From the Bookshelf of DMPL Book Chat…

The Yellow House

Sarah M. Broom

Start date: June 1, 2022

Finish date: June 29, 2022

Why we're reading this: The Yellow House is Forest Avenue Book Discussion's June selection! This book club will be held in person…more
[close] The Yellow House is Forest Avenue Book Discussion's June selection! This book club will be held in person at Forest Avenue Library on Monday, 6/27 at 6:00 PM. Visit our website or call 515-283-4152 for more details, including current COVID-19 guidelines and restrictions.

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

No group discussions for this book yet.

What Members Thought

Jun 02, 2020 Karna Converse rated it it was amazing

Shelves: my-favorites

Moving account of family bonds, racial inequity, New Orleans pre-and post-Katrina and the house that stood through it all--until it didn't

Sarah M. Broom grew up in a yellow house at the end of Wilson Avenue, on the industrialized side of Chef Menteur highway, in the Lower Ninth Ward's New Orleans East, where the ground was "always soft." Her mother, Ivory Mae, purchased the house in 1961 when this section of the metro area—seven miles from and fifty times the size of the French Quarter—was adver Moving account of family bonds, racial inequity, New Orleans pre-and post-Katrina and the house that stood through it all--until it didn't

Sarah M. Broom grew up in a yellow house at the end of Wilson Avenue, on the industrialized side of Chef Menteur highway, in the Lower Ninth Ward's New Orleans East, where the ground was "always soft." Her mother, Ivory Mae, purchased the house in 1961 when this section of the metro area—seven miles from and fifty times the size of the French Quarter—was advertised as an "opportunity for the city's future expansion." It was painted green and home for eight of her eleven siblings who remember escaping it and then rebuilding it after Hurricane Betsy in 1965.

Broom left home for college and was living in New York City when Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005. Nearly all of her siblings escaped the city during that event, and most have not returned. The yellow house at the end of Wilson Avenue was one of about 2,000 houses marked inhabitable and demolished, without the family's knowledge in June 2006. One of her brothers (Carl) "babysat" the property while they navigated the Road Home program, the federally-funded program set up to award cash grants to help those who were displaced buy another home.

The book's four "movements"—The World Before, The Grieving House, Water, and Do You Know What It Means? Investigations— lace together family history and dynamics with the history and dynamics of her community with grace, humility, and an earnestness that kept me turning the pages and highlighting paragraph after paragraph, including this one:

"Cutting grass could seem so simple an act, but Carl was drawing a line around what belonged to us. As long as we had the ground, and as long as we kept him company, we were not homeless, which was Carl’s definition of tragedy. What will happen when the case is resolved, our house replaced by another house on another lot? Will we ever shake the precarious nature of finding home? I think of all the sentinels, like Carl, who still tend to the remains of what used to be and who have not found a place on earth where they might settle down. I count myself as one."

The case of the yellow house was settled eleven years after Hurricane Katrina.

I'll hold this memoir close to my heart for a long time because of its commentary about family and home--but especially now in the summer of 2020, when racial inequity is again at a critical precipice.

...more

1 like · Like · see review

Jan 30, 2020 Merri Monks rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020-reading-challenge

Sarah Broom’s “The Yellow House,” a memoir that brilliantly touches so many aspects of the author’s life, family and home, tells us a story of the author’s place as the youngest of her mother’s children. Her father dies six months after her birth, and the aspects of her life, touched by the descent into poverty in part due to her father’s death, are chronicled in language that is clear and beautiful. An example that stands out in my mind is her choice of an out-of-state college, in Texas, and be ...more

Like · see review