Long-ago New Orleans home haunts Sarah Broom's memoir

National Book Awards finalist to speak at Ron Robinson

Special to the Democrat-Gazette/ADAM SHEMPER
Special to the Democrat-Gazette/ADAM SHEMPER

When it was announced that her memoir The Yellow House was on the long list of nominees for a National Book Award, New Orleans native Sarah M. Broom wasn't exactly turning cartwheels.

"I'm pretty even about these things," she says earlier this month from New York, where she lives. "I don't get that excited about awards, but maybe I will if I'm a finalist. Of course, it's a huge honor, but more than anything I love being in the company of other writers."

Broom was among the five National Book Award nonfiction finalists that were announced Tuesday. No word on how or if she celebrated.

She is the first speaker in the new South Words series from Little Rock-based magazine The Oxford American and will discuss The Yellow House on Tuesday at the Central Arkansas Library System's Ron Robinson Theater. KaToya Ellis Fleming, the magazine's 2019-2020 Jeff Baskin Fellow, will moderate.

Broom, whose work has appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, The New Yorker and others, is no stranger to the Oxford American. Her essay "A Yellow House in New Orleans" was published in the Spring 2008 issue and was a condensed version of the story she expands upon in her beautiful, compelling memoir.

The Yellow House is the story of Broom's family, New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, race, class, poverty, city planning and, of course, the crumbling New Orleans East home at 4121 Wilson Ave. where she was the youngest of 12 children. She tells of her family's history, the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane that left her house in ruins and so many people displaced and the sad story of the failed, forgotten New Orleans East development.

"Nothing about the dream of New Orleans East Inc. had come to pass," she writes. "The area contained 8,000 residents in 1971; 242,000 fewer than its original goal."

This is where Broom grew up, in the home her mother, Ivory Mae Broom, bought in the early 1960s. It was a "shotgun camelback" house that her father, who died six months after she was born, had worked on frequently and inexpertly.

Broom writes: "Traces of my dead father were everywhere in the house — a door sanded but unpainted; holes cut for windows, the panes uninstalled — like songs cut off right at the groove."

After his death, the house, despite being scrubbed constantly by her mother for whom cleanings were "exorcisms," began its slide into deterioration.

Its interior became a source of shame. There were no visitors, not even Broom's high school friends were allowed to stop by. There were moldy walls, and flying roaches, termites and other creatures took up residence.

"To describe the house fully in its coming apart feels maddening, like trying to pinpoint the one thing that ruins a person's personality," she writes.

Broom's style mixes the elegantly literary with dogged reportage; her instincts and flow are impeccable. A relentless note-taker and fierce observer since she was a child, Broom approached her book as a journalist, interviewing her mother and siblings and digging through real estate records at City Hall.

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"Everyone asks about my mom," Broom says. "She is the true star of the whole thing."

Broom accentuates her mother's voice with italics. This is Ivory Mae addressing her youngest child:

"You were born in seventy-niyen. They say you were in distress. All them children I had, ain't none of them ever been in no distress. And you been in it ever since."

"I had done about a year of interviews with my mom," Broom says. "I thought about how much she had to do with making me a writer. The sound of her and the way she puts sentences together is powerful and profound to me. As I was reading through the interviews, it felt quite natural that she would speak for herself [in the book] and I would literally take lines from the interviews and have her telling her own parallel story."

The book is divided into four "movements," echoing a piece of classical music. The third, "Water," is about the horror of Katrina. Broom was living in New York at the time, and most of the family had moved away or fled before the storm hit. Her brother, Carl, stayed, and his italicized recollections of being stranded for days on a rooftop are harrowing.

Katrina flooded and wrecked the yellow house — Broom's description of seeing its slumped form is heartbreaking — and it was eventually demolished.

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She left New Orleans to attend the University of North Texas, where she earned an undergraduate degree in anthropology and mass communications. She has a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.

In a way, her memoir began while she was at school.

"In college, I was obsessed with the house," she says. "I was making notes, mostly about the physical house, the architecture of it, the falling downness of it."

The writing that she started in college became the foundation of her book.

"The notebooks from my college days and from when I lived in the yellow house were so useful because I could go back and understand what I had forgotten or willfully misremembered."

The Yellow House by Sarah Broom (Courtesy photo)
The Yellow House by Sarah Broom (Courtesy photo)

The process of writing about her family was also revelatory.

"I thought I knew certain things about my family members," she says, "but I didn't really know them on any deep level. We were so busy, I realized, performing our role in the family. So much of what I thought I knew about each person was related to their role in the family ... it was all very surface."

Interviewing them "flipped everything that I thought I knew."

She also learned more about her father, whose presence is never far away in the book, especially when Broom writes about having found what she believes are old photos of him when she returned to live in New Orleans for a while as an adult.

"I came to know more about my father, and at some point there is probably a lot more I could still learn. At a certain point, I had to stop. It was becoming too unwieldy."

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Broom spent the two days before our interview recording the audio version of The Yellow House.

"It was cool. I'd heard such horror stories about reading your audiobook if you're the author, but I didn't find it horrible at all. I loved the intimacy of it. You're in this little pod of a room recording ... it felt very meditative."

She hopes readers (listeners, too) of The Yellow House will have "learned about New Orleans East, a place that was unmapped and unknown, and think about their own places that they feel tethered to, their own inheritances.

"There's a sentence in the book: 'We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not.' That is so much the heart of the book. It's about place and history and the way in which places are disappeared from narratives and the way we value certain stories over others."

Since the book was published in August, Broom says, readers have shared with her stories of their homes.

"Those are the best stories," she says. "And not only about houses, people talk about the ground and nature and family ... I am so moved by that part of it."

South Words: Sarah M. Broom

6 p.m. Tuesday, Central Arkansas Library System’s Ron

Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave., Little Rock

Moderator: KaToya Ellis Fleming

Admission: Free

(501) 320-5715

https://cals.org/ro…">https://cals.org/ro…/

Style on 10/14/2019

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