The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
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, precarious—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.
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