The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
perfectly fine buildings around the city, a tendency that Mom hated. Maintaining a house, she felt, was just like cooking: detail mattered. Everything Simon did it would last for a minute. Even if he painted you would see some places where he missed it. He was a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Simon thought perfect work like Uncle Joe’s took too long, which butted against Mom’s constitution as Lolo’s child. But she did not always say so. She had evolved from saying everything that came to mind to feeling everything and abiding it. When she spoke up, she and Simon fought mightily over how the house was rebuilt. Do it yourself then, he would say, furious. She couldn’t, even if she might try. When the addition was close to finished, Dad thought he could save money. After the men had installed temporary stairs, he vowed to finish them alone to show Ivory Mae that he could. But he never would.
The family grew into all the spaces of the house: all rooms were multipurpose; all were lived in, the family’s traces everywhere. Everything was used; nothing existed solely for show.
Every step you took in it was an important point on its map. And the house, fancier looking than before, drew people to it. This was why Uncle Joe always returned during his low times. And why there were always raucous parties; big booties squeezed into the den of the house; highballs aplenty; arms striving for the new ceiling, timed to musical beats; people milling about in the yard, telling stories, lying, and smoking.
Ivory and Simon made their bedroom in the nose of the house, closest to the street, their room separated from Valeria, Deborah, and Karen’s—the girls’ room—by the kitchen. It was the closest thing to privacy. They installed wicker accordion doors that did not lock. Michael was always barging in at the wrong moment. “Get out of here boy,” Ivory Mae was always saying.
The girls lived in the back, as if to hold the house down. The boys made their place in the newly built crown. The upstairs window looked down upon the narrow space of yard between our and Ms. Octavia’s house that now sat higher, on bricks, post-Betsy. Simon or Ivory Mae never ascended those temporary steps to upstairs, granting the boys a right to privacy that no one else had. Upstairs, Eddie, Michael, Darryl, and Carl made for themselves a private kingdom with boy rules and boy systems.
If the house was Mom’s beginnings, if the house was her world, she had to find within it a seat. She set her sewing machine on a table underneath the windowsill in the kitchen just feet away from her bedroom. The window looked out onto Ms. Octavia’s house and the lawn in between. Specifically, her window faced Ms. Octavia’s bathroom window. That would have been her view, except she sat too low to see anything.
When Mom was sitting in her chair, crocheting or making clothes or curtains, the small bathroom original to the house stared at her back.
Carl Broom hated that small bathroom, said it seemed eerie from the start.
“Certain kind of window in there, when you look through you could see a cross way up in heaven, some kind of reflection,” he says now. “I was scared of that son of a bitch.”
By the time he left it, he would have sprayed all the walls of that bathroom with piss from trying to finish so quick.
The windowpane had a numinous quality that drew congregants from the Divine Mission of God who came to the house on Wilson, as if on pilgrimage, to see what Carl was nervous about. They stood three or four at a time in the small bathroom, fitting themselves in among the towels and cleaning supplies, supplicants lined along the bathtub where Eddie, Michael, and Darryl took a bath every night. “Three kids to a tub,” says Darryl, “just like Adam and Eve before they knew they was naked.” Dr. Martin proclaimed the window a sign from God, a blessing that had befallen 4121.
But then the blessed sign began appearing in other houses too, becoming a small phenomenon, a miracle for ordinary people owning a certain brand of windowpane, a human interest story on nightly newscasts.
There was something in the material of the glass, it was eventually decided, that sunlight drew out. The manufacturers had used a new material. They were sorry for the hype and for Carl’s fear. You could call a certain 1-800 number for a replacement. It just disappeared after they said that. Thus retaining its magic.
Mom’s seat was also near (every place was near another place in the shotgun house) the refrigerator, which was at first a humming monstrosity and later a grunting monstrosity with a lock to ward off the boys’ growing hungers. Her seat was steps beyond the side door where the familiars knocked. If neighbors needed to borrow sugar or rice or salt, they went away satisfied, the goods wrapped in a paper towel.
From her seat, she made the clothes, every single piece that everyone in the house except Simon wore. This custom continued until the boys were teenagers and too embarrassed to wear pajamas made from the same bolt of fabric. The girls were teenagers and embarrassed, too, but they never had their way.
Sitting in this seat, she made new curtains for every room to match the coming in of seasons. She made curtains for the cars, too, for the white van and for the blue van that replaced it, the one she and Simon drove for many years before passing it on to the boys, who replaced the back seats with a twin bed, making a motel room on wheels that could be used for dates, Ivory Mae’s curtains pulled shut.
Later, I would peer from this kitchen window and watch the van rocking with the motion of my brothers and their dates, but that is running ahead. The boys are still children. And I am not yet born.
Those vans, the white one and then the blue, were driven around town to Schwegmann’s Super Market, to school graduations, to Zulu balls during Carnival time. Those vans were driven to meetings of the Pontchartrain Park Social Aid and Pleasure Club to which Ivory and Simon belonged. They were driven to Atlanta following behind the Saints who lost every time. Simon—a Freemason—made the social calendar; Mom made appearances.
The curtains made the van pretty, but Mom wished for a smaller, sportier car. New. This desire ran deep, but a two-seater would not match her current life. Mom longed for what now came to feel impractical, what wishes are made of. She loved, above all, beautiful things. Simon cared about affordability. His going-to-work car, a Buick Skylark, did not even go in reverse. Rather than spend the money to fix the car once and for all, he simply had the boys come and push it out from the driveway.
As Simon and Ivory settled into life in the rebuilt house, time moved in the usual distinct increments (morning, afternoon, evening; weekends and weekdays), but after a while, everything new turned old and they stopped seeing time as composed of moments. The years blurred.
Two years later and the temporary stairs were still temporary. During the building-up years, no new children were born, as if the house itself were the baby being raised. But then Deborah noticed the gray maternity dress hanging above the kitchen doorsill. The oldest three—Deborah, Valeria, and Eddie—moaned. Not another one. A new baby affected the girls’ lives especially; they were the babysitters and the assistant housekeepers, picking up after the older boys and the younger children: Michael was seven, a year older than Darryl. Karen was three to Carl’s four. Eddie thought things had gone too far: “I was wondering when the hell it was going to stop,” he said. “I thought they was just going to the hospital and picking up kids.” One more girl would have evened the score, but Troy was born on Thanksgiving Day 1967, which meant Uncle Joe made the holiday meal, memorable for not being Ivory Mae’s cooking. People took this Thanksgiving anomaly out on Troy for years. But he was the first child to come home to the reborn house.
He was a quiet baby and would be a quiet man. Too quiet, Mom sometimes thought. He could go deadly still in his bassinet on the living room perch. Mom would come rushing, lifting and shaking him vigorously like a can of frozen orange juice. She later thought this shaking might have ruined him. Or else it was the cigarette smoke she blew into the soft spots of all of her babies’ heads thinking that would cure the colic. She learned mothering by doing and by Lolo. I didn’t have friends. Mostly it was y’all, my children. And my mom. I called her every day, three or four times a day. Often, she thought of these conversations while walking Eddie, Michael, and Darryl to private school at St. Paul the Apostle on Chef Menteur Highway.