The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
as “cerebral concussion and subarachnoid hemorrhage.” Webb was eighteen years, ten months, and seven days old, two months away from his birthday on Christmas Day.
On the death certificate, listed both as “next of kin or next friend” and “wife” is Ivory Soule Webb, address 4116 Darby Street, New Orleans.
Lying there in the casket, Webb looked three times his age. His skin was darker than Mom had remembered, his head swollen due to the circumstances of his dying. She stood there looking at her husband of two years, but really he was her childhood friend of forever. They had lived together as husband and wife in the same house for less than a year before his enlistment. What was there between them now? There were the love letters about sweet childish things: how one day his woman would make his house a home, generalities mostly, and two children now between them, another on the way.
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.”
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