The Yellow House. Sarah M. Broom
had to wear a suit, but most were store-bought. Those who couldn’t afford one still graduated, but they didn’t march with the class. Joseph’s suit from Harry Hyman’s shop on Rampart Street looked so rare that even teachers were complimenting him. “That was one of the high points of my life,” he says now, at seventy-six years old. He was six feet, four inches and narrow (and still is, wearing the same size clothes now that he did then). His hair waved up with water, which the girls liked.
That eighth-grade graduation suit and the attention it drew marked the start of Joe Gant’s lifelong love of clothes. He could dress better than the girls. Joseph’s obsession with preserving the creases in the pants he spent hours ironing, made him act strange sometimes. “I used to get dressed to go out and I wouldn’t ever sit down.” When he grew to driving age, he eased into his car reluctantly, the underside of his long legs barely grazing the seat, which forced him to drive through town straight backed, like a man in a perpetual state of alarm. “Some people think clothes do something for them, I thought I did something for clothes,” he told me. “I was cocky, in other words.”
Joseph spent his earnings from summer jobs on a wardrobe for high school that included tailor-made slacks and nylon underwear from Paris, which he bought from Rubenstein Brothers on Canal Street. Blacks couldn’t try clothes on then. Joseph went in knowing his size: 42 long or extra long, depending on the style; 36 sleeve; 16-and-a-half-inch neck. He also bought the ties all boys were required to wear at Booker T. Washington High School. If you forgot the tie, you wore one of the old ones collected in every classroom for those who couldn’t afford it. “I didn’t wear any of that shit. I had my own tie. It did a lot for your manlihood and thing,” he said. “Something about the tie gave me a sense of importance, a sense of being extra-special like.”
Joseph wore tailored suits, but Elaine and Ivory made their outfits. Sewing was making a self, and this Ivory Mae especially loved. Even in middle school sewing classes, she had an eye for the movement of clothes on a body and could decide the right special touch, always improvising patterns with a surprising detail that set her apart.
Young women learned fashion from each other, mostly on the streets, but also at Ebony Fashion Fairs held yearly at the Municipal Auditorium where the women attendees dressed so hard that they outshone and lost regard for the models parading onstage, who wore unattainable things. Ivory Mae was never much for the outlandish, anyway. Her style was deceptively simple, her clothes flattering the right curves. Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.”
He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her. Sometimes Ivory would enter a club where she was to meet Joseph already dancing a number, the two of them working up to each other, the drama of which could cause a commotion. “Once we touched each other,” Uncle Joe says, “it was on. People be dancing, they get off the floor and let us dance, knowing we gone clown. People who didn’t know us thought we were some kind of celebrity, making all them different turns and thing. I’d turn her with my hand. Sometime I’d have my back to her and catch her hand and spin her round two, three times, maybe do a lil split or something like that, you know, common stuff.”
They were wild about improvisation, enacting their ideal freedom, which was precisely why Grandmother never wanted to dance with her son Joseph. “Boy, dance straight,” she would always say. “You clown too much.”
No one clowned more than another boy in the neighborhood who always stole the show. His name was Edward, but those who knew him only ever called him by his last name: Webb.
Most people just couldn’t see no matter how hard they turned it how Webb and Ivory Mae got tied together. They were not even boyfriend and girlfriend, but back in those days no one ever seemed it anyway. Quiet often meant sneaky, but as far as people knew Ivory Mae was a faithful student at Booker T. Washington High, the kind teachers always cast their vision upon; she was going to be somebody.
About Webb, little of an academic nature could be said. “If he had a following he could have been a comedian,” Uncle Joe, who was several grades ahead of him, says now. Webb sometimes stammered when he spoke, but this only encouraged his style, made him the type of person everyone knew if not liked. Webb had the build of a quarterback, which he was. He wasn’t no main player, but he was there, he had on a uniform.
Webb and Ivory Mae grew up together, barely a street apart. Webb was the third of Mildred Ray Hobley’s children, the only boy, brother to Minnie, Dawnie, and Marie. His sisters called him Lil Brother. He was one year older than Ivory Mae and knew her from the time she wore white ruffle socks in hard-soled training shoes. They could have passed for brother and sister in terms of complexion and high-flying personality, but look: Mildred had dreams for all of her four children. Webb marrying Ivory Mae was not one of them.
He was crazy about her though. Could not get enough of just looking in her face. And his cousin Roosevelt was sweet on Elaine, the tomboy. For the most part, Ivory Mae couldn’t stand Webb; he got on her nerves, bad. To her, he was a trying-to-be trickster, always thinking he was funnier than he was. There she would be on the porch, pretending aloofness when he would come loping over, pigeon-toed-like, he’d do all kind of dances on the sidewalk. He had a small dog that he knew Ivory Mae despised. His idea of being playful was to throw the dog at her, tell the dog Get her, get her, get her, which would make Ivory mad at first but then happy, secretly, later. They had between them the kind of intimacy born of growing up near another person and thus taking them for granted. Later on, once they were boyfriend and girlfriend, they sat on the porch kissing in plain sight.
Tenth grade was over and it was summertime, which meant you hung out more, tried to figure out what else to do besides look. Now Ivory Mae wanted to know what came next, after the kissing. Webb and I were just fooling around, like friends, you know, teaching and learning. We were going to school and learning about the birds and the bees and then I was pregnant. It was really just one time that we were intimate. It wasn’t no big love affair.
In those days, children did not speak openly to their parents. “Get out from grown folks’ business,” you were told. Whatever we found out, we found out on our own. In hindsight, there were the platitudes, like keep your dress down and your legs closed, but it was not clear what this meant, whether this was about sitting on a bus while wearing a dress or sex. The latter would not have automatically crossed Ivory Mae’s mind, but she was impulsive when she wanted, drawn to instant gratification, the kind to listen later.
After Ms. Anna Mae, a family friend from the apartments back behind their house, took Ivory Mae to Charity Hospital where the doctor confirmed her pregnancy, Grandmother marched over to Mildred’s house and worked out the details.
If Lolo was disappointed, she did not say.
In September 1958, when Ivory Mae would have begun eleventh grade and Webb his senior year, they were married instead, standing in the living room of TeTe’s house on Jackson Avenue, surrounded by Elaine and Roosevelt, Mildred and Lolo, and Webb’s sisters. Webb had traded in his football jersey for a groom’s dark suit and tie. He had his nice lil shoes on. I was decked out like a lil bride. We was doing it up. Ivory had borrowed a white wedding dress and veil from her brother Joseph’s married girlfriend, Doretha. She wore brand-new white shoes. Her attire was appropriate for the time, but when she looks back at it: I really didn’t need to have no wedding gown. I could have worn something