The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
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 sitting 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