The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
for much he begged to do his work, too.
Simon rarely seemed content with leisure. Except for when he was playing golf in Pontchartrain Park with a used set of golf clubs that “he used to hock every time we needed money,” says Eddie. The other time was on Mardi Gras day when he wore his gorilla mask or dressed like a hobo with torn clothes and a briefcase with rags hanging out, the case filled with the alcohol that put him three shades in the wind. He would drop Ivory Mae and the children off at Grandmother’s sister Lillie Mae’s house for Carnival, retrieving them at the end of the day. Mom, who did not know how to drive, prayed for safety the entire way home, her children in the back seat.
In the house at night, Mom often dreamt vivid scenarios where her sister, Elaine, and her brother, Joseph, were in mortal danger and she flew above them wanting to rescue them, except she couldn’t figure out how to land.
She was still “God’s kid,” she knew, but she sometimes felt not so different from the household fixtures, those immovable, bound things hanging on the walls that could not speak: golden angels and flying cherubs with cutouts underneath their wings for candles and dry flowers. A wall mirror half the size of the wall. To look at yourself in. Things with which to make a home. Delivered by messenger’s hand to the front door of 4121 Wilson, after she had chosen them from the Home Interiors catalog.
She was not a fearful person, except when it came to crawling things with tails. When she was home alone with the kids, without another adult in the house, and saw a lizard, she called Ms. Octavia to come over and search up and down until she found the thing. Mom might stand back by the door to the bedroom and point and yell about how the thing was somewhere in the closet, crawling on and between the hanging clothes. Ms. Octavia would bury her head in among the clothes Ivory had made, bang her hand against Simon’s golf club bag to scare the lizard up, and not stop until she rooted him out, dangling him between her thumb and index finger, dropping him outside in the yard.
The adults on the street stayed out of each other’s houses for the most part, unless there was good cause: Mom would go inside Ms. Octavia’s house when her husband, Alvin, died and Ms. Octavia would return the favor.
Big changes, the ones that reset the compass of a place, never appear so at the outset. Only time lets you see the accumulation of things. At the start of the seventies, the following stacked: An advertisement appeared in the Times-Picayune with the headline LOUISIANA PURCHASE 1971. “The biggest land deal of 1803 was the Louisiana Purchase,” it read. “The biggest land opportunity in 1971 is New Orleans East.” More than a decade had passed since the dream of New Orleans East Inc. had first been launched. Since then, Clint Murchison had died and Toddie Lee Wynne, feeling defeated, withdrew from the venture after his riverfront hotel deal fell through.
Nothing about the dream of New Orleans East Inc. had come to pass. The area contained 8,000 residents in 1971; 242,000 fewer than its original goal.
In 1972, the Apollo missions ended, reconfiguring things at NASA’s Michoud plant, which had, most notably, built the first-stage Saturn V rocket that launched astronauts to the moon. Though the plant added $25 million to the local economy and Simon kept his job, the 12,000 employees, counted in 1965, dwindled to 2,500.
Residents in Pines Village, one of the earliest eastern neighborhoods, minutes from Ivory Mae and Simon’s house, were threatening lawsuits against the city’s Sewerage and Water Board for “mental anguish and anxiety suffered during floods and all heavy rainstorms.” The city, they claimed, approved developers’ plans even though they knew elevation was too low for sufficient drainage, a problem exacerbated by new communities that further taxed the substandard drainage systems, “negligence … that is injurious to our health and safety,” one prophetic-seeming letter writer said. “What happens in this area will make New Orleans prosperous and strong financially or else it will cause the city to strangulate itself,” he wrote. “Undeveloped it is a chain around the city’s neck… . This area to the east is not a mirage. It will not go away if you ignore it. It will stay and haunt you if you do not start thinking of it as a part of the city.”
In its design—more apartments and trailer parks than houses; more streetlights than trees and parks; more paved roads than walkways—certain parts of the East were best driven through. Landscapes communicate feeling. Walking, you can grab on to the texture of a place, get up close to the human beings who make it, but driving makes distance, grows fear.
The Red Barn on the corner of Chef and Wilson that before blasted Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” became the Ebony Barn with Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine” coming off the stereos, serving a new clientele. Around this same time, construction began on a public housing project, a scattered site some city planners called it, on Chef Menteur Highway just next door to the Ebony Barn. Its proper name was Pecan Grove, but on the streets it was just the Grove. Before it was all the way finished, the children on the short end sold Ms. Schmidt’s fallen pecans to the construction workers. Ms. Schmidt couldn’t have cared less; she was leaving the East soon anyway. The Grove would house 221 apartments in a reddish-brown brick, two-story compound. According to the newspapers, it was an “experiment” meant to bring residents from several different downtown housing projects closer to New Orleans East, which soon-to-be residents would call the country. From the start of the complex’s going up, Simon Broom said it would infest everything around. He pointed to Press Park, where Ivory Mae’s sister, Elaine, lived, another scattered site, more westward. Press Park had been built on top of the Agriculture Street Landfill, ninety-five acres and seventeen feet of cancer-causing waste.
By the late 1970s, the racial composition of the East had flipped. Within twenty years, the area had gone from mostly empty to mostly white (investment) to mostly black (divestment).
The street transformed, too. In 1972, Samuel Davis Jr., eldest son to Mr. Samuel, married and left the short end of Wilson. He was the first child raised on the street to do so.
My sister Deborah was second to go. She had graduated from Abramson High School in 1972, and was expecting to go to college, as her father had promised her mother before she died, but now Simon Broom had different ideas. He couldn’t afford it, he said. He thought she should get a job and help support the growing family. Deborah would not do that, she told her father. Even though she was eighteen years old at the time, she was spanked. No, she was beaten by Simon Sr. with a sugarcane and then afterward, because she was raised to be obedient to elders, Deborah ironed his work shirt for the next day, ironed it the best she ever had, packed her bags, and waited for her mom’s sisters to arrive and take her away with them. Despite him, she enrolled in college at Southern University of New Orleans days after leaving home.
Shortly after that, Karen was run over by a car on Chef Menteur Highway while trying to get to third grade.
Karen and Carl were one year, one grade, apart. Sometimes, the two of them walked alone to Jefferson Davis Elementary on the long end of Wilson. They were told to hold hands and cross together; they had done it often enough to take it for granted. Carl must have run ahead. Karen was a silent child, which was just the thing to get you forgotten.
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