The Yellow House is a moving memoir of New Orleans life beyond the French Quarter
Aux Features Book Review
“Imagine that the streets are dead quiet,” The Yellow House asks in its opening pages. “[A]nd you lived on those dead quiet streets, and there is nothing left of anything you once owned.” With language full of yearning and heartbreak, Sarah M. Broom writes an elegy to her childhood home in the oft-neglected and forgotten New Orleans East. The debut memoir’s release coincides with the 14th anniversary month of Hurricane Katrina; it is the spirit that haunts the book but is also beside the point. The most urgent question that lingers throughout the book, in each precise sentence, is, “Who do we become when the place where we grew up no longer stands?” If there is no physical marker to correspond with a memory, how are we meant to understand ourselves?
Broom attempts to answer these difficult, lifelong questions and many others. She is the baby of the family, the youngest of 12 raised in the titular shotgun house located far beyond the well-trod tourist streets of New Orleans. On every page, Broom makes visceral her longing for the resurrection of life on the wilderness that the streets surrounding her childhood home became after Hurricane Katrina. The house, of course, is a metaphor—as with other places the author has lived—for one’s roots, one’s belonging to a place. This is a New Orleans that will feel similar, or at least adjacent, to the one that lingers in popular culture. But this book is more of a mirror of everyday life beyond the French Quarter, the highs of Mardi Gras celebrations and the lows of drunken visitors, eyes shut to the worst effects of Hurricane Katrina as well as the neglect that preceded the storm, to say nothing of that which followed.
“‘Water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,’” Broom quotes the late Toni Morrison to describe the havoc wreaked on the Yellow House by Katrina. Readers can also read the water as a metaphor for Broom, for the self, as she reclaims memory by chronicling the stories of love, connection, and devastation created by the house.
The story of the house does not belong solely to Broom. This memoir is also the story of her brother Carl and largely her mother, Ivory Mae—so named because Broom’s grandmother was fascinated with the elephants she visited during lunch breaks spent at the Audubon Zoo. In The Yellow House, belonging is a collective endeavor, and cartography, like almost everything else, is political. The mental maps we have of New Orleans as non-natives—geographical, cultural, and emotional—are incomplete because they ignore lives defined by so much more than disaster.
With a heartrending examination of geography and how place shapes us, Broom recovers intersections of race and class by blending her family history with the city’s evolutions and regressions. She does this while charting a journey that begins and ends in New Orleans but also includes Burundi and her new home, Harlem. The writing is her way of sorting out her family’s investment in this place—no longer an edifice, now just an empty lot, still maintained and looked after by Carl and sometimes the author herself. Broom’s family’s connection to the land is the tie that binds, a story that will never end, a memory that can’t be washed away. Broom excavates this in The Yellow House, infusing her prose with poetry and a hint of mysticism grounded in a history deeper and grander than any force of nature.
16 Comments
New Orleans East is where the decaying remnants of NOLA Six Flags stands, a perfect metaphor for the rot left in Katrina’s wake that has never been entirely excised. It never re-opened after the storm and the sign out in front still reads (minus a letter or two) “CLOSED FOR STORM”. Lately there’s been talk of finally demolishing it, but those conversations have come and gone for years with no actual action taken, so like a lot of other blather I hear in Louisiana about restoration or improvement, I’ll believe it when it happens.
…like a lot of other blather I hear in Louisiana about restoration or improvement, I’ll believe it when it happens.I’m blown away by your compassion for folks who had their worlds destroyed.
Oh, fuck you. That’s not what I meant at all, and you don’t know shit about me or my life or what I’ve experienced as someone who actually lives in south Louisiana.
I think you were talking about the revitalization and how it never happens and how it never comes to fruition and it sits there for years…did I get that right? And if so I thought you put it beautifully…..and most importantly you wrote truth! I actually think you are a beautiful writer!
Yes. I thought it was obvious that I meant systemic apathy and corruption, since private citizens who lost their houses in New Orleans East couldn’t possibly be held responsible for a corporate property. But I guess that interferes with some people’s need to be a self-righteous cunt.
Maybe consider just saying what you mean next time.
Or try using context and common fucking sense, like everyone else who read my comment managed to do, before jumping to a bizarrely incorrect conclusion.I have zero interest in continuing this conversation, so you’re going to have to go somewhere else to be a smug, judgmental cunt. Sorry if that’s the only thing that brings joy into your life.
You are certainly a pleasant person and I’ve enjoyed our little chat.
Pretty sure that comment was in regards to the corrupt state and local politicians and not the citizens of the area. Granted they had to make a very tough decision at the beginning of what to rebuild and decided on rebuilding the tourism sector to keep jobs and money flowing in. Not an easy decision, but it worked out well. What they have done since then for he rest of the community is absolutely nothing; they never turned back to the communities that sacrificed to ensure the tourists returned and brought their money, and the jobs, back to the city. They just skimmed money from everywhere and made plans they never had intention of following through on and left the poorest communities to fend for themselves.
That wasn’t clear in the post I was responding to.
Anyone who knows anything about the community in New Orleans and the government, related to Katrina or not, would have been able to identify she wasn’t going after the citizens. I honestly can’t imagine a way, regardless of context unstated, to interpret what was said in a manner that leads you to believe they were saying anything negative about the people who live in that area.
My mistake. Thank you for replying without invective and personal attacks.
It’s not like you deserved such a nice reply, though. The assumptions you made in your original reply were a personal attack, after all. It’s plainly obvious that private citizens have little to no control over a decrepit amusement park being torn down or allowed to continue to writhe in the elements.You didn’t really seem to learn anything from the nice reply or OPs more appropriate middle finger responses, so I figured I would chime in.
Yeah, ok, I’ll look for this! Thanks Root!
Maybe blacks in NOLA should stop committing such gigantic shitloads of violent crimes.https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/
I’m so excited to read this; I just went to the public library portal to reserve it and I’m 59th in line! Which is great that so many people in NOLA are interested in reading it. I’m impatient, though, so I’m going to go to the bookshop and pick it up this weekend. I’m glad y’all posted this review.