in the summer of 1963—two weeks before Carl was born—Simon Jr. stayed in the same high school, living with his grandmother Beaulah Richard in rural Raceland, surrounded by the cousins and classmates he knew. He’d won a scholarship to Johnson C. Smith College. Simon Broom Sr. put him on a Greyhound bus to Charlotte, North Carolina. He has been there ever since.

  Simon and Carrie Howard Broom’s daughters, Deborah and Valeria, ten and eight years old, were still reeling from th
eir mother’s sudden death when they moved into the rented brick house on Wilson after the wedding. Valeria seemed numb, but Deborah, who was older, fought out her rejection of this new arrangement. She was direct and loudmouthed, striving to upend, it could seem, this imposed, unnatural order of things. She asked questions. She spoke her wants and wishes.

  She had already seen what silence brought. The entire summer when they were away in Raceland at Grandmother Beaulah’s house, surrounded by kin, their mother was back in the city, battling leukemia, dying. “I didn’t know what the heck was going on because nobody was telling us details,” Deborah says.

  Deborah first learned about her new family while living with Grandmother Beaulah in Raceland shortly after her mother died. A neighbor was combing Deborah’s hair; she was on her way to be baptized. “She started rolling out this scenario. These are gonna be your brothers,” the woman said to her, describing Eddie, Michael, Darryl, and Carl.

  “No they not,” Deborah returned. “I don’t even know these people.” She considered it a while longer, then asked again: “Who are these people?” “But it wasn’t up to me,” she says now.

  Eventually, the girls were taken to meet the strangers. Deborah screamed and hollered, “ ‘Where is my mom?’ I kept saying I don’t want to go meet these people. That first year after my mom died, I went crazy. I was in a shell-shocked state almost.”

  On a winter morning, Simon Broom drove Deborah and Valeria from Raceland to meet Ivory Mae and her four children for the first time. Simon left them there until sometime before night. He was the kind of man who always had another place where he urgently needed to be.

  When the sisters arrived, they saw Eddie, Michael, and Darryl, “three beady-eyed boys,” says Valeria, staring back at them. And Ivory Mae, their father’s new woman, thin everywhere except for in the stomach (she was pregnant with Karen) and light skinned. The new woman, as Deborah and Valeria saw her, walked quietly around with little expression; they remember her as mostly silent with exploring, sometimes critical eyes. She looked and behaved nothing like their mother, Carrie, who was tall with a booming talking voice and a deep tenor singing one. “I’m Miss Ivory,” Mom said to Deborah and Valeria. They would call her Miss Ivory for the rest of their lives.

  The girls later moved into that rented brick house on Wilson. Four-year-old Eddie, firstborn of Ivory Mae’s biological children, was suddenly younger than his new sisters. Deborah, who had been a middle child, was now the second eldest and Valeria the third, ranking above Eddie, who, before the girls arrived, had been the serious older brother to Michael and Darryl. Eddie was practical and special feeling, surrounded by doting aunts—Webb’s sisters—and Mrs. Mildred who needed him to stay alive the way his dead father had not. Eddie would fight to keep hold of his original position as eldest of Mom’s children for the rest of his life, seeing the new rearrangement as an unlawful jerking away of his familial standing.

  V

  Short End, Long Street

  In March 1961—three years before the families merged and five months after Webb’s death—this advertisement for 4121 Wilson appeared in the Times-Picayune newspaper:

  Sale by Civil Sheriff

  SINGLE ONE-STORY

  FRAME DWELLING

  A CERTAIN LOT OF GROUND … situated in the THIRD DISTRICT of this City of New Orleans, in what is known as “ORANGEDALE SUBDIVISION,” said subdivision being located on Gentilly Road at second crossing of the L & N R.R. on the lake or north side of said road … Lot #7 … bounded by WILSON AVENUE, GENTILLY ROAD, LOMBARD STREET … measures 25 feet front … by a depth between equal and parallel lines of 160 feet. TERMS: CASH.

  When this advertisement ran, the area that would later be called New Orleans East was largely cypress swamp, its ground too soft to support trees or the weight of three humans. It was overrun with nutria and muskrat, prime hunting ground.

  From the beginning, no one could agree on what to call the place. But namelessness is a form of naming. It was a vast swath of land, more than 40,000 acres. Some people called it Gentilly East, others plain Gentilly. Show-offs called it Chantilly, supposedly after French-speaking city founders. It was called the area “east of the Industrial Canal,” “Orleans East,” or just “eastern New Orleans.” Some people called it by their neighborhood names, what used to be: Orangedale or Citrus. Pines Village, Little Woods, or Plum Orchard. My generation would call it the East.

  Big Texas money bought a single name that stuck: its vast cypress swamps were acquired by a single firm, New Orleans East Inc., formed by Texas millionaires Toddie Lee Wynne and Clint “Midas Touch” Murchison, one of whom owned the Dallas Cowboys, both of whom owned oil companies. Everything, they felt, could be drained. “Like the early explorers, New Orleans now gazes out over its remaining underdeveloped acreage to the east,” Ray Samuel, a local advertising man hired by New Orleans East Inc., wrote in a promotional pamphlet. “Here lies the opportunity for the city’s further expansion, toward the complete realization of its destiny.” That was the dream.

  New Orleans East suddenly became one of the most “unusual real estate stories of this country, the largest single holding by any one person or company within corporate limits of a major city,” Ray Samuel claimed. Rather than differentiate among the thirty-two thousand acres purchased by New Orleans East Inc. and those eastern neighborhoods that existed long before the company’s arrival (like Pines Village and Plum Orchard), people began calling the entire area by the one broad corporate name: New Orleans East.

  Back in 1959, when New Orleans East Inc.’s plans were first under way, the development was expected to “surpass anything that has been done in the past. The huge tract will ultimately have everything, including 175,000 or more residents,” a brochure claimed. Developers boldly foresaw a million residents by 1970. This seemed possible. New Orleans was booming, feeling extremely prosperous and proud in the days following Mayor deLesseps “Chep” Morrison’s election in 1946. Chep billed himself a reformer before that was political deadspeak. Time magazine proclaimed him “King of the Crescent City,” for all the bridge, road paving, and building projects he pushed through, including city hall, which in 1957 was deemed “one of the finest and most beautiful municipal buildings in the world.” “Glass-and-class,” Chep called the new city hall, which was built on top of Louis Armstrong’s childhood neighborhood. “Slum cancer,” was how Chep referred to those working-class communities of wooden cottages and shotgun houses that were bulldozed to make way for “glass-and-class.” These infrastructure projects launched Chep, who some loved simply because he had a New Orleans–sounding name, onto a world stage. He was the city’s first national mayor.

  By 1960, the population of New Orleans had grown to 627,525, which made it the fifteenth-largest American city. Politicians, businessmen, developers, and planners projected that it would only climb from there, fueled by advances in the oil and gas industry, a revitalized (more mechanized) port that would ensure the city’s world-class port status, the economy boosted over the long term by the soaring success of the nascent aerospace industry. “The National Aeronautical and Space Administration’s Michoud plant in the eastern part of the city hums with feverish and costly activity,” the newspaper stories went. That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.

  The newspapers fell hard for New Orleans East. Here was a story with possibility for high drama involving men and money and wetlands, dreaming and draining, and emergence and fate. Not so different from the founding tale of New Orleans itself: unlikely impossible city rising from swamplands, waging guerrilla war against the natural order of things, against yellow fever and all manner of pestilence, most of the city below sea level, surrounded by water on all sides, sinking, unfathomable, precariou
s—and now look at it!

  NEW ORLEANS EAST BIGGEST THING IN YEARS, read the headline in the Times-Picayune.

  CITY WITHIN A CITY RISING IN THE SOUTH, proclaimed the New York Times.

  That New Orleans East was now a “new frontier,” ripe for development, was bemoaned by columnist McFadden Duffy in the Times-Picayune: “This tract was once the personal property of daring French colonists, the productive plantation and game preserve of New Orleans’ forefathers. The shotgun blast, the snap of the trap, the whizz of the reel will be heard no more. The ‘call of the wild’ moves elsewhere, once more crowded out by progress.”

  It was called a “Model City … taking form within an old and glamorous one” that if successful would have made New Orleans “the brightest spot in the South, the envy of every land-shy community in America.”

  And then, too, it was the space age. Men were blasting off; the country electrified by the Apollo missions and the thought of explorations to come. Few Americans knew that the rocket boosters for the first stage of the Saturn launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, were constructed in NASA’s New Orleans East facilities, in the Michoud neighborhood, where my father, Simon Broom, worked and his son Carl would later work.

  The 131-metric-ton stage one boosters built in the East were, one could say, the most important aspect of the rocket for they carried the fuel and oxygen needed for combustion, producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust; launching the rocket into space; and at thirty-eight miles up, self-destructing, burning up in the earth’s atmosphere, allowing the now-lightened rocket to continue its mission to the far reaches, the boosters sacrificed for the greater good.