The Yellow House Read online

  NASA became the main draw that New Orleans East Inc. used to lure other industry. Folgers Coffee was one of the first businesses to come and one of the only ones to stay.

  “Boosted into the space age by the Saturn rocket, the dream of New Orleans East shows signs of accelerated movement into reality,” wrote a local reporter in 1962. “The dream is staggering—to transform a flat, low wilderness into a city, the size of Baton Rouge, within the city of New Orleans.”

  In those dreaming days when the city was helping launch men to the moon, in those heady times before white flight, civil rights, the oil bust, subsidence, before tourism would become the main economic engine and codependent, Ray Samuel pronounced: “If ever the future can be studied from the past, New Orleans, augmented by its last remaining section, is surely destined for a tomorrow that neither the facile pen of the journalist nor the measured phrases of a lawyer can express. Posterity will certainly look upon it one day and say, ‘What hath God wrought.’”

  But when the advertisement for the Yellow House appeared in the Auctions section of the newspaper in 1961 alongside other properties seized due to tax liens or defaulted mortgages or marriages gone bad, my mother wasn’t thinking about the hype.

  She was a widow, eight months pregnant and renting an apartment on Upperline Street. Webb’s stepfather, Nathan Hobley, had begun to visit, impressing upon her the value of owning a home. He drove her around to look at houses, mostly in New Orleans East, which in 1961 was overwhelmingly white. Mom saw herself living in the city, not the distant arm of it, but Hobley encouraged her to pioneer eastward, as he and Webb’s mother, Mildred, already had and as others would undoubtedly do. But what did being a pioneer actually feel like? And how would you know if you were one? You knew, for starters, when you were the only black family on the street.

  Hobley preferred the houses on the longer side of Wilson Avenue, away from Chef Menteur’s traffic, the railroad tracks, and the Mississippi River, closer to the schools and the supermarkets. But this one in the ad he had torn from the newspaper was on the short side of Wilson. It was a modest wooden shotgun house painted light green, with a screened-in porch. The structure needed work, but something about it drew Ivory Mae in. The land was almost wild, with grass between the houses—I can’t stand no close-together houses—where kids could run and play, where the only cars on the street were meant to be there, a rural village right in the middle of building up. Her attraction to the narrow pale structure was nothing resembling love; it was more like dreaming.

  She would take it.

  Hobley made an offer on Ivory Mae’s behalf. The house cost $3,200. It would take a few years to renovate, but Mom would oversee the work from the rented brick house across Chef on the long end of Wilson, the house where she married Simon Broom. Mom paid for her house with money from Webb’s life insurance policy. She was nineteen years old, the first in her immediate family to own a house, a dream toward which her own mother, Lolo, still bent all of her strivings.

  In 1964, three years after Ivory Mae bought her home, it was ready; the merged family’s move there from the rented brick house was not far. If need be, items could be pushed down Wilson Avenue on wheels, past the houses on both sides, until the stoplight where Chef Menteur Highway whizzed its travel motion and where sat the Red Barn with its country-and-western music blaring, then over to the short end of the long street and down maybe fifty feet to 4121.

  From the start, the house was sinking in the back. It needed to be built back up.

  For fifty dollars a load, dump trucks arrived with gravel and rocks and stones. No one was exempt from the work. Mom pushed wheelbarrows back and forth from the front to the back over a temporary bridge made from boards that Simon laid down, her feet and legs muddied. Boy neighbors who saw her said she was a beauty out there, working so hard, inspiring everyone else.

  “It was cold,” neighbor Walter Davis remembers. “Her nose was running. She would roll up with that barrow, unload that barrow, going back and forth there. My dad and them said, ‘Get out there and go help.’” They lent a hand, but she stayed there working, too.

  After the family had moved in, Simon Broom planted two cedar trees at the front near to the ditch between the yard and an unpaved Wilson Avenue. The trees, the same height as six-year-old Eddie, were spaced so that you walked between them onto a long dirt pathway leading to the front door. Simon cemented the path, then painted it an ugly taupe more beautiful after it faded.

  Ivory Mae made a camellia- and magnolia-filled garden that ran from the front of the house along the side. She planted mimosas—rain trees, they called them, for how they grew pretty pink flowers that fell in such scattered bulk you could sweep them all day and not be done. She planted gladiolas, the way she had seen her mother, Lolo, do. And pink geraniums.

  The land did not refuse her advances. She kept going. She laid out a row of shrubbery that ran the entire length of the house, 160 feet. Facing the street, underneath the big front window, she planted cactus trees, as if setting a trap.

  Ivory and Simon hung narrow black metal numbers on the front of the house in a crooked vertical line:

  4

  1

  2

  1

  The screened-in porch existed only briefly, long enough for a few nights out there sipping Old Grand-Dad. Mr. Taylor, an electrician and one of Simon’s best friends, was there a lot, smoking his cigars. He was a short wrinkle-faced man, a white version of Sammy Davis Jr. in navy-blue Dickies. Mom would be holding a cigarette, taking puffs from time to time, not even inhaling, the thing burning down to a nub in her hand.

  The porch was converted into an extension of the living room, with beautiful French windows that opened out. Mom hung heavy satin curtains that she’d sewn, curtains that she changed out in the winter and spring when the house was remade.

  It was beautiful because that was my first house that I actually owned. Everything was new then. The house was my beginnings. I made it new with Simon’s help and my own skills. Brand-new furniture, the one time everything was new. And brand-new carpet. Bright yellow carpet of all things. Why in the hell were people with a thousand children getting yellow carpet. They would be pretty, but it would be a lot of work trying to keep them up. When the rugs dirtied, Simon rented a carpet cleaner from K&B drugstore off Chef Menteur.

  Mom had already started collecting French provincial–style pieces from Barnett’s, a place that sold real nice furnitures. You put so much money down and you would pay maybe fifty or sixty dollars a month. Every time I paid that off I’d get something else. The couch was wide with yellow brocade fabric with hints of gold and the prettiest legs. Its two matching slipper chairs sat in each corner of the room. And just like my mother I had that big gold mirror that sit right as soon as you walk in the door.

  You walked in and saw you reflected back.

  Karen’s baby bed was set up in the living room on the perch, a slightly raised and thus stagelike area where the screened-in porch used to be. Karen, like every child who was born to Ivory and Simon, slept in the baby bed until she was so big the bed broke down. Ivory Mae felt her and Simon’s bed in the room next door could become dangerous. We could smother them, you know, if they was sleeping and you were having sex and all.

  When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.

  When Ivory and Simon were both feeling good, after bourbon and a small party usually, Ivory Mae spoke about buying the yard in between the two houses, the strip of land that still belonged to Della Davis, who paid taxes on it from California. Mom dreamed of converting her narrow house into a double with a porch and a center hall.

  I always dreamt I would have this house that was so pretty. It was gonna have a nice front yard, a big backyard. Three bedrooms. A sewing room. I always pictured a front room that had a window with a little seat running across it. I could see myself just sitting up on the couch with my foot up. I was gonna have these pillows at my back. I’m reading a book, just sitti
ng there looking at the rain, at anything. It wasn’t a big ole house, just a nice house.

  In those years, it seemed Simon was always adding on: to the house and to the family. Not yet with kids, but with dogs. Mostly collies. Beauty was coal black but missing a tail; there were Jack and Butch, dogs that looked at you like they was old men. For them, a silver chain-link fence went up, alongside the house in the space between 4121 and Ms. Octavia’s house next door.

  No one ever saw Simon Broom cry until the first time one of his dogs died. He’d weep like one of them children had died. Big grown man all tore up and crying like a baby. I’d have to get him right again. The dogs were buried in the backyard, out by the septic tanks, close to the back property line; on the other side of the fence were cottages full of people living.

  Their immediate neighbors, Octavia and Alvin Javis, had one daughter, Karen, whom they obsessed over and thus ruined. Karen bore three children: Herman, Rachelle, and Alvin.

  Octavia Javis was sister to Samuel Davis Sr., who lived in the house next door to them, two houses down from Ivory Mae’s new house. When Samuel Davis and his family moved to Wilson Avenue in the summer of 1963 from a one-bedroom apartment complex with the kitchen and bathroom in the hallway, he and his wife, Mae Margaret Fulbright, already had seven children. Samuel’s house was a solid square with slate siding and two doors on the side. It was one big room, formerly part of a military hospital that had been moved to Wilson, but much larger than what they’d had before.

  The Davises were also neighbors to Ms. Schmidt, a tall, thin gray-haired white woman who wore thick white cotton socks all the time, for her diabetes. “Ms. Schmidt was uptown,” Sam Davis Jr. says. “Her home was uptown. Next to us, she had money.”

  Her house, a white two-bedroom cottage with a hallway, was separated from the rest of the street by a tall wooden fence that marked a land of no return, especially for boys playing ball. “She took every ball we ever had,” my brother Michael says.

  “She was just mean to be mean,” says Joyce, Sam’s sister. “You’d go up on that porch and knock on that door. ‘Get off my porch! What you knocking on my door for?’ Now once in a while you might catch her in a semi-good mood. That’s when she’d finally give you that ball back.”

  She had two pecan trees, one that sat back by the garage, another closer to the street. She didn’t mind the children picking the short, fat pecans that fell near the garage, “You had to work to eat those,” Sam Davis remembers. But the ones on the tree closest to the front were the kind you wanted, long and thin and off-limits.

  Ms. Schmidt had a garage double the size of her cottage, where she parked her beige early model Ford. As soon as her car turned onto the street from Chef Menteur, she was nearly at her drive. Her universe, therefore, did not consist of much except her house and Mr. Spanata’s land, a complex of persimmon groves on two narrow plots, and several houses that faced inward, a small village arranged to mimic his native home in Italy.

  Whereas the persimmons in Ms. Octavia’s backyard were tiny, Mr. Spanata’s were the size of apples.

  “He was from the old, old country and didn’t want to change,” says Walter Davis. “He grew persimmons that I ain’t never seen nobody else have. You could take and eat as many as you wanted.”

  From Chef Menteur Highway, the houses ran down toward Old Gentilly Road in this order: Spanata, Schmidt, Davis, Javis, and Broom.

  The short end of Wilson stayed still in a way, anchored as it was by the houses on one side of the street. The houses and the families who belonged to them composed the short end of Wilson’s identity, which weathered with time, changed suddenly, then completely fell in on itself, like much else. But back then, it held steady while the other side of the street changed wildly. When Ivory and Simon moved in, the land across the street from the houses was Oak Haven trailer park, owned by J. T. LaNasa, a scheming local businessman.

  The children from the houses would, as sport, stand curbside watching trailer homes roll in on the backs of giant eighteen-wheeler trucks whose girth and grunting rattled the street. “Who these people gone be?” Michael would ask Eddie, who was a year older. “I wonder if they got some children.”

  The families—all of them white—arrived after the trailer homes had been settled on their narrow plots, the Astroturf already laid down, the families pulling up in cars with the hood two times longer than the body, dragging the ground, packed with their belongings. The license plates rarely read “Louisiana.” The new neighbors and their rolling homes presented a stark contrast to the fixedness of the houses, the existence of the trailers confirming an elsewhere, the fact that the American dream was a moving target that had to be chased down.

  At first Oak Haven existed only across the street from the houses, but because business at Michoud’s assembly plant—one of the largest in the world, housing NASA, Boeing, and Chrysler—was booming, Oak Haven expanded to the side of Ivory Mae’s house, extending to where Old Gentilly Road and Wilson met, helped along by LaNasa’s newspaper offer of “first month’s rent free if you qualify.”

  The land where the houses stood was always on the verge of being bought up.

  So-and-so wanted to buy the sinking land that the houses sat on, but the owners resisted. Wanted the land in order to expand Chef Menteur and then to expand the Louisville and Nashville Railroad line. J. T. LaNasa wanted to expand his trailer park business. The houses were inefficient, LaNasa always said, taking up too much space, to say they weren’t all that special. LaNasa, a short, stout man who lived with his family on Gentilly Boulevard across the Industrial Canal, would pull up in his brand-new pickup truck to tend to trailer park business, then stop by the front of the houses on his way out. His offers were laughable. To his mind, it was inevitable: the five houses would be overcome. He returned again and again bearing paltry offers, dangled in such a way that if you weren’t careful you might mistake them for compliments.

  That September of the move, in 1964, the Beatles came to town.

  A motorcade of black stretch limos ferried them out of the airport. The procession made its way down Chef Menteur, past Wilson Avenue. The interstate was a year from finished, making Chef Menteur the only route through the East. The Beatles made a chaotic arrival to the Congress Inn, four miles from Wilson, a squat, one-story motel on Chef Menteur Highway that advertised itself as “100 units … with complete lounge and dining facilities,” evidence of New Orleans East Inc.’s building “extravaganza.”

  The Congress Inn was nothing special. But it was a place where fewer fans might converge and if it was damaged, no one would care. This motel would not suffer as might the Roosevelt Hotel downtown, which had begged Beatles management to cancel the group’s reservation there.

  Gathered at the Congress Inn when the limos pulled up were screaming, fainting girls and ambulances to take them away. The Beatles flew out from the cars into Room 100, where the windows had been boarded up as if a hurricane were coming. Mayor Victor Schiro arrived that afternoon and proclaimed that one had in fact come. The Beatles were, he said, an “English storm.” He said, too, that they played music “on a cousinship with jazz, the jumping, danceable historic art form which New Orleans has contributed to world culture,” before presenting each member of the group with a key to the city and designating that day, September 16, 1964, Beatles Day.

  While Beatlemania erupted just down the road, barely a person on the short end of Wilson Avenue knew it. Around the same time fainting girls were carried off in ambulances, Napoleon Fulbright was jumping down from a freight train that moved along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks at the edge of Wilson, his guitar flung over his shoulder. The older Davis children were running down the block toward the tracks to meet their uncle, Mae Margaret Davis’s brother, joined along the way by Michael, Eddie, Darryl, and a tottering Carl, all of them yelling “NAPOLEON!”

  “We’d be so happy when he came,” Michael says.

  “CALDONIA! CALDONIA! What makes your big head so h
ard!” Napoleon Fulbright, who also went by the name Moti, sang his favorite tune that night, lit by campfire in the Davises’ yard, his shadow flitting around the dark block. Napoleon was a man caught in a loop: either crying and singing or singing and crying, arriving in a town or leaving for elsewhere.

  He was a hobo and a wino if you were judging by looks, a master carpenter and railroad man by trade. During his stays, he picked up work around town, taught Walter and Sam carpentry, and did renovations around his sister Mae Margaret’s house. She’d want a hall here, a wall there.

  He cried, the stories go, because he’d gotten involved in the occult and had tried to put a hex on someone, but that backfired, didn’t go where it was supposed to, making Napoleon a man forever unseated. From that point on, it is said, he couldn’t abide any one place for too long.

  The mobile homes outnumbered the houses on the short end of Wilson, but the houses pulled rank. Ours was directly across from Oak Haven’s horseshoe drive, paved with broken clamshells that stabbed bare feet. My brothers, led by Michael, played a game of running their bicycles as fast as they could through the U-shaped drive, white tenants yelling out, “Nigger” as they went. The word seemed extended, floating like a blimp; you could still hear it as you flew out of there and back across the street to the side where you belonged.

  The houses were ordered inside and out by the standards of the times and so were the children. The adults wore titles in front their names—Miss, Mrs., Mr., Sir, Ma’am. No one knows what would have happened if you failed to address an adult in that way, because it never happened. Children belonged to each other but not to themselves. The street seemed to know when someone deserved chastisement and any parent could oblige. When one did, everything held quiet for a time.