The Yellow House

“Fixed details were important to stories, Amelia knew, even if you couldn’t prove them.” 

Broom is concerned with evidence. However, she knows that traditional forms of evidence often do not document histories like her family’s. Oral history is prominent source material for Broom’s memoir. Broom alludes to the reality that all of these details may not be accurate, but that the specifics are sometimes less important than the overall narrative. Amelia, for example, fills in the gaps in her own history.

“The past played tricks, Lolo knew. The present was a created thing.” 

Memory is complicated and history is rarely simple. Amelia’s mother dies in childbirth and parts of her past are unknown to her. However, Amelia also knows that she has control over her own present. However, as Amelia also discovers when she tries to move to Chicago, the past has a way of influencing our present.

“Later, I would peer from this kitchen window and watch the van rocking with the motion of my brothers and their dates, but that is running ahead. The boys are still children. And I am not yet born.”

Though the structure of the book is largely chronological, occasionally Broom uses foreshadowing as her narrative moves around in time. Movement 1 covers the period before she is born. In this quote, she inserts a memory that she has from several years later to connect the moment that she is writing about to her experience. By deliberately breaking up the flow of the narrative, Broom draws attention to where the story is going.

“Big changes, the ones that reset the compass of a place, never appear so at the outset. Only time lets you see the accumulation of things.” 

Two metaphors that Broom uses frequently appear in this passage. The first is the idea of maps, reflected by the compass. The second is distance, which she frames as the passage of time. This is reflective of the poetic style she brings to narrative nonfiction.

“The city, they claimed, approved developers’ plans even though they knew elevation was too low for sufficient drainage, a problem exacerbated by new communities that further taxed the substandard drainage systems, ‘negligence…that is injurious to our health and safety,’ one prophetic-seeming letter writer said. ‘What happens in this area will make New Orleans prosperous and strong financially or else it will cause the city to strangulate itself,’ he wrote. ‘Undeveloped it is a chain around the city’s neck…. This area to the east is not a mirage. It will not go away if you ignore it. It will stay and haunt you if you do not start thinking of it as a part of the city.’” 

Broom weaves her family’s story into the history of New Orleans. In particular, she focuses on New Orleans East. In this section, she quotes letters written by residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy. They highlight failures in city planning and the prioritization of profit over people. The letter also echoes a motif that Broom uses of vision, seeing, and hiding.

“Landscapes communicate feeling. Walking, you can grab on to the texture of a place, get up close to the human beings who make it, but driving makes distance, grows fear.” 

In this quote, Broom describes the importance of experiencing a place. The tangible, physical landscape makes it real. It reflects Broom’s desire for closeness and understanding of the people who make up New Orleans. This tension between closeness and distance runs through the book. Broom describes her connection to the city as being like a rubber band. She pulls away, the band snaps back, and she returns.

“I, too, wish she had said yes to this request and have sometimes felt that the absence of that detail somehow disturbed my own personal narrative. It would have been nice, for instance, to tell the following story: I am rhythmic because I have come from musical lineage. My father was so great an artist that he was honored with a jazz funeral. Horse-drawn carriages moved through the streets of New Orleans; people danced behind. To be able to say: ‘I have come from that.’” 

Myth-making happens on large levels through national narratives and the history of New Orleans, but it is also personal. How one narrates a family history is a form of myth-making. The quote is from a section that describes Simon Broom’s funeral. Here, the desire for a significant family mythology is expressed. However, in practice, Broom’s memoir strips away the layers of myth to embrace the more complex realities that exist beneath them.

“I try not to see what is right in front of my face. Sometimes, when I want the world to go blurry again, I remove my glasses when passing by these scenes. In this way, I learn to see and to go blind at will.”

Broom makes frequent reference to seeing and not seeing. She describes her vision problems in childhood, which she hides from her family. Once she has glasses, she occasionally tries to hide things from her vision. This intentional blindness extends symbolically to her descriptions of New Orleans East as something that people didn’t want to see. Later in the book, she writes that Carl wears sunglasses at night. Broom describes this as “a form of willful blindness. Who and what does Carl not want to see?” (468) 

“We take photos because we do not want to remember wrong.” 

Broom is very committed to remembering. She writes everything down in her journal. She records interviews with her family. She goes into archives. However, for many things that she wants to know, photographs are the evidence that she uses. In this quote, she suggests that photographs can truthfully record the past. Once people have locked a memory into a photograph, they can access it later. Broom later reflects on “believing, even against my will, that to be photographed is to be present, alive, confirmed. ‘You never know how you look until you get your picture took,’ my mother says my father, Simon Broom, was always saying.” (427)

“I am ashamed of our car even though it is brand-new. I am ashamed if Mom wears rollers in her hair. She is gentle and kind and gorgeous, and she loves me. Sacrifices basic necessities to put me in this private school we cannot afford. I understand those things. I know. But my feelings…. We seem, in our car and in our lot, not to match the school to which I now belong.”

Shame is an emotion that surfaces throughout The Yellow House. To be embarrassed by one’s parents is a common teenage feeling, but Broom’s desire to hide her origins troubles her. Broom is aware of her poverty. Broom reflects that it is a tragedy that they felt so much shame because it prevented her family from following their natural instincts.

“Like her mother, my mother buried her rage and despair deep within, underneath layers and layers of poise. America required these dualities anyway and we were good at presenting our double selves. The house, unlike the clothes our mother had tailored to us, was an ungainly fit.” 

The children grow up in a chaotic home in a low-income neighborhood. However, the kids are well put together. Lynette later reflects, “The kind of people that we were made it worse. Because of the way Mama made us look, people began to have expectations. It’s better to look homely if you live in a house like that’” (201). Broom links this desire for respectability with the racial dynamics of America. As Black people, they are expected to hide their anger and ambition. For example, when Michael challenges a teacher for incorrectly grading his work, he is punished.

“It was normal in New Orleans to work two or three jobs at once to reach a decent salary—even for police officers who earned a mere $18,000 a year and were responsible for buying their uniforms and their handguns.” 

Sociological data adds evidence to Broom’s analysis. Here, she identifies how much police officers earn while situating them within the larger context of employment in the city. This reality also reflects why corruption emerged in the New Orleans police department, exemplified by Len Davis who profited off his authority by protecting cocaine dealers and, later, ordering the murder of a witness.

“I had chosen the University of North Texas, following behind Roy the bass player, who was attending the music program there. When he mentioned the school to me, it was the only university outside Louisiana that I had heard of. Even though I had been taking college-level correspondence courses and excelling academically, no one at the Christian school had ever mentioned the kinds of universities where I likely could have been accepted. I never heard the names Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, or Yale—or even Tulane, Loyola, or Xavier, which were only a few miles, a public bus ride, away. I do not recall ever sitting with a guidance counselor to discuss life beyond high school. It was as if life stopped there—for me.” 

Dreaming is a theme that runs through the book. However, Broom shows us that dreaming is not an opportunity that is afforded to everyone equally. Despite a promising academic record, Broom is not encouraged to grow. She highlights the isolation caused by poverty, noting that she hadn’t even heard of Ivy League institutions. If one doesn’t even know they exist, one can’t aspire to them. One of the tragedies that Broom draws out is the narrowed potentials offered to so many low-income Black students like herself because of a lack of resources and support. Having to do everything on one’s own comes with high emotional, financial, and psychological costs. 

“I came to lay much of what was wayward and backward about myself on New Orleans: I can cook and hold my liquor because … I love jazz because … I am therefore interesting, because … Defining myself almost exclusively by a mythology, allowing the city to do what it does best and for so many: act as a cipher, transfiguring into whatever I needed it to be. I did not yet understand the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from.” 

In her twenties, Broom draws from the mythology of New Orleans as a shorthand reference to define herself. This helps her situate herself in the world. A tension emerges for her, however, because the mythology of New Orleans is not the experience of the place that she had growing up. She sees the darker realities behind the façade of the city. 

“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.” 

Throughout the book, Broom includes long quotations from Ivory Mae. In this section, Ivory Mae reflects on what the house means to her. Broom conducted extensive interviews with her family members. She captures Ivory Mae’s cadences and specific way of speaking, adding new perspectives to the book. 

“‘When I’m in New Orleans,’ I wrote in a notebook, ‘I feel like Monique. At UNT, I was Sarah.’ Sarah and Monique, such different titles, in sound, in length, and in feel. I have felt for so long that those two names did not like each other, that each had conspired, somehow, against the other. That the contained, proper one, Sarah, told the raw, lots-of-space-to-move-around-in Monique that it was better than she. The names allowed me to split myself in two, in a way, as a decisive gesture. In its formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions and could show up as a presence in someone’s mind long before I did. My mother, understanding the politics of naming in a racially divided city, knew this back in the parking lot of Jefferson Davis Elementary.” 

As a child, Broom is called Monique. When she starts school, she is called Sarah. Broom uses the slippage between these two names to show closeness and distance. For example, in 2009, Carl starts to call her Sarah. She writes, “His calling me by the name reserved for nonfamily made me feel separate and apart from him, like I had somehow changed—in his eyes” (316). In her correspondence with her cousin James who is in prison, he shifts from calling her Sarah Broom to calling her Monique Broom. Naming is one way that Broom shows the duality between who she is in her family and how she is expected to be in the world. Other characters in the book are sometimes called their nicknames and sometimes their full names. 

“All told, we scatter in three cardinal directions, nine runny spots on the map” 

Broom frequently uses maps as an analogy. For example, as a child, she describes the boundaries of her life as having five fixed points on a map. The first half of the book centers on one place, the Yellow House. In Movement 3, Hurricane Katrina disrupts the emplacement of their family in this particular setting. They are all pushed in different directions, which Broom finds traumatic. In Movement 4, she tries to heal this trauma by visiting her siblings, spread out on the map, to “reconnect the fraying family edges” (381). 

“It’s been bout four, five hours. All a sudden, the water don’t look like it’s coming no higher. It just stopped right there, bout six or seven feet. You could hear all kind of birds then came through all the windows.

See when daybreak come, that water it start coming again, it start coming all the way now. I got to start cutting now.

The water coming.

It’s daytime now. I can cut now.

The water steady rising.

I said, Shit I gotta get through this attic now.

Never panic, Mo. You can never panic.” 

Carl is in New Orleans East when the hurricane hits. In this section, Broom quotes him describing the realization that the water was rising. Broom uses spacing to show his speech patterns. This is an example of shifting viewpoints which the author frequently uses.

“It could be said, too, my engineer friend told me, speaking more metaphorically than she was comfortable with, that the house was not tethered to its foundation, that what held the house to its foundation of sill on piers, wood on bricks, was the weight of us all in the house, the weight of the house itself, the weight of our things in the house. This is the only explanation I want to accept.” 

Throughout the book, Broom blends the symbolic and the real. After researching the history of her apartment in the French Quarter, which is well documented, she wants to learn the history of the Yellow House and exactly what happened to it. After it is torn down without her family’s knowledge, she turns to city records. In this quote, Broom asks an engineer to explain what structural problems were caused the Water and which ones predated it. The answer is metaphorical, which answers Broom’s question on a deeper level.

“I knew, for example, that we lived in an unequal, masquerading world when I was eight and crossing the dangerous Chef Menteur Highway with Alvin. I knew it at Livingston Middle School when I did not learn because no one was teaching me. I knew it in 1994, when we were petrified, afraid the law might kill us—knew it before, during, and after the Water. Katrina’s postscript—the physical wasteland—was only a manifestation of all that ailed me and my family in mind and spirit.”

Hurricane Katrina greatly affects Broom’s family. They lose their family home, they are displaced from the city that many of them chose to settle in, and they are traumatized by the aftermath. Broom situates the disaster of the Water within the ongoing disasters faced by the Black community in New Orleans. While Hurricane Katrina made the gross inequality that her family experienced more visible, the problems date back centuries. 

“The East was not too young for history; it was just that in the official story of New Orleans, its stories and people were relegated to the sidelines, deemed not to matter as much, the place not having earned—through demographics or economic success—a spot on the cartographer’s nearsighted map: a situation not dissimilar to the exclusion of Native American tribal lands from early maps of the Americas.” 

Broom draws attention to the history that was hidden for the myth of New Orleans to be constructed. Before it became New Orleans, the land was Indigenous territory. This claim to land was left off of maps so the area could be claimed by settlers. This is another form of erasure.

“It was as if he were calling from another city.” 

Carl calls Broom to tell her about the smoke in New Orleans East caused by burning marshes. He also tells her that their cousin has been killed. In this quote, Broom describes the disconnection she feels spatially from the stories that Carl tells her. In the French Quarter, the music and liveliness hide the violence and poverty that she knows exist. Carl draws her back into this world. 

“Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who was always threatening murderers with words at press conferences, said that New Orleans had long been ‘a violent town’ and resolved to stamp out the city’s ‘culture of death.’ A big part of the problem, Landrieu said, was a lack of conflict-resolution skills among young people. But that seemed, to me, the very least of it. What about the debilitating inadequacies of the educational system and the paltry job market? An economy based on selling as many elements as possible of New Orleans culture via tourism as opposed to actual industry? Unemployment was at seven percent, and twenty-six percent of those who did work were in the hotel and food-service industry, which was the lowest paid of all professions. Health services were still crippled, and mental health services for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, what my cousin Pam called ‘Katrina crazy,’ were virtually nonexistent." 

Broom’s cousin Antonio “Tony” Miller is shot by his sons’ grandfather. He was 21 years old. She goes to the funeral with Carl and recalls Alvin’s funeral. Webb’s mysterious death is another example of a young Black man killed at the precipice of adulthood. In this quote, Broom challenges the idea that the violence of New Orleans had an easy answer like young people’s “conflict resolution” skills. The move to displace blame onto these individuals ignores the structural violence that prevents them from reaching their full potential. Broom lays out what some of these issues are.