The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
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 their 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 awhile 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.
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.