The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
door to that (all the houses on the short end except for one were on the left side of the street) is a concrete slab representing the house where the Davis family lived before getting fed up with the short end of Wilson and moving elsewhere.
Then you will come upon Ms. Octavia’s cream-colored shotgun house that now belongs to her granddaughter Rachelle—the only remaining legal inhabitant of the street—before finally arriving at what used to be our Yellow House.
My mother, Ivory Mae, bought this house in 1961 when she was nineteen years old. It was her first and only house. Within its walls, my mother made her world. Twelve children passed through its doors: descendants of Ivory Mae Broom and her first husband, Edward Webb; of Ivory Mae Broom and Simon Broom; and of Simon Broom and his first wife, Carrie Broom. We are Simon Jr., Deborah, Valeria, Eddie, Michael, Darryl, Carl, Karen, Troy, Byron, Lynette, and Sarah. We span the generations, born to every decade, beginning in the forties. I arrived ten hours before the eighties.
When you are babiest in a family with eleven older points of view, eleven disparate rallying cries, eleven demanding and pay-attention-to-me voices—all variations of the communal story—developing your own becomes a matter of survival. There can be, in this scenario, no neutral ground.
Yet feelings of transgression linger, the conviction that by writing down the history of the people who have come before me—who, in a way, compose me—I have upended the natural order of things.
When I call my eldest brother, Simon, at his home in North Carolina to explain all the things I want to know and why, he expresses worry that by writing this all down here, I will disrupt, unravel, and tear down everything the Broom family has ever built. He would like, now, to live in the future and forget about the past. “There is a lot we have subconsciously agreed that we don’t want to know,” he tells me. When he asks about my project, I am imprecise, lofty, saying I am writing about “architecture and belonging and space.”
“It is a problem when you are talking too much,” he says. I take his sentence down in my notebook at the moment he says it, just as he says it. I have not added a single word. Nor have I taken anything away.
In New Orleans, we tell direction by where we are in relation to the Mississippi River, in relation to water. Our house was bounded by water. The Mississippi snaked three miles to the back of us. Less than a mile away, west and south, were the Industrial Canal and its interlinking Intracoastal Waterway. Lake Pontchartrain sat two miles north. To the far east lay the Rigolets, a strait connecting Lake Pontchartrain to Lake Borgne, a brackish lagoon that opens into the Gulf of Mexico. We were surrounded by boats, barges, and trains; ingresses and egresses—a stone’s throw from the Old Road, which is what we called Old Gentilly Road. My father, Simon Broom, took the Old Road to his job at NASA. Later, my brother Carl took the Old Road to his job at NASA. Same road, same maintenance job, different men. But the road is impassable now because at a certain point, illegal tire and trash dumps block the way. The train tracks perched above the Old Road were laid in the 1870s for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, trains that passed almost nightly in my growing up. Their clacking and roar were the sounds outside my window as I tried to sleep. The Old Road could, if clear, lead you to the Michoud neighborhood, where Vietnamese immigrants settled after the Vietnam War; or to Resthaven cemetery, where my best childhood friend, Alvin, is buried; or to NASA’s manufacturing plant, where rocket boosters were built for the Apollo space mission but where Hollywood fantasies are conjured now, its unused acres frequently leased as movie sets.
By bringing you here, to the Yellow House, I have gone against my learnings. You know this house not all that comfortable for other people, my mother was always saying.
Before it was the Yellow House, the only house I knew, it was a green house, the house my eleven siblings knew. The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst. My mother is always saying, Begin as you want to end. But my beginning precedes me. Absences allow us one power over them: They do not speak a word. We say of them what we want. Still, they hover, pointing fingers at our backs. No place to go now but into deep ground.
MOVEMENT I The World Before Me
The things we have forgotten are housed.
Our soul is an abode and by remembering houses and rooms, we learn to abide within ourselves.
Gaston Bachelard
In the world before me, the world into which I was born and the world to which I belong, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Amelia, was born in 1915 or 1916 to John Gant and Rosanna Perry, a shadow of a woman about whom only scratchings are known. Even the spelling of Rosanna’s name is uncertain. She appears briefly in Lafourche Parish census records for 1910 and 1920. These papers tell us that my great-grandmother lived in Raceland, Louisiana, could not read or write, and that she had been widowed. Next to my great-grandmother Rosanna’s name, no form of work was ever indicated. Those are the facts as they were recorded, but this is the story as the generations tell it.
Rosanna Perry had these five children: Edna, Joseph, Freddie, my grandmother Amelia, and Lillie Mae. Doctors had warned Rosanna that another child would kill her; still, Lillie Mae was born in August 1921 when Amelia was five or six years old. It has always been said that my great-grandmother Rosanna Perry died in childbirth when she was thirty-four, but those who might know are not alive to confirm, deny, or offer alternative theories, and burial records cannot be found. Whatever the facts, Rosanna disappeared.
Of Rosanna’s children, the only one ever to reside under the same roof with her was the son Joseph. Where her other four children went after being born, why they went, and with whom they lived is uncertain. And so even if Rosanna did not die giving birth to Lillie Mae, my grandmother Amelia still would not have had a mother.
Grandmother was born on Ormond Plantation, named after an Irish castle, next to which the West Indies colonial–style Louisiana replication would appear bedraggled and dim. Ormond sits haughtily still, it doesn’t care, along Louisiana’s River Road, seventy miles of two lanes hugging tight to the curves of the Mississippi River, its waters hidden behind levees that look like molehills. The “fabled Great Mississippi River Road,” present-day brochures call it. Its “showy houses, gay piazzas, trim gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat,” read the description during its pre–Civil War heyday when tons of “white gold” sugarcane were grown and processed in Louisiana, building generational wealth and power for white plantation owners.
What modern marketers never tout is how in 1811 the largest slave revolt in American history, an army of five hundred or so, wound its way along the River Road for two days, strategically headed toward New Orleans to take over the city, stopping only to light plantations afire after loading up on weaponry. They made it far, considering—twenty of forty-one miles—before a local white militia halted them. Some slaves escaped; others were shot on the spot. Of the unlucky ones put on trial, most had their heads severed and placed on poles atop the River Road’s levees—forty miles of heads, the grisly trophies of petrified whites.
Today, the “pillared splendor” (as a recent brochure describes) of the River Road’s plantations is flanked and outmatched by petrochemical refineries, their silver nostrils blowing toxic smoke.
Long before the near-to-end when my grandmother would forget her life’s story, she claimed July 1916 as her birth date even though it was officially recorded a year or two after the fact. Fixed details were important to stories, Amelia knew, even if you couldn’t prove them.
She was named after her father, John Gant’s, mother, Emelia, whom she would never meet. Grandmother’s namesake presided over a large family