The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
“I guess we saw it sort of like the white men saw it,” says Uncle Joe now, trying to explain his baby sister. “As people being lower than us.”
Joseph roamed, but his sisters played in sight of adults, except for weekends when they were given a quarter, which could go far at the ten-cent stores on Claiborne Avenue. We would buy our barrettes. I used to always pick nice colors. We were always neat kids. We used to look like we were more kept than the other kids that would be around us, like little rich kids. When we were little bitty children, five years old or maybe seven, we ain’t wore nothin’ but Stride Rite. Lolo believed you put good shoes on your feet.
“Hold your heads up,” Grandmother was always saying. If they didn’t have a penny in their pocket no one had to know that. “It’s how you carry yourself,” she would say. They were to hold something of themselves in reserve, to never ever give it all away, to value each other more than anyone else, and to stay out of other people’s houses where anything could happen. We were sheltered. We couldn’t go by people house. I never had a whole lot of friends. People stood to themselves. We were just Elaine, Ivory, and Joseph and a few people who came along.
The children wore the color white on special occasions: for picture taking, church services at the Divine Mission of God on Sundays, and then every May, on John McDonogh Day.
John McDonogh was a wealthy slave owner who in 1850 bequeathed half of his estate to New Orleans public schools, insisting that his money be used for “the establishment and support of free schools wherein the poor and the poor only and of both sexes and classes and castes of color shall have admittance.”
This “patron saint of New Orleans public schools,” as city officials sometimes called him, had other requirements too—that the Bible be used as the main textbook and also “one small request … one little favor to ask, and it shall be the last … that it may be permitted, annually, to the children of the free schools situated nearest to the place of my interment, to plant and water a few flowers around my grave.”
Students who attended schools named after McDonogh visited his grave site yearly, some of them taking a ferry across the river to where he was buried alongside his slaves at McDonoghville Plantation. Even after 1860, when his family had his remains exhumed and moved to his native Baltimore, schoolchildren continued to gather at his emptied grave to honor him. They did so until 1898 when a statue was erected in New Orleans’s Lafayette Square, facing Gallier Hall, which was then city hall. McDonogh’s bronze head looked straight ahead while a chiseled boy scaled the monument, reaching with one hand to lay a garland in perpetual honor at the base of McDonogh’s bust. A sculptured girl with cascading hair stood at the base of the monument, holding the boy’s free hand, looking up.
On McDonogh Day, all the children of the more than thirty McDonogh schools wore their best white clothes to the segregated event. Black and white students arrived by separate buses. The black children waited in the sun while the white children completed their procession to honor John McDonogh. We would be standing up there for hours and hours sweating inside our pretty white dresses.
A school band played as the white children gathered around McDonogh’s statue to sing McDonogh’s song:
O’ wake the trumpet of renown
Far echoing a hero’s name
McDonogh: let the trumpet blow
And with the garland twine his brow
Extol him with your voices now
Praise to him; all praise to him!
Mayor deLesseps Story “Chep” Morrison awarded the key to the city to one sixth grader from each white school; then the black students had their turn. By the time they arrived at the middle of McDonogh’s song, several black children would have fainted from the noontime heat bearing down, dirtying up their white. Those still standing sang on, holding wilted flowers for John McDonogh’s replica. Those passed-out students would have missed the bestowing of the key on one sixth grader from each black school.
It was not surprising then that in 1954 black students, principals, and teachers protested John McDonogh Day for years of what local civil rights leaders called “countless unpleasantries of humiliation and shame.” Only thirty-four of the thirty-two thousand black students citywide appeared before the statue that year. Ivory Mae, who was then thirteen, and her siblings were not among them.
After that, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory wore their white only to church. Sarah McCutcheon introduced Lolo and her young children to the Divine Mission of God. Its sanctuary was a double shotgun house uptown on Soniat Street that was church on one side, house on the other. The minute you walked in there, you could imagine being in a part of heaven. There was a little porch you went up on and then into the church. Nothing else would exist. Services were held in daytime; you left them at night.
The mission had no more than twenty-five congregants, all of whom believed their leader, Dr. Joseph Martin, was a prophet, the kind who could speak to the rain and tell it to stop. On several occasions he did so, several people claim, holding back thunderstorms so his church members could make it to their cars without getting soaked. He was said to turn back terrible hurricanes and calm the winds. His prophecies exceeded the meteorological. He told of the little people who would come across the ocean in droves, which he later claimed were the Vietnamese refugees who started arriving in 1975.
Congregants called themselves Holy Catholic. The church drew from Catholic rituals but was not listed in any directory, nor were the congregants ever visited by the archbishop. Strict Catholics who visited, like Joe Gant’s friend Harold, said congregants were ridiculing Catholic traditions, practicing hoodoo. “It was an individualized thing,” Joe Gant said.
Inside the church, four days a week, otherwise ordinary people transformed themselves. The women kept their white cloaks in a wooden armoire in the church; the men wore long white robes with wide sleeves and kingly crowns made of felt. Some people wore headbands patched with golden stars. The children of congregants marched down the aisles like future prophets, holding royal blue banners that rose high up above their heads.
The entire congregation was the choir. Everybody singing together sounded like the trumpets. We used to all get up and march a circle around the church.
Oh Daniel he was a good man
Lord, he prayed three times a day
Oh the angels opened up the windah,
just to hear what Daniel had to say
For I thank God I’m in his care
In a lifted moment, singing this song or another one like it, Mom was first saved at the Mission. One minute she was singing about feeling the fire burning then jumping up wildly the next. Elaine went over and held her sister around the waist as if she were a tree. “Don’t hold her, let her go,” people were yelling. Elaine did let go, after a while, and Ivory Mae kept on at her salvation. After this, Ivory Mae began to develop a keen sense that she was God’s kid. That’s what she would call herself, in a possessive way, as if she were an only child. This annoyed Elaine. Ivory Mae now addressed God directly in regular prayers. Father God, she began, and he became for her (and would forever stay) the birth father she never had.
Every April twelfth on the Mission’s anniversary, each member spoke their “determinations,” what they intended to do for God and who they intended to be in the coming year. These speeches ran three or four pages, which led dedication services to extend far past midnight. I used to always sing this lil light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. I used to say my desire is to be a nurse. I used to say that because Lolo was a nurse and I wanted to be like her.
Joseph wanted to be like his mother, too, but mostly in presentation, which he sometimes affected to the detriment and exclusion of other useful qualities. He was the only boy at Hoffman’s eighth-grade graduation who wore a tailor-made suit. It was