The Yellow House

In early spring, before the Jane magnolia tree bloomed, I set off to close the distance between the me of now and the me of then. When I made the drive to New Orleans from upstate New York, where I live now, I began as I had dozens of times before, from various starting points, cradling a longing to see what, if anything, had changed. These returns always seem necessary, as if I were a rubber band, stretched to its breaking point.

In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina, what has plagued me most is the unfinished business of it all. Why is my brother Carl still babysitting ruins, sitting on the empty plot where our childhood home used to be? Why is my seventy-four-year-old mother, Ivory Mae, still unmoored, living in St. Rose, Louisiana, at Grandmother’s house? We call it Grandmother’s even though she died ten years ago. Her house, the only one remaining in our family, is a squat three-bedroom in a subdivision just off the River Road, which snakes seventy miles along the Mississippi, where plantation houses sit alongside grain mills and petrochemical refineries.

On the evening of the second day, I arrive in New Orleans. I call Carl, who tells me to find him at the Yellow House, where we grew up. It was demolished a year after the water. None of us was there to see it go. When it came down, all seven of my siblings who lived in New Orleans were displaced. There are twelve of us in all, and I am the baby.

I exit the interstate in New Orleans East, fifteen miles from the French Quarter, at Chef Menteur, a highway named for a deceitful Choctaw Indian chief or an early colonial governor, depending on whom you ask.

There is no welcome sign here, nothing to signify the New Orleans of most people’s imagination. The East, where nearly twenty per cent of the city lives, lies in the shadow of more mythologized sections of New Orleans: the French Quarter, the Garden District, and even the Lower Ninth Ward, which became the drowned and abandoned symbol of the storm’s destructive power. The totems—architecturally significant houses, second-line parades, and historical markers—are nearly nonexistent.

The East comprises more than half of New Orleans’s geography, though it is mostly water: Lake Pontchartrain on one side, the Mississippi River on the other. To the west, the Industrial Canal, dredged in 1923 to make a commercial route between the lake and the river, is a watery bifurcation that divides the East from the rest of the city.

Chef Menteur slashes through the East, cutting some long streets off at their ends, creating impromptu culs-de-sac where sometimes only five houses exist. Chef severs a street called America, and splits Wilson Avenue, where I grew up, separating us from a mile-long line of handsome brick houses and from Jefferson Davis, my elementary school, which in 1993 was renamed for Ernest (Dutch) Morial, the city’s first black mayor, but is now an empty field.

My sister Karen was struck by a car and dragged down the ruthless highway when she was nine years old and trying to get to third grade. She survived with skin grafts that formed islets on her arms and legs, and with faith in God.

For the past ten years, the only inhabitants of our side of Wilson Avenue have been our neighbor Rachelle and her two children, who live in a cream-colored shotgun house. Next door was our house, a narrow camelback shotgun, with a second floor in the back that did not run the length of the house.

When I pull into the drive, I see Carl at the back of the lot, seated at a trestle table with several men. Carl sits here at least five times a week, when he is not fishing, or working his maintenance job at NASA, or tending his own house. In the past, I have arrived unannounced to find him sitting on an ice chest, a skinny man with socks pulled up to his kneecaps, a gold picture frame around his front tooth, searching the view.

This time, a light-skinned man named Mark is here, smoking a cigar. Another, Arsenio, rushes out to buy Popeyes chicken. Carl’s son, a three-year-old whom we call Mr. Carl for how grown he acts, is here, too. Carl, six feet four, with a loping walk, stands and beckons me over. The top of my head kisses his armpit. “Welcome back, li’l sis,” he says. Carl is fifty-two, my older brother by sixteen years.

Certain things have changed since I was last here, four months ago. The table rests on the concrete foundation that used to hold the house’s den. Carl has painted the slab black. His Mardi Gras trailer and matching boil pots, large enough for several thirty-five-pound sacks of crawfish, have been painted orange and blue with streaks of yellow.

Carl asks if during my stay I’ll “see what’s happening with that Road Home.” Louisiana’s Road Home program, designed to return the displaced to permanent housing, has thus far led my family nowhere. The federally funded program has awarded nine billion dollars in grants to Louisiana residents to rebuild their homes and protect their property against storm damage in the future. But we fear losing the land. An unkempt lot could be reported as a public nuisance. If accused, we could be subject to legal proceedings and, worse, private shame for not attending to the only thing our mother has left. “This is still our land,” Carl says.

I stay until the chicken arrives. Then the sun sets and the mosquitoes become too much.

Mom is calling by now anyway, happy to know that I have found Carl, less happy that we are on the lot. “Looks like nothing was ever there,” she has said. But when she feels like remembering she says, “That house was my beginnings.”

My mother bought the Yellow House in 1961, for thirty-two hundred dollars. She was nineteen years old, mother to three, and already widowed. Her husband, Webb, an Army recruit, had been run over by a car near Fort Hood, in Texas, the year before.

Until the sixties, people called the land east of the Industrial Canal Gentilly or the Ninth Ward or the East. Then a development firm, New Orleans East, Inc., led by two Texas oilmen, Clint Murchison and Toddie Lee Wynne, bought thirty-two thousand acres of it. The area was to be a “city within a city,” rising from swamplands, self-contained, with a population of two hundred and fifty thousand.

To my mother, who grew up on Roman Street, uptown, around the corner from Rex’s Carnival den, New Orleans East was the country. When she first saw the house on Wilson, she thought little of it. A wooden house with a screened-in porch and two bedrooms, it was already sinking in the back.

For fifty dollars a load, a dump truck arrived with gravel and rocks and stones. No one was exempt from the work, even though my brothers were toddlers. Ivory Mae pushed wheelbarrows over planks laid down by Simon Broom, her second husband and my father.

She set out to make a garden that ran for a hundred and sixty feet along the side of the house, and planted camellias, magnolias, and mimosas—rain trees, they called them, for the way their pink flowers fell in drifts. She planted gladiolus and pink geraniums, as she had seen her mother, Amelia, do on Roman Street. Simon planted two cedar trees in front near the ditch that marked Wilson Avenue. Nothing had yet been paved.

They hung narrow black house numbers near the front door in a crooked vertical line. This is where we—the three children Simon Broom brought with him from his first marriage, the three my mother already had, and the six they made together—grew up.

In August, 2005, my family scattered. I lived in a town house in Harlem, two doors away from my older sister Lynette. She had come to New York at nineteen for fashion school, but was making a living as a makeup artist. I worked at a national magazine. On the day we heard the hurricane warnings, Lynette and I were swinging out at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, in Marcus Garvey Park. While I was tapping my foot, my mother was evacuating with my sister Karen and her two children.

My brother Troy left his carpentry job early and was making his way to them. The confusion lent them time: everyone packed a single bag. My mother called the nursing home where Grandmother was an Alzheimer’s patient, after realizing that there wouldn’t be enough time to get her. The nursing home promised a speedy evacuation.

My brother Eddie called from the highway, on his way to Missouri, to say what everyone already knew: Get out. Ivory Mae and the others headed to a cousin’s house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. What was normally a two-hour drive became five. My sister Valeria drove east with her two daughters and their children. When she finally stopped driving, she was in Ozark, Alabama.

Carl and my brother Michael sat outside the Yellow House that day, grilling.

“You gotta realize,” Carl told me later, “it’s August, it’s beautiful, a Sunday. I cut all the grass, weed-eated and everything, had it looking pretty.”

He went on, “It got to be dark, eight or eight-thirty, still no rain or nothing.” He packed up his ice chest and said goodbye to Michael, who left to meet his girlfriend at their house, on Charbonnet Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward. It was already too late; he knew they wouldn’t be travelling far. They made their way to a friend’s elevated apartment in the Lafitte Projects, in the Treme, where they slept outside on balconies.

Carl took Chef Menteur to his one-story house, just off Paris Road, in the East. Mindy and Tiger, his Pekinese dogs, greeted him at the door. The telephone was ringing. “Mama and them kept calling, saying, ‘Boy, get out of the house,’” he told me. He sat in his recliner and fell asleep so that the TV was watching him.

A little later, he woke and made small preparations. He had lived through Hurricane Betsy, in 1965. He knew what to do. He pulled the attic steps down and placed his hatchet and ice chest near them. He went back to bed.

“About three, four o’clock in the morning, the dogs in the bed scratching, licking on me,” he said. “It’s dark, you could hear it storming outside, sound like a freight train derailing. I put my feet down. Water.”

He put Mindy and Tiger on the attic steps. “Stuff crashing, stuff flying. I can’t see nothing, but I know the house.

“I go in the icebox, take the water out. Five minutes later it come off the ground. Floating. I got to go up now myself. I got pajamas on. I took a pair of jeans—I still got them jeans, my Katrina jeans.” He climbed into the attic to wait. “I got my light on my head,” he said. “That water coming higher and higher.”

After five hours, it stopped.

My mother called me from Hattiesburg. She said, “Water is coming into the house. We’re calling for help.” The phone cut out right as she was speaking. For the next three days, those two lines kept replaying in my head—during half-sleep and at my job, where I pretended to have it together.

Water is. We are. Calling. Help.

Carl spent the night in the attic. In the morning, the water started rising again. He figured that the levees had collapsed or been blown up.

He took up his axe.

“I said, ‘I got to get through this attic now.’ Never panic—you can never panic. I’m cutting through that sucker. Once I got my head out, I looked around.”

Men who were stranded on rooftops several houses down called out. It was beaming on the roof, but suffocating in the attic. He and the other men stayed up talking until about midnight. Someone told stories about alligators in the water, but Carl didn’t know if that was the truth or just exhaustion speaking.

Back in the attic, the dogs ran wild, never sleeping.

After three days, Carl and another man started swimming. They reached an apartment complex that housed the elderly. “We stayed there a couple of hours. One dude had food and was grilling and smoking cigarettes.” Carl was hungry, but if he ate he would have to use the bathroom.

Days passed in this way, as Carl travelled between his roof and the apartment complex. From the roof, he could see the staging area on the interstate where boats dropped the rescued. “We knew they was eventually coming to get us, but you go to getting mad anyway,” he said.

On his seventh day on the roof, rescuers arrived: “White guys from Texas on big old airboats.” Carl was deposited on the interstate, and he set off toward the Convention Center, where people were taking refuge, using his shoelaces as leashes for the dogs.

Carl stayed on the perimeter of the Convention Center, watching the clamor from a distance. After days of observing the growing and agitated crowd, Carl and a few friends started walking back toward the interstate. At the base of the Orleans Avenue ramp, close to where he normally spent Mardi Gras, he found a boat with paddles.

The men rowed down Orleans to Broad Street. That night, they stayed in the boat, tethered to the huge metal roll-up gates of the Regional Transit Authority parking lot, stranded cars and buses just inside. “Just like we were fishing somewhere,” Carl said.

The next morning, they made their way to the freeway bridge at Tulane and Broad, joining a long queue of boats. Inmates from the Orleans Parish Prison, in orange jumpsuits, were being evacuated by helicopter. Afterward, Carl headed to the top of the bridge with his dogs and climbed into a helicopter. “I’m home free now. I’m there now,” he said when he saw Louis Armstrong International Airport, a few miles from Grandmother’s house.

Inside the airport, people lay on stretchers and on luggage carts. Carl ate his first solid meal—red beans and rice—before he and the dogs walked a mile down Airline Highway to a cousin’s house on the River Road. The cousin drove him the final mile to Grandmother’s house, where the lights had never gone out.

To feel less helpless, I had flown to Vacaville, California, where my brother Byron lives. My mother and her crew had eventually made their way there, in the days after the storm. When Carl finally called, after two weeks, we let out a collective sigh: Cuuuuurrrrrrl.

It rained more than usual in the days after Carl got to Grandmother’s house. He imagined water topping the levees nearby and stayed up all night watching. Even after the rain quit, the water could still do something, he knew.

His stomach hurt constantly and he suffered from headaches, but his physical ailments, he told himself, were due to the water. It just needed to run through him.

We heard from Michael a few days after Carl arrived at Grandmother’s house. He had made it to San Antonio.

Three weeks later, Grandmother was still lost. Only a hundred and twenty of the nursing home’s three hundred and seventy patients got out before the storm hit. A second group left three days later, on September 1st. By then, thirteen patients had died. Eventually, a cousin found Grandmother’s name online: Amelia Williams, Briarcliff Health Center, Tyler, Texas. She had fallen ill; her organs were failing. Ivory Mae flew to Texas, arriving just hours before her mother died.

In late September, a month after the storm, my family gathered in St. Rose to bury Grandmother. We wanted to memorialize her in the Times-Picayune, but no one answered the phone at the newspaper.

A few days after the funeral, we drove to see the Yellow House. At the checkpoint on Chef Menteur, Carl flashed his NASA employee badge. “I’m legal,” he said to the officer. At the house, my mother stayed in the car, hand cradling the side of her face, a surgical mask over her nose and mouth, while we poked our heads through its blown-out windows. The house had split in two—we could see straight through to the lavender-walled room that was once Lynette’s and my childhood bedroom. The walls of the narrow house bulged toward us as if it were threatening to spill its guts. No one made a sound.

We went on to visit Carl’s destroyed house. He was desperate to recover his weed-eater. My mother begged him, “Just leave it, Carl—I’ll get you another one,” but her voice was muffled by the mask.

As we looked on from below, Carl loped around the roof, his movements wild yet measured. We formed a semicircle, as if poised to catch him. We were there, it is apparent now, as witnesses to what he had come through. To help him retrieve, in some way, the memory.

In May, 2006, when less than half of the New Orleanians displaced by the storm had returned, a letter was delivered to the Yellow House announcing its intended demolition. Our house was one of almost two thousand on the Red Danger List. These houses bore bright-red stickers no larger than a child’s hand.

The notice read, in part, “Dear Ms. Bloom: This serves as your official notification that the City of New Orleans intends to demolish and remove the home/property and/or remnants of the home/property located at 4121 Wilson Avenue. . . . THIS IS THE ONLY NOTIFICATION YOU WILL RECEIVE. Sincerely, Law Department–Demolition Task Force.”

That June, the house was demolished without our knowing it. Everyone in my family had been displaced—to Texas, Alabama, California, and Mississippi—and Carl was in the hospital, undergoing surgery for twisted intestines. The only person to see the house razed was our next-door neighbor, Rachelle, who took a Polaroid that she lost and never found. “That land clean as a whistle now,” my mother said. “Looks like nothing was ever there.”

When the Yellow House fell down, so did, in a way, the view I had of my father. In the summer of 1980, six months after I was born, he died in its small bathroom, of a brain aneurysm. My mother discovered him on the toilet, blood draining from his ear. He had built the house’s second story, where the boys ruled. He was a man prone to beginning but not to finishing, and so what I knew of his labors were the temporary stairs that remained in place and the upstairs closet that was meant to contain a bathroom, where I used to hide as a child. From the window there, I looked down on my brothers—Byron and Troy and Carl, sometimes Michael or Darryl or Eddie—while they slept or lifted weights or polished sneakers or ironed creases into their jeans. Sometimes I stayed in the closet for hours while the boys were away, peering down at nothing, stuffed between shoeboxes, hats, and suits.

These trips home recall for me the lull of those days. It is partly this: I have no friends to visit, and few outside of my family to call. Most of the people I grew up with are either in prison or buried in the cemetery. This was true before August 29, 2005. Now there is even less to find. Still, I follow the traces, driving alone through a pockmarked New Orleans East.

In my teen-age years, I yearned to belong to the “real” New Orleans, twenty minutes away. My brothers and sisters found jobs there, and so did I, working in ice-cream shops and cafés on the Riverwalk and on Jackson Square. Those of us who worked in the French Quarter and lived elsewhere recognized one another by our stained uniforms, which could feel like marks of dishonor as we walked to catch buses home.

In the eighties, the oil bust set into motion a disinvestment from which the East never recovered. The New Orleans East firm pulled out. The Plaza Shopping Center, which had drawn customers from all over, travelling there on the newly built interstate, lost three of its four flagship stores. White flight happened, and the Red Barn, which had blared country music, became the Ebony Barn. The skating rink closed down and so did the movie theatres. New Orleans East came to be seen as a no man’s land, and crime soared.

These events gave new meaning to a proclamation made in a pamphlet commissioned by the developers in boom times: “If ever the future can be studied from the past, New Orleans, augmented by its last remaining section, is surely destined for a tomorrow that neither the facile pen of the journalist nor the measured phrases of a lawyer can express. Posterity will certainly look upon it one day and say, ‘What hath God wrought.’ ”

My mother and I make the trip to the Road Home office, where even the caseworker is surprised that we’re still in limbo. It’s too late, he says—they’re closing down the program. I plead and insist: my mother was sixty-four when the process began; she’s seventy-four now.

As long as we owned the land, my mother could sell it to Road Home in exchange for a grant that would allow her to buy another home. But the program had become an endless loop, bungled and exhausting, seemingly designed to wear you out. My mother tried to make it go. So did my brother Eddie, who has a big job at an oil plant where daily he makes things go.

Because we children were all part owners of the Yellow House, we had to transfer our stakes to my mother. The law firm contracted by Road Home to close the file suddenly changed. Its requests for materials were unclear. My mother would call me in New York, speaking in vague avoidance: “Those people said they need another paper or something.” Without the means to hire lawyers, very little advanced.

Days before I arrived, my mother called the law firm and was told that her case had been closed for nonresponsiveness. They had made a single unanswered call.

I tell all of this to the caseworker. My mother stays silent, peeking at the man as if from behind a veil. We take all the required steps to reopen the case. The caseworker promises that he’ll do his best—he seems hopeful—but we’ve heard nothing since then about the status of our case, which is really the question of whether my mother will ever live in her own house again.

Recently, the city notified us that our property would be sold for nonpayment of back taxes if we did not appeal within sixty days. My mother called me, upset, saying, “You know I’m not all that business-minded.” All I could think was to call the Road Home number and leave another message. “Please tell us what to do,” I said.

Until we know, we tend the property. We are cutting grass for the look of it. From above, where the survey images are taken, this would not show.

As usual, people stop by the spot where they know Carl will be. Everyone is dressed up as if going somewhere. Mr. Carl’s mom wears a pink visor and matching pants with a gold-and-pink pocketbook resting on one leg. Mr. Carl sits on the other.

“You never came to our Yellow House?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

Michael says, “They got a tree right here, a tree right there,” referring to the cedar trees that once framed the front door.

She strains to see.

After a while, the sun waned and Carl climbed on the mower. He drove a bit and then asked if I wanted to cut the grass. He sat at the trestle table, where the front of the house had been, and yelled directions. “Push that clutch in!” he called. The mower stuttered and quit.

Someone yelled, “Go ’head, cut that grass!”

At the back of the lot, the view opened up in a way I had never seen. I imagined the time before the houses, when this was marshland, and the time long after that, when my sister Deborah had her wedding reception here. That morning, my father cut the grass to submerge his nerves, and then all of my brothers set up the tables and chairs before my mother laid out the lace tablecloths that she had sewn.

Cutting grass could seem so simple an act, but Carl was drawing a line around what belonged to us. As long as we had the ground, and as long as we kept him company, we were not homeless, which was Carl’s definition of tragedy. What will happen when the case is resolved, our house replaced by another house on another lot? Will we ever shake the precarious nature of finding home? I think of all the sentinels, like Carl, who still tend to the remains of what used to be and who have not found a place on earth where they might settle down. I count myself as one.

The evening of my last day in New Orleans, the family gathered at Grandmother’s house. I packed my car with acquired things, mostly plants my mother has grown, things that don’t have a chance of surviving northern temperatures. I took them anyway. They remind me of a photograph I love: my mother standing on her land, between the two shotgun houses, a hoe in one hand, a pulled weed in the other, hair a bit wild, her arms open, as if saying, “Ta-da!”

I drove away before sunrise the next morning, as if possessed, completing the fourteen-hundred-mile stretch to New York without stopping for the night, feeling that everything and absolutely nothing was behind me. ♦