Читать книгу The Yellow House - Sarah M. Broom - Страница 15

In March 1961—three years before the families merged and five months after Webb’s death—this advertisement for 4121 Wilson appeared in the Times-Picayune newspaper:

Sale by Civil Sheriff

SINGLE ONE-STORY

FRAME DWELLING

A CERTAIN LOT OF GROUND … situated in the THIRD DISTRICT of this City of New Orleans, in what is known as “ORANGEDALE SUBDIVISION,” said subdivision being located on Gentilly Road at second crossing of the L & N R.R. on the lake or north side of said road … Lot #7 … bounded by WILSON AVENUE, GENTILLY ROAD, LOMBARD STREET … measures 25 feet front … by a depth between equal and parallel lines of 160 feet. TERMS: CASH.

When this advertisement ran, the area that would later be called New Orleans East was largely cypress swamp, its ground too soft to support trees or the weight of three humans. It was overrun with nutria and muskrat, prime hunting ground.

From the beginning, no one could agree on what to call the place. But namelessness is a form of naming. It was a vast swath of land, more than 40,000 acres. Some people called it Gentilly East, others plain Gentilly. Show-offs called it Chantilly, supposedly after French-speaking city founders. It was called the area “east of the Industrial Canal,” “Orleans East,” or just “eastern New Orleans.” Some people called it by their neighborhood names, what used to be: Orangedale or Citrus. Pines Village, Little Woods, or Plum Orchard. My generation would call it the East.

Big Texas money bought a single name that stuck: its vast cypress swamps were acquired by a single firm, New Orleans East Inc., formed by Texas millionaires Toddie Lee Wynne and Clint “Midas Touch” Murchison, one of whom owned the Dallas Cowboys, both of whom owned oil companies. Everything, they felt, could be drained. “Like the early explorers, New Orleans now gazes out over its remaining underdeveloped acreage to the east,” Ray Samuel, a local advertising man hired by New Orleans East Inc., wrote in a promotional pamphlet. “Here lies the opportunity for the city’s further expansion, toward the complete realization of its destiny.” That was the dream.

New Orleans East suddenly became one of the most “unusual real estate stories of this country, the largest single holding by any one person or company within corporate limits of a major city,” Ray Samuel claimed. Rather than differentiate among the thirty-two thousand acres purchased by New Orleans East Inc. and those eastern neighborhoods that existed long before the company’s arrival (like Pines Village and Plum Orchard), people began calling the entire area by the one broad corporate name: New Orleans East.

Back in 1959, when New Orleans East Inc.’s plans were first under way, the development was expected to “surpass anything that has been done in the past. The huge tract will ultimately have everything, including 175,000 or more residents,” a brochure claimed. Developers boldly foresaw a million residents by 1970. This seemed possible. New Orleans was booming, feeling extremely prosperous and proud in the days following Mayor deLesseps “Chep” Morrison’s election in 1946. Chep billed himself a reformer before that was political deadspeak. Time magazine proclaimed him “King of the Crescent City,” for all the bridge, road paving, and building projects he pushed through, including city hall, which in 1957 was deemed “one of the finest and most beautiful municipal buildings in the world.” “Glass-and-class,” Chep called the new city hall, which was built on top of Louis Armstrong’s childhood neighborhood. “Slum cancer,” was how Chep referred to those working-class communities of wooden cottages and shotgun houses that were bulldozed to make way for “glass-and-class.” These infrastructure projects launched Chep, who some loved simply because he had a New Orleans–sounding name, onto a world stage. He was the city’s first national mayor.

By 1960, the population of New Orleans had grown to 627,525, which made it the fifteenth-largest American city. Politicians, businessmen, developers, and planners projected that it would only climb from there, fueled by advances in the oil and gas industry, a revitalized (more mechanized) port that would ensure the city’s world-class port status, the economy boosted over the long term by the soaring success of the nascent aerospace industry. “The National Aeronautical and Space Administration’s Michoud plant in the eastern part of the city hums with feverish and costly activity,” the newspaper stories went. That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.

The newspapers fell hard for New Orleans East. Here was a story with possibility for high drama involving men and money and wetlands, dreaming and draining, and emergence and fate. Not so different from the founding tale of New Orleans itself: unlikely impossible city rising from swamplands, waging guerrilla war against the natural order of things, against yellow fever and all manner of pestilence, most of the city below sea level, surrounded by water on all sides, sinking, unfathomable, precarious—and now look at it!

NEW ORLEANS EAST BIGGEST THING IN YEARS, read the headline in the Times-Picayune.

CITY WITHIN A CITY RISING IN THE SOUTH, proclaimed the New York Times.

That New Orleans East was now a “new frontier,” ripe for development, was bemoaned by columnist McFadden Duffy in the Times-Picayune: “This tract was once the personal property of daring French colonists, the productive plantation and game preserve of New Orleans’ forefathers. The shotgun blast, the snap of the trap, the whizz of the reel will be heard no more. The ‘call of the wild’ moves elsewhere, once more crowded out by progress.”

It was called a “Model City … taking form within an old and glamorous one” that if successful would have made New Orleans “the brightest spot in the South, the envy of every land-shy community in America.”

And then, too, it was the space age. Men were blasting off; the country electrified by the Apollo missions and the thought of explorations to come. Few Americans knew that the rocket boosters for the first stage of the Saturn launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, were constructed in NASA’s New Orleans East facilities, in the Michoud neighborhood, where my father, Simon Broom, worked and his son Carl would later work.

The 131-metric-ton stage one boosters built in the East were, one could say, the most important aspect of the rocket for they carried the fuel and oxygen needed for combustion, producing 7.5 million pounds of thrust; launching the rocket into space; and at thirty-eight miles up, self-destructing, burning up in the earth’s atmosphere, allowing the now-lightened rocket to continue its mission to the far reaches, the boosters sacrificed for the greater good.

NASA became the main draw that New Orleans East Inc. used to lure other industry. Folgers Coffee was one of the first businesses to come and one of the only ones to stay.

“Boosted into the space age by the Saturn rocket, the dream of New Orleans East shows signs of accelerated movement into reality,” wrote a local reporter in 1962. “The dream is staggering—to transform a flat, low wilderness into a city, the size of Baton Rouge, within the city of New Orleans.”

In those dreaming days when the city was helping launch men to the moon, in those heady times before white flight, civil rights, the oil bust, subsidence, before tourism would become the main economic engine and codependent, Ray Samuel pronounced: “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.’”

But when the advertisement for the Yellow House appeared in the Auctions section of the newspaper in 1961 alongside other properties seized due to tax liens or defaulted mortgages or marriages gone bad, my mother wasn’t thinking about the hype.

She was a widow, eight months pregnant and renting an apartment on Upperline Street. Webb’s stepfather, Nathan Hobley, had begun to visit, impressing upon her the value of owning a home. He drove her around to look at houses, mostly in New Orleans East, which in 1961 was overwhelmingly white. Mom saw herself living in the city, not the distant arm of it, but Hobley encouraged her to pioneer eastward, as he and Webb’s mother, Mildred, already had and as others would undoubtedly do. But what did being a pioneer actually feel like? And how would you know if you were one? You knew, for starters, when you were the only black family on the street.

Hobley preferred the houses on the longer side of Wilson Avenue, away from Chef Menteur’s traffic, the railroad tracks, and the Mississippi River, closer to the schools and the supermarkets. But this one in the ad he had torn from the newspaper was on the short side of Wilson. It was a modest wooden shotgun house painted light green, with a screened-in porch. The structure needed work, but something about it drew Ivory Mae in. The land was almost wild, with grass between the houses—I can’t stand no close-together houses—where kids could run and play, where the only cars on the street were meant to be there, a rural village right in the middle of building up. Her attraction to the narrow pale structure was nothing resembling love; it was more like dreaming.

She would take it.

Hobley made an offer on Ivory Mae’s behalf. The house cost $3,200. It would take a few years to renovate, but Mom would oversee the work from the rented brick house across Chef on the long end of Wilson, the house where she married Simon Broom. Mom paid for her house with money from Webb’s life insurance policy. She was nineteen years old, the first in her immediate family to own a house, a dream toward which her own mother, Lolo, still bent all of her strivings.

In 1964, three years after Ivory Mae bought her home, it was ready; the merged family’s move there from the rented brick house was not far. If need be, items could be pushed down Wilson Avenue on wheels, past the houses on both sides, until the stoplight where Chef Menteur Highway whizzed its travel motion and where sat the Red Barn with its country-and-western music blaring, then over to the short end of the long street and down maybe fifty feet to 4121.

From the start, the house was sinking in the back. It needed to be built back up.

For fifty dollars a load, dump trucks arrived with gravel and rocks and stones. No one was exempt from the work. Mom pushed wheelbarrows back and forth from the front to the back over a temporary bridge made from boards that Simon laid down, her feet and legs muddied. Boy neighbors who saw her said she was a beauty out there, working so hard, inspiring everyone else.

“It was cold,” neighbor Walter Davis remembers. “Her nose was running. She would roll up with that barrow, unload that barrow, going back and forth there. My dad and them said, ‘Get out there and go help.’ ” They lent a hand, but she stayed there working, too.

After the family had moved in, Simon Broom planted two cedar trees at the front near to the ditch between the yard and an unpaved Wilson Avenue. The trees, the same height as six-year-old Eddie, were spaced so that you walked between them onto a long dirt pathway leading to the front door. Simon cemented the path, then painted it an ugly taupe more beautiful after it faded.

Ivory Mae made a camellia- and magnolia-filled garden that ran from the front of the house along the side. She planted mimosas—rain trees, they called them, for how they grew pretty pink flowers that fell in such scattered bulk you could sweep them all day and not be done. She planted gladiolas, the way she had seen her mother, Lolo, do. And pink geraniums.

The land did not refuse her advances. She kept going. She laid out a row of shrubbery that ran the entire length of the house, 160 feet. Facing the street, underneath the big front window, she planted cactus trees, as if setting a trap.

Ivory and Simon hung narrow black metal numbers on the front of the house in a crooked vertical line:

4

1

2

1

The screened-in porch existed only briefly, long enough for a few nights out there sipping Old Grand-Dad. Mr. Taylor, an electrician and one of Simon’s best friends, was there a lot, smoking his cigars. He was a short wrinkle-faced man, a white version of Sammy Davis Jr. in navy-blue Dickies. Mom would be holding a cigarette, taking puffs from time to time, not even inhaling, the thing burning down to a nub in her hand.

The porch was converted into an extension of the living room, with beautiful French windows that opened out. Mom hung heavy satin curtains that she’d sewn, curtains that she changed out in the winter and spring when the house was remade.

It was beautiful because that was my first house that I actually owned. Everything was new then. The house was my beginnings. I made it new with Simon’s help and my own skills. Brand-new furniture, the one time everything was new. And brand-new carpet. Bright yellow carpet of all things. Why in the hell were people with a thousand children getting yellow carpet. They would be pretty, but it would be a lot of work trying to keep them up. When the rugs dirtied, Simon rented a carpet cleaner from K&B drugstore off Chef Menteur.

Mom had already started collecting French provincial–style pieces from Barnett’s, a place that sold real nice furnitures. You put so much money down and you would pay maybe fifty or sixty dollars a month. Every time I paid that off I’d get something else. The couch was wide with yellow brocade fabric with hints of gold and the prettiest legs. Its two matching slipper chairs sat in each corner of the room. And just like my mother I had that big gold mirror that sit right as soon as you walk in the door.

You walked in and saw you reflected back.

Karen’s baby bed was set up in the living room on the perch, a slightly raised and thus stagelike area where the screened-in porch used to be. Karen, like every child who was born to Ivory and Simon, slept in the baby bed until she was so big the bed broke down. Ivory Mae felt her and Simon’s bed in the room next door could become dangerous. We could smother them, you know, if they was sleeping and you were having sex and all.

When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.

When Ivory and Simon were both feeling good, after bourbon and a small party usually, Ivory Mae spoke about buying the yard in between the two houses, the strip of land that still belonged to Della Davis, who paid taxes on it from California. Mom dreamed of converting her narrow house into a double with a porch and a center hall.

I always dreamt I would have this house that was so pretty. It was gonna have a nice front yard, a big backyard. Three bedrooms. A sewing room. I always pictured a front room that had a window with a little seat running across it. I could see myself just sitting up on the couch with my foot up. I was gonna have these pillows at my back. I’m reading a book, just sitting there looking at the rain, at anything. It wasn’t a big ole house, just a nice house.

In those years, it seemed Simon was always adding on: to the house and to the family. Not yet with kids, but with dogs. Mostly collies. Beauty was coal black but missing a tail; there were Jack and Butch, dogs that looked at you like they was old men. For them, a silver chain-link fence went up, alongside the house in the space between 4121 and Ms. Octavia’s house next door.

No one ever saw Simon Broom cry until the first time one of his dogs died. He’d weep like one of them children had died. Big grown man all tore up and crying like a baby. I’d have to get him right again. The dogs were buried in the backyard, out by the septic tanks, close to the back property line; on the other side of the fence were cottages full of people living.

Their immediate neighbors, Octavia and Alvin Javis, had one daughter, Karen, whom they obsessed over and thus ruined. Karen bore three children: Herman, Rachelle, and Alvin.

Octavia Javis was sister to Samuel Davis Sr., who lived in the house next door to them, two houses down from Ivory Mae’s new house. When Samuel Davis and his family moved to Wilson Avenue in the summer of 1963 from a one-bedroom apartment complex with the kitchen and bathroom in the hallway, he and his wife, Mae Margaret Fulbright, already had seven children. Samuel’s house was a solid square with slate siding and two doors on the side. It was one big room, formerly part of a military hospital that had been moved to Wilson, but much larger than what they’d had before.

The Davises were also neighbors to Ms. Schmidt, a tall, thin gray-haired white woman who wore thick white cotton socks all the time, for her diabetes. “Ms. Schmidt was uptown,” Sam Davis Jr. says. “Her home was uptown. Next to us, she had money.”

Her house, a white two-bedroom cottage with a hallway, was separated from the rest of the street by a tall wooden fence that marked a land of no return, especially for boys playing ball. “She took every ball we ever had,” my brother Michael says.

“She was just mean to be mean,” says Joyce, Sam’s sister. “You’d go up on that porch and knock on that door. ‘Get off my porch! What you knocking on my door for?’ Now once in a while you might catch her in a semi-good mood. That’s when she’d finally give you that ball back.”

She had two pecan trees, one that sat back by the garage, another closer to the street. She didn’t mind the children picking the short, fat pecans that fell near the garage, “You had to work to eat those,” Sam Davis remembers. But the ones on the tree closest to the front were the kind you wanted, long and thin and off-limits.

Ms. Schmidt had a garage double the size of her cottage, where she parked her beige early model Ford. As soon as her car turned onto the street from Chef Menteur, she was nearly at her drive. Her universe, therefore, did not consist of much except her house and Mr. Spanata’s land, a complex of persimmon groves on two narrow plots, and several houses that faced inward, a small village arranged to mimic his native home in Italy.

Whereas the persimmons in Ms. Octavia’s backyard were tiny, Mr. Spanata’s were the size of apples.

“He was from the old, old country and didn’t want to change,” says Walter Davis. “He grew persimmons that I ain’t never seen nobody else have. You could take and eat as many as you wanted.”

From Chef Menteur Highway, the houses ran down toward Old Gentilly Road in this order: Spanata, Schmidt, Davis, Javis, and Broom.

The short end of Wilson stayed still in a way, anchored as it was by the houses on one side of the street. The houses and the families who belonged to them composed the short end of Wilson’s identity, which weathered with time, changed suddenly, then completely fell in on itself, like much else. But back then, it held steady while the other side of the street changed wildly. When Ivory and Simon moved in, the land across the street from the houses was Oak Haven trailer park, owned by J. T. LaNasa, a scheming local businessman.

The children from the houses would, as sport, stand curbside watching trailer homes roll in on the backs of giant eighteen-wheeler trucks whose girth and grunting rattled the street. “Who these people gone be?” Michael would ask Eddie, who was a year older. “I wonder if they got some children.”

The families—all of them white—arrived after the trailer homes had been settled on their narrow plots, the Astroturf already laid down, the families pulling up in cars with the hood two times longer than the body, dragging the ground, packed with their belongings. The license plates rarely read “Louisiana.” The new neighbors and their rolling homes presented a stark contrast to the fixedness of the houses, the existence of the trailers confirming an elsewhere, the fact that the American dream was a moving target that had to be chased down.

At first Oak Haven existed only across the street from the houses, but because business at Michoud’s assembly plant—one of the largest in the world, housing NASA, Boeing, and Chrysler—was booming, Oak Haven expanded to the side of Ivory Mae’s house, extending to where Old Gentilly Road and Wilson met, helped along by LaNasa’s newspaper offer of “first month’s rent free if you qualify.”

The land where the houses stood was always on the verge of being bought up.

So-and-so wanted to buy the sinking land that the houses sat on, but the owners resisted. Wanted the land in order to expand Chef Menteur and then to expand the Louisville and Nashville Railroad line. J. T. LaNasa wanted to expand his trailer park business. The houses were inefficient, LaNasa always said, taking up too much space, to say they weren’t all that special. LaNasa, a short, stout man who lived with his family on Gentilly Boulevard across the Industrial Canal, would pull up in his brand-new pickup truck to tend to trailer park business, then stop by the front of the houses on his way out. His offers were laughable. To his mind, it was inevitable: the five houses would be overcome. He returned again and again bearing paltry offers, dangled in such a way that if you weren’t careful you might mistake them for compliments.

That September of the move, in 1964, the Beatles came to town.

A motorcade of black stretch limos ferried them out of the airport. The procession made its way down Chef Menteur, past Wilson Avenue. The interstate was a year from finished, making Chef Menteur the only route through the East. The Beatles made a chaotic arrival to the Congress Inn, four miles from Wilson, a squat, one-story motel on Chef Menteur Highway that advertised itself as “100 units … with complete lounge and dining facilities,” evidence of New Orleans East Inc.’s building “extravaganza.”

The Congress Inn was nothing special. But it was a place where fewer fans might converge and if it was damaged, no one would care. This motel would not suffer as might the Roosevelt Hotel downtown, which had begged Beatles management to cancel the group’s reservation there.

Gathered at the Congress Inn when the limos pulled up were screaming, fainting girls and ambulances to take them away. The Beatles flew out from the cars into Room 100, where the windows had been boarded up as if a hurricane were coming. Mayor Victor Schiro arrived that afternoon and proclaimed that one had in fact come. The Beatles were, he said, an “English storm.” He said, too, that they played music “on a cousinship with jazz, the jumping, danceable historic art form which New Orleans has contributed to world culture,” before presenting each member of the group with a key to the city and designating that day, September 16, 1964, Beatles Day.

While Beatlemania erupted just down the road, barely a person on the short end of Wilson Avenue knew it. Around the same time fainting girls were carried off in ambulances, Napoleon Fulbright was jumping down from a freight train that moved along the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks at the edge of Wilson, his guitar flung over his shoulder. The older Davis children were running down the block toward the tracks to meet their uncle, Mae Margaret Davis’s brother, joined along the way by Michael, Eddie, Darryl, and a tottering Carl, all of them yelling “NAPOLEON!”

“We’d be so happy when he came,” Michael says.

“CALDONIA! CALDONIA! What makes your big head so hard!” Napoleon Fulbright, who also went by the name Moti, sang his favorite tune that night, lit by campfire in the Davises’ yard, his shadow flitting around the dark block. Napoleon was a man caught in a loop: either crying and singing or singing and crying, arriving in a town or leaving for elsewhere.

He was a hobo and a wino if you were judging by looks, a master carpenter and railroad man by trade. During his stays, he picked up work around town, taught Walter and Sam carpentry, and did renovations around his sister Mae Margaret’s house. She’d want a hall here, a wall there.

He cried, the stories go, because he’d gotten involved in the occult and had tried to put a hex on someone, but that backfired, didn’t go where it was supposed to, making Napoleon a man forever unseated. From that point on, it is said, he couldn’t abide any one place for too long.

The mobile homes outnumbered the houses on the short end of Wilson, but the houses pulled rank. Ours was directly across from Oak Haven’s horseshoe drive, paved with broken clamshells that stabbed bare feet. My brothers, led by Michael, played a game of running their bicycles as fast as they could through the U-shaped drive, white tenants yelling out, “Nigger” as they went. The word seemed extended, floating like a blimp; you could still hear it as you flew out of there and back across the street to the side where you belonged.

The houses were ordered inside and out by the standards of the times and so were the children. The adults wore titles in front their names—Miss, Mrs., Mr., Sir, Ma’am. No one knows what would have happened if you failed to address an adult in that way, because it never happened. Children belonged to each other but not to themselves. The street seemed to know when someone deserved chastisement and any parent could oblige. When one did, everything held quiet for a time.

From the time they were small boys, Michael and Darryl went around cursing. When this memory is revived today everyone laughs because, of course. When Simon Broom could no longer stand it, he decided Michael, as the older of the two, needed a spanking.

Go cut a switch.

Michael returned dangling a substandard twig.

“Mr. Simon went out there and cut a branch off a tree and beat that negro with it,” Sam Davis Jr. recalls now. “What tripped me out, it wasn’t that he got beat with a switch, this dude got beat with a branch.”

Everyone knew, too, the ferocity of Mr. Samuel, Sam and Walter’s dad. He had a reputation for slowly cueing up his punishments. He’d lean the weight of himself to one side of the doorsill and start to talking about what the Bible said.

“Honor your father and mother …” Mr. Samuel always began.

“I hate to do this to you, son. I really do.

“So that your days may be long …

“But after what you did. It just can’t be avoided.

“So that all may be well with you …”

It took him a long time to come round to the action. “When Dad whupped, he whupped the whole house, he whupped everything in the house,” says his son Walter Davis now.

The older children lorded over the younger. Sam and Walter Davis were the elder by three and four years over Eddie and Michael.

Sam often designed entire summer days, marching the Davis and Broom boys in single file like young army recruits all the way down the Old Road where Mount Pilgrim Church was, chanting military cadences as they went. Naturally, anyone who got out of line would be disciplined.

Along the way, the smaller boys fished for crawfish in the ditches along Old Gentilly Road where, if you weren’t careful, one of your car tires might find itself. They’d drop nets into the ditch and pull up buckets and buckets of crawfish for boiling.

Michael and Darryl would often break off along with JoJo, the Davises’ youngest boy, to climb over the railroad tracks into the woods where they wandered for hours, fishing and falling into bodies of water formed in the last rains. On the way back, they picked blueberries along the train tracks.

There were ditches everywhere you looked. “It was like we were the rural part of New Orleans,” Walter Davis said. One fall, at the start of third grade, his teacher at his black elementary school, McDonogh 40, asked how many students had left town. One kid had gone to Los Angeles, another to Chicago. Walter raised his hand and said he’d traveled to Gentilly, referring to his family’s move to Wilson Avenue. “Boy, I said if anybody left town,” the teacher said.

“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘We didn’t leave town?’” says Walter now. “That’s when I found out that the East was part of New Orleans.”

The women stayed home while the men and boys worked, except for Mae Margaret, who worked small jobs without her husband, Samuel Davis, knowing, beating it back to home before him, ruffling her hair and slipping into a frock. Mr. Samuel worked close to the Industrial Canal at American Marine Shipyard, which in 1967 built the largest aluminum oceangoing commercial ship in world history. Two hundred twenty-six feet at a cost of $1.6 million, but still, Samuel Davis never earned enough to own a car. When he died it was on the job, pumping out a barge.

Simon Broom had begun his work at NASA for the contractor Mason-Rust as a groundskeeper and maintenance man, which meant he tended the plant’s 832 acres, painting, grass cutting, and repairing whatever needed it. His niece Geneva, the daughter of his sister Corrine, worked at NASA, too, but in a lab. He could see her through the narrow window in the lab door wearing a white hazmat suit.

The older boys mimicked the men and found work on the short end of the street or in its vicinity.

Walter and Sam had as some of their hustles cutting grass, landscape design, and washing the trailers in Oak Haven, many of which, unlike the houses, had air-conditioning so that “when you opened the door that cold air would run out of there.” Walter knew because he’d gotten familiar; his employers would offer him Coca-Cola in six-ounce glass bottles. In time, he’d also clean the trailers’ insides, which is how he worked a vacuum for the first time. One tenant offered him corned beef with chowchow relish. He was thinking he had it going on and that life couldn’t get better.

Sam Davis was on the way to Spee-D Super Market on Chef Menteur one day when a Gypsy family who were living across the highway on Chef next to a greenhouse stopped him. “They asked me to get something from the store for them. That was gonna be a nickel or a dime. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll get it.’ They said, ‘You wanna make some more?’ They had me cut the grass. Said, ‘You wanna make some more money?’ I said, ‘Yeah!’ They had a chicken out there in the yard, they had a goose out there in the yard, they had a lamb out there in the yard. Look, everything that was in the yard died that day. They wanted me to kill it. Said, ‘Grab the chicken, kill the chicken.’ I tried. I was running around after that chicken. I did want to catch the chicken. I could not catch that chicken. Old lady ran over there, I don’t know how she got that chicken, grabbed that bad boy, swung it up, broke its neck, came down with it, took a hatchet, chop. This is all one move, martial arts stuff. I said, ‘I want my money.’ Well here’s how they paid me. All that stuff was walkin’ round out there in the yard, they gave me a big ole plate of all that stuff. That’s how they paid a brother. I went home. I was mad. I gave that plate to my mom. She didn’t have no problem with all that stuff dyin’. She was from the country. Mama tore that up.”

This story sounds outrageous but around the same time an advertisement appeared in the Times-Picayune’s Lost section: “ANYONE knowing the whereabouts of either Gypsy or Spanish people with a large tan-and-white collie, please call WH 5-3775.”

The first year they lived in the not-yet-yellow house, Simon and Ivory Mae threw parties in the backyard for every holiday or birthday, or any other excuse. The liquor was stocked and stored in the shed at the back of the property. Simon would spend the entire morning cutting the grass, setting up tables and chairs. His friends from NASA would come and so would members of the various social and pleasure clubs to which he and Ivory belonged. All of the neighbors knew to appear.

Ivory Mae loved entertaining. She prepared the food herself: stuffed eggs, potato salad, and fried catfish. Sometimes, she pulled vegetables from her small garden. They had begun growing tomatoes and okra on the land.

Friday was a recurring holiday, too: Mom would either take the bus to meet Simon at Schwegmann’s Super Market across the Danziger Bridge on Gentilly Road, or he’d come to the house to retrieve her. They dressed nice to go to the store because chances are you’d run into people you knew. Inside, they’d start off holding hands, Simon’s entire salary balled up in his pocket. One full basket led easily to two. Simon knew everyone—if he didn’t know them he would soon—and was always stopped in the aisle having conversations. The ice cream and thing be melting in the cart he so busy talking.

Simon Broom built a wooden bridge wide enough for the car tires to roll over the ditch into the land close to the side door of the house where the children would run out and unload the bags.

From time to time, Simon set up a projector in the backyard, turning Fridays into movie night for anyone who wanted to come watch Hollywood fantasies—horrors like The Last Man on Earth, which the children loved, and Mary Poppins—the side of the house becoming, for a night, the greatest movie screen.