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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nNew Orleans has certain phrases that are \u2014 well, New Orleans. \u201cWhere y\u2019at?\u201d Is a common greeting. It\u2019s also common for people to chant \u201cWhere you from?\u201d to people parading through neighborhoods, second-lining behind parades. Sarah Broom would give a loud, emphatic answer to that chant \u2014 NEW ORLEANS EAST.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s where The Yellow House<\/em> she grew up in with 11 brothers and sisters was located. New Orleans East shouldn\u2019t even exist. Swampland, below sea level, cut through by ill-advised waterways, developed by greed, grossly mismanaged by government, New Orleans East was no kind of tourist destination. No one ever headed off I-10 West to see the sights of Chef Menteur Highway, especially the half-street known as Wilson where the yellow house was located. In this marvel of a memoir, Sarah \u201cMonique\u201d Broom mixes family history, oral history, political deviance, city portrait, and personal memoir \u2014 sometimes all on the same page. Reflective at times, riveting at others, this book is about people that people don\u2019t write books about. Like many families, the 11 children either worked at the local NASA facility, or took the bus 15 miles into the city to take care of the tourists in hotels, restaurants and bars. New Orleans East was \u201c…a city where being held up while getting out of your car is the norm, where many children graduate from school without knowing how to spell, where neglected communities exist everywhere, sometimes a stone\u2019s throw from overabundance.\u201d Long before Katrina, local residents were familiar with the \u201cwaters,\u201d surging into the swamp of a city through commercial waterways. One of Broom\u2019s brothers remembers learning to swim from their house to the shop on the corner. But \u2014 it was her home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then came Katrina. The most peripatetic of her family (she travels to New York, Burundi, Paris, Berlin and other parts of the world during the course of the book), Broom watched the flood from a distance. She wasn\u2019t surprised, however: \u201cThose images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew.\u201d For her, and most of the people in New Orleans, Katrina and its aftermath were \u201c…a metaphor for much of what New Orleans represents: blatant backwardness about the things that count.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before Katrina, 11 members of her family lived in New Orleans. After Katrina, only two remained, and that number stayed that way. Broom left again and again, only to return. A constant theme in her narrative is the struggle to be \u201cfrom\u201d New Orleans while leaving so often. The Yellow House<\/em> is at the center of the family\u2019s life, even when the city tears it down. It is only then that she comes to terms with the loss of that center: \u201cI had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not. When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It takes 11 years for Broom\u2019s mother to get a settlement for her house, and then that sum was based on pre-Katrina value, not what it would cost to replace it. When Ivory Mae sells the property, a palpable sense of true loss permeates the conclusion. Broom has captured in the history of The Yellow House <\/em>a history of a whole generation, and an homage to the people who lived in New Orleans East, then and now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bob Moyer loves New Orleans and visits often. Here he reviews a book about a side of New Orleans most tourists don’t visit, a book about “people that people don’t write books about.” Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer THE YELLOW HOUSE. By Sarah M. Broom. Grove Press. 304 pages. $26. New Orleans has certain phrases […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,253],"tags":[256,1138],"class_list":["post-2618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-history","category-memoir-biography","tag-memoir-2","tag-sarah-m-broom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2620,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2618\/revisions\/2620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}