“The large, close family is like an amoeba. To disconnect from its slithering mass is to tear. A friend once told me that it is easier to cut than to tear. I learn this, but slowly.” (p. 303). Kindle Edition.
The Yellow House is divided into sections that Broom calls movements. Of course, these movements represent her life stages as they related to her home, the Yellow House (always capitalized as a main character). They also have more symbolic meanings related to her growth, especially in understanding her family and how each family member contributed to Sarah becoming an adult. The movements also represented the movement “away” of many of her siblings and her brother Carl’s inability to accept movement. It is quite profound how Carl insisted on staying and going back to visit the yellow house’s space after the Water (written with a capital W to show its power) demolished it. I think the movements can also be considered musically as the cadence or activity of her life developed. More darkly, I think the movements can represent the Black people’s lack of movement in New Orleans. They have been isolated in specific neighborhoods and treated as lesser citizens by those in power.
Quite honestly, there were times while reading that I wished the story would move along a little quicker and when I thought of the narrative droning on, I began to see that the incessant details and repetitive nature of some parts of the book might have been part of the message. It took eleven years for Sarah’s mother, Ivory Mae, to receive compensation after Katrina destroyed her house. The city officials created a “broken record” kind of response to the many inquiries of Ivory Mae and her contemporaries in New Orleans East, a part of the city that is not included on the tourist maps and the official literature about the city. the author made her message clear that it is the forgotten area in so many ways.
Many questions, themes, and sentiments came to my mind while reading about the Yellow House that Sarah’s mother owned for more than half a century. The house itself never had a solid foundation, and its rooms and infrastructure were never completely built, but it was the house that grounded Sarah and her family. It gave them a home, and at various times they became part of the house and its memories.
I finished reading with these thoughts:
*Why is it OK to forget Sarah Broom’s people? Black Americans have been a huge part of New Orleans’ development, and they comprise a large part of the population.
*Why are the Brooms and their neighbors deemphasized, devalued, and ignored?
*It is so sad that Sarah was ashamed to have friends over to her house. The city leaders should be ashamed for the negligence of the neighborhood and schools in New Orleans East.
*Disappearance, destruction, and demolition of family elements were analogous to the disappearance, destruction, and demolition of the house; all were intertwined.
*Hiding the house, ignoring the neighborhood, and dismissing the inhabitants were deplorable. The dysfunction of the New Orleans’ government and its deviant priorities can be added to the “D” words that describe Broom’s message.
*Broom mentions that van Gogh said yellow is the color of divine clarity. The Yellow House’s clarity and what it represented are exactly why only disaster tour buses go to the Yellow House area.
Among the many points that Sarah Broom makes about the treatment of her people in the supposedly “fun” city of New Orleans, perhaps the most memorable discussion is about the mythology of the city as she describes it:
“This is the place to which I belong, but much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are, more often than not, underemployed, underpaid, sometimes suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness. If the city were concentric circles, the farther out from the French Quarter you went—from the original city, it could be reasoned—the less tended to you would be. Those of us living in New Orleans East often felt we were on the outer ring.” (p. 391). Kindle Edition.
