A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East. 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. 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.
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Sarah M. Broom. The Yellow House
Praise forThe YellowHouse
CONTENTS
MAP
MOVEMENT I The World Before Me
I. Amelia “Lolo”
II. Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory
III. Webb
IV. Simon Broom
V. Short End, Long Street
VI. Betsy
VII. The Crown
MOVEMENT II The Grieving House
I. Hiding Places
II. Origins
III. The Grieving House
IV. Map of My World
V. Four Eyes
VI. Elsewheres
VII. Interiors
VIII. Tongues
IX. Distances
X. 1999
MOVEMENT III Water
I. Run
II. Survive
III. Settle
IV. Bury
V. Trace
VI. Erase
VII. Forget
VIII. Perdido
MOVEMENT IV Do You Know What It Means? Investigations
I. Sojourner
II. Saint Rose
III. Saint Peter
IV. McCoy
V. Photo Op
VI. Investigations
VII. Phantoms
VIII. Dark Night, Wilson
IX. Cutting Grass
AFTER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTOGRAPHS
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:
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“Broom knits together her family history, the history of New Orleans East, and the history of her family’s house to tell a grand story of the fallacy behind the myth of New Orleans, the aftereffects of Katrina, and the transformation of a city into something not quite what its inhabitants have made.”
—Kaitlyn Greenidge, The Cut
.....
After that, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory wore their white only to church. Sarah McCutcheon introduced Lolo and her young children to the Divine Mission of God. Its sanctuary was a double shotgun house uptown on Soniat Street that was church on one side, house on the other. The minute you walked in there, you could imagine being in a part of heaven. There was a little porch you went up on and then into the church. Nothing else would exist. Services were held in daytime; you left them at night.
The mission had no more than twenty-five congregants, all of whom believed their leader, Dr. Joseph Martin, was a prophet, the kind who could speak to the rain and tell it to stop. On several occasions he did so, several people claim, holding back thunderstorms so his church members could make it to their cars without getting soaked. He was said to turn back terrible hurricanes and calm the winds. His prophecies exceeded the meteorological. He told of the little people who would come across the ocean in droves, which he later claimed were the Vietnamese refugees who started arriving in 1975.
