The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
but was then called Elkinsville after freed slave Palmer Elkins, who in the 1880s made for himself and his family a self-sufficient community composed of four dirt streets, named in the order in which they appeared: First, Second, Third, and Fourth. The Gants were tall, brooding men well known in the community. Samuel Gant, brother to Amelia’s father, was pastor of Mount Zion Baptist, Grandmother’s church in her later years, where her funeral service would be held and where her son Joseph still serves as deacon.
Sometime in Amelia’s childhood, no one is sure exactly when, she left St. Rose where she was born for New Orleans, a thirty-minute drive away, to live with her eldest sister. Edna had married Henry Carter, whom everyone called Uncle Goody. Edna was a Jehovah’s Witness, the young Amelia her right hand, toting Watchtower bulletins around city streets on long soul-saving sprees that netted few returns. Amelia never converted; she had the kind of mind to resist.
Edna and Uncle Goody lived uptown on Philip Street in a community of women where everyone called themselves something other than their given name, it seemed, where familial relationships were often based on need rather than blood. What you decided to call yourself, these women seemed to say, was genealogy too.
The disappeared Rosanna Perry had two sisters who were part of this community. People called her eldest sister Mama. Mama also answered to Aunt Shugah (Shew-gah), a supposedly Creolized version of Sugar except it is actually only a restating of the English word, the stress moved elsewhere. Aunt Shugah’s actual name was Bertha Riens. She was also sister to Tontie Swede, short for Sweetie. Aunt Shugah was the biological mother of a woman who only ever called herself TeTe, with whom Amelia shared a sisterhood even though they were cousins.
These women, who lived in close proximity, composed a home. They were the real place—more real than the City of New Orleans—where Amelia resided. In this world, Amelia became Lolo, another version of her name entirely, the origins of which no one can pinpoint. Everyone called her Lolo, no one uttered her given name again, not even her eventual children, which exacted on the one hand a distance between child and parent and on the other an unnatural closeness and knowing.
Lolo’s life contains silent leaps with little tangible evidence to consult. But then flecks of story appear: Grandmother was a young girl living with her sister Edna, then suddenly she was fourteen years old and living in a boardinghouse on Tchoupitoulas Street in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans.
Along with a teenage Lolo in the boardinghouse lived John Vaughan and his wife, Sarah McCutcheon, the woman Lolo would come to call Nanan and regard as her mother and whom Lolo’s children—Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory—would call Grandmother. She was Sarah Randolph by birth and Sarah McCutcheon by marriage; she was not a blood mother to Lolo, but she acted with the rights and liberties of one. Sometimes, when Sarah McCutcheon was upset she’d say, “I’m Aunt Carolina’s daughter,” but no one had any idea who Aunt Carolina was. And no one dared ask. It seemed an astounding riddle.
Two stories get told about Sarah McCutcheon: that she raised Lolo and that she once owned a restaurant that closed after a man she loved ran off with all her money. But before that, Sarah Randolph married Emile McCutcheon and they lived briefly together in St. Charles Parish. This must be how Sarah McCutcheon came to know Lolo’s father, John Gant; or how she came to know Lolo’s mother, Rosanna Perry.
Lolo learned from Sarah McCutcheon how to find the numinous in the everyday. It was from her that Grandmother learned to dress the body and dress a house like you would the body. How she saw firsthand that cooking was a protected ritual, a séance really. Grandma McCutcheon had this big potbelly stove, black cast iron. It was the best food I’ve ever eaten, period. Meatballs with tomato gravy, stewed chicken, stew meat with potatoes. She’d make her own biscuits from scratch. She’d make root beer and put it in the bottles. She’d get these tomatoes, you didn’t even know about no lettuce. She sliced these tomatoes so thin, put them in a bowl with vinegar and sugar. You’d be drinking the juice. That’s my mother, Ivory Mae, speaking for herself.
Cooking had to be done right because food carried around in it all kinds of evil and all kinds of good just waiting to be wrought. This was why, for instance, before you ate a cucumber you rubbed the two ends of it together to get the fever out. And why you always cooked the slime all the way out of the okra before you served it. Why? You didn’t ask, because inquiry from children or young people toward an elder was not allowed. You didn’t make eye contact with adults either. You spoke to other children if you were a child. These were protections.
But even if you could ask why, Sarah McCutcheon would likely say, “Because they said.” “They” were omniscient and omnipresent, requiring no explanation.
Each meal was a creation, derived from scratch, the smell and taste unified. Sarah McCutcheon painstakingly taught Lolo this. Lolo would teach her three children, too. Whatever seasoning my mother and her brother and sister chopped for food had to be so fine it would not be visible in the finished dish. Chunky meant unrefined, that care had not been taken, that the thing was done in haste. If it did not look appetizing, Sarah McCutcheon taught Lolo—and Lolo taught her own children—it could not be good to eat, and this small germ of an idea that appearance determines taste settled deep, especially in my mother, Ivory Mae, who to this day does not eat what does not appear right.
At fourteen, Grandmother had not been to school within the past year, according to 1930’s census documents. She had dropped out after fifth grade but could read and write. And she knew, above all, how to work, which is always the beginning of fashioning a self.
Lolo worked for what she wanted, but what she set her sights on was always changing. She was practical, known to tell an aspiring but not-quite-there person, “You got champagne taste with beer money.” The matriarch of one family she cleaned for was always giving Lolo her old china, her elaborate heavy curtains. These beautiful, sometimes fragile things had to be handled a certain way. They were the kinds of objects that slowed you down, could take some of the crass out of you. This family nurtured but did not ignite Lolo’s love for beautiful things. That had come from Sarah McCutcheon, long before.
Lolo placed men in the category of beautiful things. Lionel Soule was one. A married man, a devout Catholic whose wife was unable to have children, he fathered Lolo’s three—Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory—but was present in name alone, bestowing upon Elaine and Ivory a last name, Soule, which in the right company spoke something about them. Lionel Soule was descended from free people of color; his antecedents included a French slaveowner, Valentin Saulet, who served as a lieutenant in the colonial French administration during the city’s founding days. Having a French or Spanish ancestor confirmed your nativeness in a city colonized by the French for forty-five years, ruled by the Spanish for another forty, then owned again by the French for twenty days before they sold it to America in 1803, a city where existed as early as 1722 a buffer class, neither African and slave nor white and free, but people of color who often owned property—houses, yes, but sometimes also slaves, at a time in America when the combination of “free” and “person of color” was a less-than-rare concept. This group—often self-identified as Creole; claiming a mixture of French, Spanish, and Native American ancestry; passing for white if they could and if they chose—had been granted access to the kinds of work held only by white people: in the arts (painting, opera, sculpture), or as metalworkers, carpenters, doctors, and lawyers.
This was partly why my Uncle Joe, though Lionel’s son, was confused and disappointed about having been given his mother’s maiden name, Gant. He claims he thought he was Joseph Soule up until he was a grown man in the navy, when the sergeant called out Joseph Gant, the name on his birth certificate, causing him to look around “like a stone-cold fool,” he says now. When he asked his mother why he carried his grandfather’s last name she said, “You lucky you had a name.”
Lolo was dark skinned and fine with big thick legs that men loved to grab hold of. There is a single image of a young Lolo—her hair slicked back with curled-under bangs running the width of her forehead—taken at Magnolia Studio, the only black-owned photo studio in the city. It had the best-dressed waiting room. To advertise, they hung along