The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
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 hard!” 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.
From the time they were small boys, Michael and Darryl went around cursing. When this memory is revived today everyone laughs because, of course. When Simon Broom could no longer stand it, he decided Michael, as the older of the two, needed a spanking.
Go cut a switch.
Michael returned dangling a substandard twig.
“Mr. Simon went out there and cut a branch off a tree and beat that negro with it,” Sam Davis Jr. recalls now. “What tripped me out, it wasn’t that he got beat with a switch, this dude got beat with a branch.”
Everyone knew, too, the ferocity of Mr. Samuel, Sam and Walter’s dad. He had a reputation for slowly cueing up his punishments. He’d lean the weight of himself to one side of the doorsill and start to talking about what the Bible said.
“Honor your father and mother …” Mr. Samuel always began.
“I hate to do this to you, son. I really do.
“So that your days may be long …
“But after what you did. It just can’t be avoided.
“So that all may be well with you …”
It took him a long time to come round to the action. “When Dad whupped, he whupped the whole house, he whupped everything in the house,” says his son Walter Davis now.
The older children lorded over the younger. Sam and Walter Davis were the elder by three and four years over Eddie and Michael.
Sam often designed entire summer days, marching the Davis and Broom boys in single file like young army recruits all the way down the Old Road where Mount Pilgrim Church was, chanting military cadences as they went. Naturally, anyone who got out of line would be disciplined.
Along the way, the smaller boys fished for crawfish in the ditches along Old Gentilly Road where, if you weren’t careful, one of your car tires might find itself. They’d drop nets into the ditch and pull up buckets and buckets of crawfish for boiling.
Michael and Darryl would often break off along with JoJo, the Davises’ youngest boy, to climb over the railroad tracks into the woods where they wandered for hours, fishing and falling into bodies of water formed in the last rains. On the way back, they picked blueberries along the train tracks.
There were ditches everywhere you looked. “It was like we were the rural part of New Orleans,” Walter Davis said. One fall, at the start of third grade, his teacher at his black elementary school, McDonogh 40, asked how many students had left town. One kid had gone to Los Angeles, another to Chicago. Walter raised his hand and said he’d traveled to Gentilly, referring to his family’s move to Wilson Avenue. “Boy, I said if anybody left town,” the teacher said.
“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘We didn’t leave town?’” says Walter now. “That’s when I found out that the East was part of New Orleans.”
The women stayed home while the men and boys worked, except for Mae Margaret, who worked small jobs without her husband, Samuel Davis, knowing, beating it back to home before him, ruffling her hair and slipping into a frock. Mr. Samuel worked close to the Industrial Canal at American Marine Shipyard, which in 1967 built the largest aluminum oceangoing commercial ship in world history. Two hundred twenty-six feet at a cost of $1.6 million, but still, Samuel Davis never earned enough to own a car. When he died it was on the job, pumping out a barge.
Simon Broom had begun his work at NASA for the contractor Mason-Rust as a groundskeeper and maintenance man, which meant he tended the plant’s 832 acres, painting, grass cutting, and repairing whatever needed it. His niece Geneva, the daughter of his sister Corrine, worked at NASA, too, but in a lab. He could see her through the narrow window in