The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
Uncle Joe. But this was New Orleans. Black and poor lived in eyesight of rich and white or white-looking. The projects, for instance, stood blocks away from St. Charles Avenue’s mansions; a different social world always lay just around the corner. Also just around the block from Lolo’s house, on Claiborne Avenue, was the Rex Den, a massive warehouse where Mardi Gras floats were made. Some blocks down the street, on Jackson Avenue, lived Aunt Shugah’s daughter, TeTe, on whose porch it was tradition to watch Zulu and Rex krewes—social clubs with fake kings and queens and real social hierarchies—parade by on Carnival morning.
In 1947, Elaine and Ivory Mae posed at Magnolia Studio for their only remaining childhood photograph. They were dressed like twins, in identical white dresses with pouffy sleeves, real flowers pinned on their chests. Each wore black patent leather Mary Jane shoes with ruffled white socks. Elaine was already mean mouthed, her hair in long plaits that reached the middle of her back. Ivory stands awkwardly beside her, leaning away, her weight on the side of her outer foot. But Auntie holds firm to her baby sister’s waist, using her height as heft. This would be the last time in their lives when Elaine, who never rose above five feet, three inches, would be taller than her baby sister who grew to five feet, eight inches. In the photograph, Mom’s small plait sticks up in front, and her mouth is wide open in a dazed face. She is tugging at the bottom of her dress, possibly trying to cover a visible patch of skin that shines just above her knee.
By this time in their lives, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were like lil maids, waking up and making their beds first thing, sweeping and dusting, the house would be shining. We were brought up with cleanliness. All of Lolo’s children knew how to clean, including the boy. “Guess who be out there windin’ them clothes through that wringer? Your big uncle,” Uncle Joe told me. When two of Lolo’s friends whom the children called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Agnes arrived at Roman Street for the annual Mardi Gras and Nursing Club balls, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory pressed their gowns and laid them out on the bed for the women to slip into after they had taken their baths. When they returned from their parties, they found lamplit rooms, their slippers by turned-down beds, their nightclothes already laid out for them.
After school, while Lolo attended nursing classes, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory grocery-shopped from a list their mother had made, the three of them toting bags down the street. Elaine always finished her chores early while Ivory lounged, watching her sister and the clock until time wore down, close to when their mother would appear, at which point she would run around the house frantically. I had to be made to do things.
Even at Hoffman Junior High School, Ivory Mae resisted working in the garden because only the girls were required to do so. Look like I was always in a beating way. Ivory Mae was sassy mouthed. “She’ll answer back if it kills her,” Grandmother was always saying. Elaine was the tomboy, playing marbles, climbing trees, breaking her collarbone and leg. “I was a whip.” She could fight the boys, too, defending her baby sister who she thought “let people walk all over her.” When Elaine was not fighting, she was shy. “Elaine had more of a quiet personality than Ivory,” Uncle Joe said. “But when she came out of that quiet it was like terror. Ivory and I both had them flip mouths and thing. That helped bring us into either being liked or hated according to what side you was on. Elaine was quiet and didn’t say nothing, but Elaine would do so much fighting you didn’t need to say nothing.” Still, Elaine and Ivory were always chosen for major parts in spring plays at Hoffman, whether or not they could sing or dance. They were light skinned, “pretty colored,” teachers would say. Elaine was chosen for Queen of McDonogh 36 when she was in second grade. Elaine had all that hair, which never was good, but they had combed it and it was all sticking up. She wore a lil tiara, looking mean as hell. Elaine also wore an aloofness that could disappear you. You could sometimes feel, speaking to her, that she was physically there but had walled herself up somewhere inside.
Joseph was spoiled by women from the start. His grandmother Sarah McCutcheon was the first to buy him a two-wheel bike. He preferred to spend his time at her house in the Irish Channel, which proved a more adventurous life for a young boy. Sarah McCutcheon lived in front of town on St. James between Tchoupitoulas and Religious Street, just across from the rice mill, a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks near to the Mississippi River. Joseph was responsible for finding wood for the stove and for the fireplace, and this would lead him to the railroad tracks where he’d salvage discarded wood once used to line the boxcars that transported goods all across the country. Sometimes, if he showed up at the wharf when the ships were unloading, a longshoreman might bust a bag of sugar or rice or coffee or bananas and Uncle Joe would hold them in his shirt to carry back to Sarah McCutcheon on St. James Street.
Woodson Elementary, McDonogh 36, Hoffman Junior High, and Booker T. Washington—Joseph’s, Elaine’s, and Ivory’s schools—were segregated for all of their school years and long after 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, the results of which were not seen in New Orleans until November 1960 when three six-year-olds, Tessie Provost, Leona Tate, and Gail Etienne, dressed in full skirts and patent leather shoes, with massive white bows atop their heads, arrived at an all-white McDonogh 19, where they would remain the only three students in school that entire year, taught in classrooms with brown paper taped to windows, blocking sun and jeers from white parents raging outside. The same day in November, first grader Ruby Bridges, a lone black girl surrounded by three US marshals, integrated William Frantz Elementary, spending half a school year as the only student. A decade later, on the eve of the 1970s, integration in New Orleans high schools would still cause riots. Four decades later, it would remain factually incorrect to describe New Orleans schools as fully integrated.
Lolo always told us we could be whatever we wanted to be. When we were growing up, we never thought of white people as superior to us. We always thought we were equal to them or better.
But Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory had only to walk to the curb outside their Roman Street house to see Taylor Park and its sign: NO NIGGERS, NO CHINESE AND NO DOGS. It was a strange sight, the mostly empty, fenced-in park in a black neighborhood. If the neighborhood children wanted a park to run around in or a pool for swimming, they had to travel to Freret Street’s Shakespeare Park, several miles away. “It seemed most of the black people in New Orleans had to go over there,” Uncle Joe said. Getting to Shakespeare Park required a ride on segregated buses.
But there was an added complication in New Orleans, a city fixated on and obsessed with gradations of skin color. My mother, Ivory Mae, understood from a young age the value in her light skin and freckles and in the texture of her wavy hair, which she called good. The favoritism came through in the double-standard ways of all prejudice, in the way people lit up when they saw Ivory but did not come alive so much for Elaine, who wondered why she was a few shades darker than Joseph and Ivory and with thicker hair that she herself described as “a pain to comb.”
As a child, my mother internalized this colorism, the effects of which sometimes showed in shocking ways.
One day Ivory, Elaine, and Grandmother’s sister Lillie Mae were sitting together on the Roman Street stoop watching people. Mom was eight years old. A schoolmate, whom Mom called Black Andrew, walked by. He was headed to Johnny’s Grocery store. This was not unusual. Andrew passed two, three, sometimes four times a day, whenever he raised a nickel or a couple of pennies for candy. When he went by he stared, sometimes winking at Ivory Mae, who glared back from the porch. She was always taunting: Black Andrew, hey lil black boy. The neighborhood children on their respective porches urged her on without needing to. That lil black boy ain’t none of my boyfriend she remembers telling them.
He never did look like he was clean. I mean he was really a little black boy, nappy and everything. She meant that he was dark skinned, the color of her own mother, the color of her mother’s sister Lillie Mae, who was sitting right beside her.
“You have cheeks to call that boy black?” said Lillie Mae. “Look at your ma. What color is she?”
My mama not black, small Ivory Mae had said then.
She wasn’t black to me. She was my mama and my mama wasn’t