In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant—the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. … children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
more
I do not have adequate words to describe how important this memoir is for me. I received a history lesson of the area of the city I grew up, facts I’d never heard before in all my years there. New Orleans people are different and special, and it was captured so beautifully on these pages. Besides going to the web for more information on history and geography, I also had to do a bit of introspection regarding the subject of shame that really resonated with me. This is an important work for not just the Broom family, but for any of us that lived and loved New Orleans East and still have hope of what it could be.
Not what I was expecting. It was depressing
What I loved most about this memoir was Sarah’s voice, and her honest, unsure assemblage of memory, research, and interview that combines to paint a history of a house, a family, and a city. I loved being privy to Sarah’s confusion and frustration along the way, her hesitancy telling the story from the “baby’s point of view.” She is the youngest of 12 children and so much of the family history happened before she was born and that urgent sense of needing to play catch up and understand comes through in the work. A fantastic read if you love memoir, also if you want an insider’s tour of New Orleans, both pre and post Katrina.
Also…. for those y=who read the Dutch House…. some interesting comparisons
Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, “The writer needs an address, very badly needs one. It is [her] roots.” The Yellow House is a memoir that not only expresses Sarah Broom’s nostalgia for her childhood address but also paints a broad picture of the rise and fall of a neighborhood. To write the book, Broom did extensive research and interviewed her family. In addition to documenting her upbringing, the book maps out her parents’ lives and chronicles the family diaspora as they flee to California, Texas, and Alabama after Hurricane Katrina.
Early in the book, Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in New Orleans East after the death of her first husband. The newly built area was booming economically. “The newspapers fell hard for New Orleans East. Here was a story with the possibility for high drama involving men and money and wetlands, dreaming and draining, and emergence and fate.” A few years later, she married a man 19 years her senior. Her new husband, Simon Broom, had fought in the Battle of Manila during World War II. “He earned five stars fighting on behalf of a country that listed his name on a roll-call docket as Simon Broom (n), the (n) for negro or negroid or n[*]gger.” Simon Broom worked in NASA’s New Orleans East facility, which was another factor in the area’s growth.
New Orleans East was built on swampland. Simon and Ivory are constantly struggling to keep the back of the house from sinking. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy hit the neighborhood. New Orleans East, including the yellow house, was half destroyed. “This story, that the levees were blown, the poorest used as sacrificial lambs, would survive and be revived through the generations.”
Both Ivory Mae and Simon Broom had children from previous marriages and had several more together. Sarah was the youngest of 12. Simon died when she was 6 months old. Though Simon was hardworking, he never quite finished working on the Yellow House and his death only accelerated its decay.
Growing up, Sarah witnessed the comings and goings of her family. Her elder siblings found work and moved out but moved back in between jobs or marriages. Sarah was born with an eye defect but tried hard to hide it from others, including her mother. As a teenager, Sarah felt ashamed of the Yellow House. Her mother was great at making clothes for her children but wasn’t as good at fixing the house, creating a contrast between how the children looked and the place they had to return at the end of the day. People assumed they lived in a functional house. Only the family knew how precarious their house was. “When would the rats come out from underneath the sink where the plastic bowl caught leaking water? You could not say. This is how your disappointment in a space builds, becomes personal: You, kitchen, do not warm me. You, living room, do not comfort me. You, bedroom, do not keep me.” Sarah never invited her friends over. “By avoiding showing people the place where we lived, we unmoored ourselves.”
Sarah felt the urge to run away. She went to Texas for college and California for grad school. She moved to New York City after graduation and worked for O Magazine. She was at a noisy party as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Her family, her grandmother, her mother and her siblings, scrambled to evacuate. “That absence, my not being there physically, began to register in me on subtle emotional frequencies, I can see now, as a failure.” The Yellow House broke apart during the storm and was practically abandoned. In Katrina’s aftermath, “the Yellow House was deemed in ‘imminent danger of collapse,’ one of 1,975 houses to appear on the Red Danger List, houses bearing bright-red stickers no larger than a small hand.” Sarah did want the Yellow House gone, but a bulldozer wiped it out without giving the proper notification, leaving her frustrated. “I had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not¼Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”
In order “to understand more broadly the displacement of my New Orleans family,” Sarah became a humanitarian aid worker going to Burundi, where she was often assumed to be Tutsi: a major ethnic group in Burundi, but she couldn’t speak Kirundi, which didn’t help her frustration. “One important reason to travel the world is so you know how to speak about things…So that there exists in one’s mind a system of comparison…” After eight months, she returned to America and worked as a speechwriter for New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin. Even with connections at the city hall, bureaucracy stood in her way. She couldn’t speed up the reimbursement for her mother’s demolished house, which took seven long years to resolve.
At the end of the book, Sarah and her brothers went back to the site of the house to cut the grass. “We were cutting grass for the look of it, making a small blot of pretty in a world of ugly. From high up above where the survey pictures are taken, this would not show. But standing on the ground, we knew.” Trimming the grass in the empty lot is an action charged with a deep affection for a place that no longer exists, and a deeper regret for her powerlessness. As a final struggle to honor the house and calm her regrets, Sarah began writing this book, the thing that a writer does the best.
In her review of the book, Martha Anne Toll points out that The Yellow House “stands in for the countless ways America has failed and continues to fail African Americans.” As difficult as the African American experience may be in the United States, I still envy Sarah Broom for having grown up in a society that allows free expression.
I have family in New Orleans and visit the city frequently. This book provides good insight on one family’s life — good times and bad — in NOLA.
Broom writes about my home town New Orleans. Reading the book, I felt that I was back at home in the city, although I haven’t lived there in years. The book is described as being about Katrina, but it covers significant portions of the author’s life before and after “The Water,” as she calls it. I shared much of her emotion about the city. As the song goes, she knows “what it means to miss New Orleans.”