For much of the country, New Orleans summons two narratives. One is a romantic story about Mardi Gras, the occult, the French Quarter—an exotic vision of the American South that draws tourists in droves. The other is the story of Hurricane Katrina—highlighting the abject failure to protect the vulnerable that begins in 2005 and continues through today. But in her debut book,, Sarah M. Broom uses her family’s history to carve out a new story for New Orleans.
The titular yellow house was bought by Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, in 1961. Ivory Mae was 19 at the time and had recently become a widow; her first husband was hit by a car and killed in Fort Hood not long after enlisting. Along with her second husband, Simon Broom, Ivory Mae would raise 12 children in the house, a mixed group that included Simon’s three children, her own three from her first marriage and six of their own. The oldest, Simon Jr.
The yellow house sat in New Orleans East, which was once a wilderness that became poised for development. But that development never quite came, and the neighborhood demographics shifted from majority white to majority black by the time Sarah was born. In 1965, Hurricane Betsy flooded the area so rapidly that residents had just 20 minutes to evacuate, despite later claims that the city could have alerted the public in time.
To tell the story of the yellow house and its inhabitants, Broom weaves memoir and reportage on her own family, having interviewed many of her extended and immediate family members and quoting them at length. She reaches back to her great-grandmother and her grandmother, Lolo, before settling in to tell the story of her mother, father and siblings.
That changes with Hurricane Katrina. The home is destroyed, the family is displaced and the wrongs committed against New Orleans’ black residents come into sharper view. Broom is explicit in the ways colorism and racism shaped her family’s experiences—and by extension, the experiences of others in New Orleans East and beyond. But in the absence of the yellow house, the potential for systemic injustices to do harm on a personal level appears more acute.
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