The Yellow House by Sarah M Broom
On 26 December 2019 Jeffrey Brown, on the PBS News Hour, interviewed Sarah Broom. Her memoir The Yellow House was the Non-fiction Winner of the 2019 National Book Award.
The Yellow House is the story of the house, purchased by the author’s mother, Ivory Mae, when she was 19 years old, at 4121 Wilson Street “the short end of Wilson Street” in New Orleans East. Ivory Mae raised her 12 children in this little house. A mother who was always loving, always involved in the lives of her children, a woman whose own mother “told us we could be whatever we wanted to be”.
Sarah Broom was Ivory Mae’s last child, born only six months before the death of her father. For Sarah, and perhaps for all of the family, the Yellow House was what connected them to the father they had lost. But, in 2005 Hurricane Katrina “the Water” destroyed the house and much of New Orleans. Sarah Broom was working in New York for O Magazine. Her siblings and other family members fled New Orleans, scattering themselves across the country, some on the first plane out to any place away from the storm. Most found jobs and did not return, living in many other states, displaced forever, along with so many others who fled in 2005.
“Before the storm, New Orleans had the highest proportion of native-born residents of any American city”, very deeply rooted people, and the reason Sarah Broom returned in 2008, taking a job in the city of her birth in an effort to help to re-populate and re-build the city.
The homeless population in New Orleans had doubled, with rents beyond what most of those displaced by the storm could afford. Those whose homes had been damaged by Hurricane Katrina could apply for assistance from the Road Home Program, meant to get people back into their homes, as Ivory Mae so desperately wanted. But, it seems to have been a program that failed many. The Yellow House meant everything to Ivory Mae, the home that she provided for her children, that she worked so had to purchase and maintain. It was not until 2016, long after the city had condemned and demolished the house, that Ivory Mae accepted a small settlement. The property that had been cared for by her son, Carl, who had remained there through the storm and after, and had been cutting the grass for all those years, keeping the property “presentable”, something that was so important to his mother
As Ivory Mae told her daughter, “And then you see the lives of the children and they become the living people of the house, the house lives in them. They become the house instead of the house becoming them. When I look at you all, I don’t really see the house, but I see what happened from the house. And so in that way, the house can’t die.”
For Sarah Broom, a journalist, well educated, articulate and intelligent, writing “the story of our house was the only thing left” as she attempted to come to terms with the loss of the Yellow House.
Sarah Broom now owns her own Yellow House in New Orleans, and divides her time between New Orleans and Harlem. The wonder of the internet also allows us to watch the PBS interview and another, on Amanpour & Co, an interview with Walter Isaacson and Sarah Broom, where she expresses her “existential feeling of loss … what I mean by that is that if something is there the day before and then suddenly is not, the mind has a really hard time trying to process what happened”.