The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
by Deborah and Valeria, who went to the only black public school in the area at the time, McDonogh 40. Valeria complained daily about her hair: “Miss Ivory put it in a million little plaits, a million barrettes sticking out everywhere.” But what she hated was passing by St. Mary’s Academy where the light-skinned girls flaunted their coloration, long hair, and class. Valeria was a seeing child; she noticed the way Eddie and Michael’s aunts and grandmother treated them like small kings. “They ate up Eddie and Michael. We watched. We just … we just couldn’t understand. Until later, when we were older.”
Jefferson Davis Elementary on the long end of Wilson was still segregated, which was why in a letter to Mayor Victor Schiro, a tax consultant referred to the East as “safe” from school integration. As in: “Of course Lakeview, Aurora Gardens, East New Orleans … and part of Gentilly is still ‘safe’ but what about other parts of New Orleans?” Another letter writer made the case this way: “By integrating the schools of New Orleans there is a potential loss of sixty million dollars yearly in purchasing power, plus the loss of much revenue which have to be made up from some source. Will the negroes foot the bill with their welfare checks????”
Eddie, who was nearly ten, scored badly in all his subjects at St. Paul, including physical education. After learning his father’s story, Eddie felt that he was biding his time, waiting to die at eighteen just as Webb did.
Michael was an academic star. His class assignments were always perfect. He finished them earlier than the other children, then, out of boredom, taunted the kids who still worked. Darryl’s behavior was the polar opposite. On report cards, teachers called him “everyone’s favorite.” “Darryl is just a wonderful example of what an ideal student should be! He’s loved by all his teachers, and he seems to just do the right thing most of the time. It has been my pleasure to teach him; I anticipate a fine future for Darryl,” one teacher wrote.
Around the time school let out and the four-o’clocks bloomed, Mom would be at the stove finishing a meal that tasted as good as it looked. Simon would have arrived home by now from his work at NASA, coming down Old Gentilly Road and turning right onto the short end of Wilson, his car the first in a long procession that took the same shortcut to avoid traffic on Chef Menteur Highway. When Simon pulled into the drive, the other men following him yelled out of their car windows, “Simon, you son of a bitch, working so close to home.” The men kept on across congested Chef Menteur to their lives. Simon went inside for maybe a minute, then was back out in the yard, which was the room of the house he loved best. Sometimes, for no reason, after the kids were asleep, Ivory and Simon danced on the grass between the houses, Mom looking up at him, her arms stretched to hold on to his neck, her head buried in the middle of his chest. He still couldn’t believe the sight of her. His pretty little wife. He felt powerless against her.
On nights such as this they sometimes found themselves sitting on the edge of their bed, Simon sometimes with his head in his hands—either he had a headache or he was thinking something through. No one can know now. He was always a young-acting old man; she seemed always a grown young woman.
Mom would say, I love you, Simon.
I said I love you Simon.
When he stayed silent, she pressed. You don’t love me back?
“You’re my beautiful, pretty little wife,” he would always say. It was not enough, no, but nothing ever was.
One time, in 1969, two years after Troy, Simon turned to Ivory Mae and said, “We don’t need to be having all of these children.”
You’re right, she had said.
And then?
Byron Keith was born.
Her children’s births were not the main way Ivory Mae measured time passing. She recalled the particulars of births only if they were wrenching enough. The children born from her body were all one big delivery to her mind, mostly indistinguishable, the results nearly always the same. But Byron was born in springtime, unforgettable because her mother, Lolo, my grandmother, had bought her first house in St. Rose, minutes from Ormond Plantation where she was born. Preston Hollow was a U-shaped subdivision built for black people atop former oil fields, surrounded by petroleum processing plants, but this detail was not in the official sales pitch. The house on Mockingbird Lane was the fulfillment of a dream, a place where Grandmother’s family could routinely gather, a place where she could unpack her beautiful things and give them a permanent geography. But her husband, Mr. Elvin, was against it, preferring city living. Lolo bought the house anyway. “He went to work a renter and came home a homeowner,” says Uncle Joe. It is said that Grandmother gave him an ultimatum, declaring her love first, then telling him she was moving to St. Rose with or without him. So which was it?
With, his actions said. With.
Byron took his position as the baby boy of the male kingdom, but quietly. Michael was forever taunting him, sometimes dangerously. Once, he tried to hang Byron (like a shirt or a pair of pants) from Mom’s clothesline in the backyard. Joyce Davis, the neighbor, saw it go down and tells a heroic story about how she was standing two houses over in her back door when she saw Michael lifting Byron onto a trash can, how at eight months pregnant she ran and climbed the fence into our yard to stop Michael, who she thought was playing but who kept at his work on Byron even after she called for him to “stop that boy, stop it now.” He was tying a rope around Byron’s neck and looking ready to remove the trash can. “If it were not for me,” she says now, “Byron would not be here on this earth.” But the Davises are prone to hyperbole. Joyce’s mother, Mae Margaret, was said to have rescued Simon Broom, who was stuck underneath a car that had been poorly jacked up. Mae Margaret was sitting on her porch, the story goes, saw the car fall on Simon, and bounded over to singlehandedly lift it, releasing him from death’s grasp.
Simon’s life—which Mae Margaret had allegedly saved—consisted mostly of work. On weekends, he banged violently on the faux-wood paneling leading to the boys’ room in the crown, his voice booming: “Come down.” Any time past 5 a.m. he considered oversleeping. The boys—Eddie, Michael, Darryl, Carl, a too-small Troy, then later Byron—scurried and pouted on the way to whatever job he had found for them to do. “When every other kid in the world was sleeping,” Eddie complains, they were already crisscrossing the city. “We either painted something, tore something down, or did pest control.” In the evenings, they sometimes catered parties. Other times, they assisted Mr. Taylor on electrical jobs.
“The white Mr. Taylor,” Carl says, “was Daddy’s white best friend, but he also had a black best friend. His name was Mr. Taylor, too. We used to go around his shop and clean up.” The black Mr. Taylor owned a barroom in back of a barbershop. Simon bartered his and the boys’ services for haircuts. Every Friday night, the boys arrived to empty the black Mr. Taylor’s trash barrels onto the back of Simon’s old black Ford, which announced its arrival everywhere it went. On their drives, Simon related his philosophy on how everything should be done well, how what they started they needed to finish, wisdom he didn’t always follow.
The boys sometimes went to Saints games before the Superdome was built, back when they were held at Tulane Stadium—but to work—entering the stadium against the wave of fans filing out. Eddie found this deeply embarrassing, but Michael made fun of it, throwing Carl into the massive dumpster and rolling him down the ramp that led indoors.
Carl was Simon number two except he could be wild in his appearance, his hair uneven and patchy, his skin dry as if he had fled the moisturizing sessions that came after Mom’s bathing.
“I used to always get Daddy’s trumpet ready for him,” says Carl. “Just wipe it off for him and try to play it. He’d say, ‘Boy, give it here, let me show you how to play that thing.’”
Of all the children, Michael could be counted on to make Simon mad. “I used to taunt him and mess with him. I thought I was so smart. I’d say, ‘Time to cut the grass. Gr-ass.’ ” Doing things like taking his shotgun and sawing it off. “That really pissed him off.”