The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
a person you’d met on the street was somebody, you checked for their image on the walls of Magnolia Studio.
In her photo, Lolo wears horn-rimmed cat-eye glasses and a pastel-blue dress with white accents on the collar and on the pockets. Her shoes are dazzling red—the photographer painted them so—her ankles thick in the pumps. She stands tall, one arm on top of a pillar serving as prop, her hand partly open, the other on her right hip. She has what my mother calls dancing eyes, what I call laughing eyes. Instead of smiling, she just knows.
Lionel Soule glimpsed his two eldest, Joseph and Elaine, only a few times in rushed transactions when my grandmother appeared at his dock job to collect folded-up money from his palm. Auntie Elaine remembers this one detail: “With every word you could hear his fake teeth going click, click, click.” In her earliest years, my mother thought the following about her father: I didn’t know I had no daddy. I thought I just came here. I swear. I thought he was dead. I assume if he ain’t around, he must be dead. Which explains why when the one time her father, Lionel, came to visit, my mother ran and hid herself behind a door. Rather than wait for her or persuade her to come out, Lionel Soule left and never came back. Ain’t that the pitifullest thing you ever heard?
Grandmother named my mother Ivory after the color of elephant tusk. Those who are still alive to tell stories say Grandmother, who was twenty-five when Ivory Mae was born, became infatuated with elephants during frequent lunch breaks at the Audubon Zoo, which was within walking distance of a mansion on St. Charles Avenue where she once worked.
Uncle Goody called the child not by her coloration, Ivory, but by her birth year: ’41, the end of the Great Depression—the residue of which still mucked Uncle Goody’s life. Ivory’s nickname had the weight of a history Uncle Goody could not shake, which Ivory Mae understood made her highly significant, to Uncle Goody at least. “Where Old Forty-One?” he would always say.
Forty-One! The year of my birthday was what he called me. Here come Old Forty-One. I used to like it. I used to get so happy.
It paid to be his chosen. Uncle Goody worked on the Louisville and Nashville Railroad cleaning boxcars and lining them with wood. Sometimes he oiled the railcar brakes. At home, he presented another self, making molasses candy that stretched long like taffy. When Ivory Mae was around, she was always the first to taste. That was the first time I knew that men knew how to make candy.
Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory: When people said one name, they almost always said the other two. Joseph was three years older than Elaine, and Elaine was two years older than Ivory. The trio formed a small intimate band closed for membership.
Everyone knew that Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory belonged to Lolo, not by coloration, which could throw off the undiscerning (they bore their father’s color), but by their manner and how they dressed. Of the three children, Elaine was darkest, and she was the color of pecan candy—a milky tan. They were starched children, their lives regimented, Lolo’s attempt to create for them a childhood she had not had. This was why in every place she rented, she painted the walls first, as if doing so granted them permanence, which was the thing she craved. She bought brand-new wood furniture that looked to have been passed down through generations—Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory sustaining the aura of antiquity with their daily polishings. She shopped in the best stores, always collecting beautiful things and storing them away to be used later. But these untouched passions, boxes upon stacked boxes, succumbed to fire one night while the family stood on the sidewalk watching one of Lolo’s remade houses on Philip Street in the Irish Channel burn to the ground.
Of her history, Lolo seemed to know only her mother’s and father’s names and the names of those who raised her. She favored the moment, knew how remembering the past could elicit despair. For a long time, my mother says, Grandmother kept retelling the story of how she prayed unceasingly to see her mother, Rosanna Perry, in dreams. The vision took forever to manifest and when it did during sleep one night, the woman who appeared was a dead mother surrounded by a brood of zombified cousins. Grandmother, frightened by these corpses, was forced to rebuke the evil dead spirit, telling it to go away from her and never to return. All of this heightened because she could not rightfully identify the spirit in her dream, having never glimpsed her mother in life or in photograph.
The past played tricks, Lolo knew. The present was a created thing.
Maybe this was what led her to try her fate in Chicago around 1942, leaving six-year-old Joseph, three-year-old Elaine, and two-year-old Ivory behind with Aunt Shugah and her daughter, Te Te.
After Lionel Soule came a man called Son who drove cabs for the V-8 company, the only car service black people in New Orleans could call. Son left for Chicago in a rush. It is said that Grandmother flew to him there for a weeklong visit that became a yearlong stay. Lolo took a job in the bakery where Son worked. She planned to save, set up a decent life in a remade Chicago apartment, and send for her kids; but her leave-taking must have revived feelings of her own mother’s abandonment, her children now in the hands of the same group of women who raised her.
Lolo’s eldest boy, Joseph, tested the women. “I could get spankings, but as soon as the hurt stop I’m doing something else they didn’t think I had no business doing,” he says. “That was just part of my personality.” Elaine cried whenever her mouth wasn’t chewing on something. “I want Lolo,” she moaned over and over again. “Give me Lolo.”
From Chicago, Grandmother heard reports that Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory weren’t well fed. Out of all the things to go wrong, this one thing seemed untenable. “I promised when I got to be a man I wasn’t gone eat no more weenies and spaghetti,” Uncle Joe told me. “TeTe wasn’t no good cook and that’s what we used to eat every day.”
And so Lolo came back.
No one likes to dwell on her going away, for it speaks too loudly and reveals too much. It could be said that she almost escaped this particular story. I imagine her in Chicago wearing a great fur-collared overcoat, fighting freezing cold, her fingers and ears tingling then going numb. Chicago was the possibility of a life shorn of her fragmented past, the chance to make a new story from start to finish, but leaving her children was also the repeat of an ancient pattern.
Back in New Orleans, she cleaned during the day so she could afford night classes at Coinson’s School of Practical Nurses, where she was best remembered for her uniforms: frozen-white bleached dresses and matching nurse’s cap with freshly polished shoes and stockings that were a clashing veil against her dark skin. It was a white you were afraid to touch. She was determined to finish, and she did, working eventually at Charity Hospital downtown and in private homes everywhere around the city, sometimes for employers whose houses she had once cleaned.
Sometime after Chicago, Grandmother began to whisper under her breath how even if she didn’t have a pot to piss in, she wasn’t ever leaving her children again. My mother heard her say this. And, too, she started talking to her community of women confidantes about how she was actually mother to six children, how there was a set of twins and another lone child who died before Joseph was born. These stories of Lolo’s were overheard, “caught” by her children like wisps, then held inside for them to tell much later.
By the time Ivory Mae was seven years old, Grandmother was firmly planted in a double house on South Roman Street uptown, between Second and Third Streets. She had married a longshoreman thirteen years her senior whom the children called Mr. Elvin and who is described by most people as some version of what Mom remembers: He used to talk to the television. Easygoing guy. More like a little common man. He went along with the program. He liked to drink.
The 2500 block of Roman where they lived was hemmed in by two bars and a small grocery store that seemed to hold the block down like paperweights.