Down in the Flood
‘The Yellow House’ maps family’s history in New Orleans
Sarah M. Broom’s debut, “The Yellow House,” is a meandering and engaging history, captivating us as it covers vast terrain. At the heart of this book is her mother Ivory Mae’s purchase of what would become known as the Yellow House in New Orleans East in 1961.
Because the narrative begins following the family long before the arrival of the 12th and final child — the author — this work is more than a personal memoir. It is a mapping of a place and of a family, moving beyond the literal representation of space into the inner dimensions of the Brooms’ world, functioning as both an intimate and cultural history.
The narrative touches upon details from as far back as the city’s founding under French colonization, the area’s 1811 slave revolt, and Ms. Broom’s personal tie to a long racist history through her last name, which came down to her from a slave owner. This chronicling of the past moves beyond the family’s connections to the city, highlighting a larger history of blackness in New Orleans. It becomes a people’s history that tells the story from inhabitants who lived it rather than the leaders who ruled over it.
Ms. Broom does this work, in part, through family photographs and interviews. With the images, she creates the intimacy of flipping through a photo album, and she allows the people who experienced events to
dictate the history. Not only are there formal quotations, but there are also italicized comments throughout from Sarah’s mother, who, in this way, is set up as sitting at the author’s side as she writes. The matriarch guides.
This means that Sarah Broom is intentionally yielding part of the story to her sources. For instance, her mother says about the dangers of her bed when she and her husband were in it: “We could smother them, you know, if they was sleeping and you were having sex and all.” The author then goodnaturedly delivers an aside as a response: “When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.” We hear the difficulties and the love throughout this tale, even as we see testimony given on big and small happenings.
Ms. Broom herself is adept at rendering the material world so that it exposes larger, symbolic implications. She explains that the Yellow House was erected on drained cypress swamps, so the family was raised on an insecure foundation from the start. Additionally, although we may be impressed by Ivory Mae’s ability to buy a home at 19, especially as she is the first person in her immediate family to do so, she only possessed those funds because of her first husband’s death benefits. This example is one of many where Ms. Broom shows the difficulty of accumulating black wealth and stability through the generations in a society that keeps knocking African Americans — and their houses — down.
Another way that we are reminded how African Americans keep being held back is through the lack of access to educational opportunities. In particular, the schools her mother, aunt and uncle attended were “segregated for all of their school years and long after 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education.” This passage also points out the difference between some history books that state 1954 for integration with no ambiguity and the direct experiences that disprove such a clear break.
Even the next generation of the Broom family felt the cruelty of insincere integration, when it did arrive. Ms. Broom’s brother discusses how a teacher gave him a zero on his test even though his answers were correct: “‘After that I just felt like, well, [expletive], I had everything right and they marked it wrong, so even if I’m right they still gone make me wrong.’” The educational system itself beat him down.
It’s not surprising, then, that Hurricane Betsy in 1965 points out other unresolved problems. The storm functions as type and antitype, both anticipating the future and recalling the past. During Betsy, New Orleans is inundated with water because it is now surrounded by canals built for economic profit. This particularized vulnerability invokes for Ms. Broom the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which also decimated neighborhoods when the levee was dynamited, purposefully flooding some areas to save others, with “the poorest used as sacrificial lambs.”
She comes back to this idea during Hurricane Katrina, which also had many human causes in addition to natural ones. Again, Ms. Broom’s family is in the storm’s path, some members fleeing and others riding out the storm. In this most powerful section, Ms. Broom presents much of the story in the words of those who were there, creating a dynamic sense of immediacy.
The narrative wisely extends well into the time “post-Water,” as Ms. Broom calls it, to discuss the lack of support for those who were displaced by the storm. She also talks about her own experiences away from New Orleans. Though the shifts between chapters can be momentarily jarring, those changes in topic are also this book’s strength. Ms. Broom quickly persuades that her experiences away from home also reveal her relationship to it.
This hybrid memoir fluidly showcases a family and a place that represent much of U.S. history. We need more memoirs like this.