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What makes ‘home’? Is it a physical place, the items that abide within a house, the house itself, or perchance the people who inhabit and imbue the place and items with meaning, giving each thing a piece of their soul? Is it, as Sarah Monique Broom writes in her 2019 National Book Award winning memoir The Yellow House, a combination of all of these things, all ephemeral and indecipherable for all except for the person who is defining their home. Broom is a journalist and writer by training and by trade, and even though this is her first book, her work has been seen in publications such as the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, O, The Oprah Magazine.

Broom has taken me on the most poignant journey over the past 24 hours (some of which has been spent sleeping, eating, and taking a real estate class- the irony of which is not lost on me). She describes the journey of her childhood home, the Yellow House, that shotgun house her mother purchased at the age of 19 with money acquired from her first husband’s life insurance policy, to its demolition after hurricane Katrina, and the sale of the land upon which the house stood in 2016. 

Her story, the story of her family, spans the city of my birth. Literally. I am not just talking about the tourist city of French Quarter fame, but of the same New Orleans East where I arrived at 6:50pm on Wednesday, January 23, 1985 at Humana Women’s Hospital. A hospital that no longer exists and upon the same address has been placed a shiny Wal-Mart and a Wendy’s. The two addresses I found in my 3am internet search are 6000 and 6020 Bullard Ave. Google Maps has kindly helped fill in the gaps of my knowledge, though I suppose I could call my mother. I probably will after she reads this blog post. My cousins and sister were born at Methodist hospital – destroyed in Katrina but rebranded and reopened as New Orleans East Hospital in 2014.

I have made my career out of finding buyers homes and helping sellers release their old one, but it is the story of a family home, the bedrock of generational wealth for so many families, that always touches my heart. Broom explores this sentiment about how her family identity from her maternal grandmother, to her mother, and all of her siblings was tied up in the striving and achievement of homeownership. It meant ‘you have arrived,’ that there is something immovable, this dirt, that literally grounds you. And the house that is built upon it contains the story of all the lives that have breathed within it, and the hopes for the family’s future.

What happens then when the embodiment of all those lives is filled with water and pulled from its foundation? It is an almost unimaginable tragedy for most, and I, like Broom, watched from afar (from Quebec, Canada, on an exchange trip I almost didn’t take because up until the day before we didn’t know the whereabouts of my family in the aftermath of the storm). I no longer call my birthplace home – Nashville has become my hometown – but it holds the roots of my family. It’s the place where all of my people are buried (yes, above ground) from both my mother’s and father’s families. My family was not stranded on the roof during Katrina, thank all that is holy, but some of their houses are gone. The family photo albums were destroyed. I think at this point there are less than 10 photographs of my mother as a child – ones that either she or her sister had at their homes in Tennessee and Mississippi respectively during the storm. Photos of my maternal grandmother and grandfather as children or youths probably don’t exist. These facts, the heavy emotional burden of them, is carried in every single one of us now, each of us manages that grief in different ways. It defines us as people, as a family, and as a part of the culture of the city.

Broom’s memoir about her family home and her family that lived within its walls can be triggering for those suffering from PTSD after Katrina. But it is also an important reminder of the inequalities that BIPOC have endured for generations. In their education, employment, neighborhood infrastructure, housing, and in access to resources after a tragedy. I have felt the privilege of my skin tone in every word Broom wrote. Because as close in geography as I and my people were to her Yellow House, our daily lived experiences could never have been more different.

My heart weeps. My wounds about home and the importance of place have been poked and prodded and left me emotional. I cry for the loss of all of New Orleans’ families, but especially those not deemed worth helping. I cry at the privilege those families who look like mine have become blind to seeing in the midst of such great tragedy that seems to be a “great equalizer” before the lord. Broom’s writing just shows how our lives truly are nothing alike, but how we can still love the same places and call them home.

Even after the deep emotional journey of reading this book in 24 hours was over, I’m still embedded in its pages (even though I read it on kindle). I am going to pick up a hardback copy as soon as I am able – and finally moved into the home Adam and I just purchased. Dealing with moving from homes during ‘normal times’ is stressful enough, and why I avoided typing up my thoughts for weeks after writing them at 3am in a journal, evacuating from your home because of a storm is an experience no one wants to have.

~Ashley

When Ashley told me she stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finish Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, I had a list of expectations.  I expected it to be well written, engaging, and powerful.  Then she told me what kept her up all night, the second half of the book where Broom describes her family’s experiences during and after Hurricane Katrina, and I knew my reaction to this book would be very different than Ashley’s.  She’s from New Orleans, and her family is still (or again) there.  I’ve visited twice (once with Ashley, months before Hurricane Katrina), although my aunt did live there for decades.  Our engagement with the city is very different, so the book hit us very differently.  

First though, I want to say, Sarah M. Broom isn’t just someone who wrote a memoir, she’s a bookish author, she’s our kind of people.  I’ll let her words speak for her – “A house always insists on being kept.  Mostly I had to find shelves where my books could live.”  

The Yellow House is a gorgeous tale of family, home, and systemic racism.  While this book could only take place in a few locales around the world because of how the hurricane interacted with local geography and infrastructure, the underlying principles can be found in most western countries, perhaps most countries around the world, but certainly those with colonial ties.  

Broom starts her tale with the story of her grandmother.  This idea of starting a book this way speaks to my soul, because it gets straight to the heart of the family.  I didn’t fully understand the connection until I read Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, but now I can’t imagine another way to start any story of family.  Lolo shapes the family, including the author’s mom Ivory Mae, as she was shaped by the strong women in her life, including the one who taught her to “dress the body and dress a house like you would the body.  How she saw firsthand that cooking was a protected ritual, a séance.”  There is barely a mention of voodoo in the book, which highlights one of Broom’s points – tourists don’t know the real New Orleans, they only know the French Quarter and the legends.  

There are so many parallels that could be drawn between New Orleans and Nashville, and likely many cities.  There is contention between native-born residents and those who’ve relocated here (although in Nashville, we tend to accept you if you went to high school here).  As Broom talks about the limitations of seeing the French Quarter as New Orleans, I wonder what pieces of my city I’ve left out because I didn’t see them, not in any real way.  Some I’ve grown to know and adore, since I’ve been back as an adult, but others are still on my list to be explored.  I wonder how they’ll change before I get there, and what of their histories will be reflected in my view and experience when I do arrive.  

The Yellow House is about Broom’s family but also about their neighborhood, about New Orleans East, and how it was structured, how the interstate was constructed on land that previously held a vibrant Black community and a gorgeous avenue with hundreds of great oaks which were sacrificed for the “greater good.”  Broom takes the reader on the journey of her family and it’s engrossing.  We learn about Broom’s siblings and their experiences at school, and how a family with 12 children from three different marriages functions in the midst of this broader community.  Sarah’s experience of getting glasses made me laugh and reminisce, as my own experience was very much the same, a mix of shocked adults, ugly frames, and seeing the world for the first time.  It’s more than that though, this tale of the Yellow House is also a tale about Sarah’s world, as she grew up the youngest of a dozen children, going to high school with her nephew who was technically her elder, during the 1990s when the war on drugs was waged.  

As readers hit the halfway mark of The Yellow House, Hurricane Katrina has arrived.  The story of this family as they experience the storm, the tragedies after, and figure out how to survive, recover, and continue is heartbreaking yet also hopeful.  The tale of the author finding herself, the book within her, is my favorite part.  Despite her education and connections, it took 11 years for her to guide her mother through the Road Home program, reluctantly settling for a cash payout instead of rebuilding as Ivory Mae had wanted. 

I remember passing through the reading room multiple times as the storm was hitting and an alumni had evacuated from his graduate program at Tulane and was glued to the news all day.  He was awaiting news of his second home, his classmates, and his friends, awaiting to see if they’d have homes and a school to return to when the rain stopped and the waters receded.  I was disconnected, a college senior with a heavy course load and a job.  The stories my aunt told of her Metairie home was of one room being regularly flooded, but nothing major, and she’d lived in the area for decades.  Surely this wasn’t that different, until it was very, very different. 

It was 2010 when I started to understand, when Nashville flooded.  My home was fine, but my town was not.  I knew people who were rescued off of their roof, and I helped them demo their home as contractors walked the neighborhoods to make sure homeowners and volunteers knew how to safely and properly remove drywall so the frames could dry out, the first step of rebuilding.  None of this is included in the book.  No neighbors, no volunteers, no food trucks feeding those working to make sense of the mess the water made, no clean up at all, just people trying to go back into their homes to salvage what they could and then waiting on promises to come true, promises that left residents displaced for years, or maybe still. 

Here’s the piece of the book that really hit home for me, it’s how Broom connected with the Yellow House.  Her mother purchased the house years before Sarah’s birth, and it was the only place she lived until she went to college and entered a transient phase of life.  My family moved when I was a year and a half old, and then my mom and I moved again right after I graduated high school.  Even when I went “home” from college, it wasn’t to my home because it was a new house that I didn’t feel connected to in the same way.  I didn’t know the neighbors, I struggled to find my way around the new part of town (even though my grandparents were across the street and I’d grown up visiting).  And for Sarah, “as long as the house stood, … my father was not yet gone.  And then suddenly, he was.”  For me, it wasn’t that my father was gone, but that my family as I knew it was gone with that house.  My parents sold it as part of their divorce, as a way of creating a new start for my mom and me, who lived there during the divorce proceedings.  I wasn’t really present in our home during their divorce, between being a senior in high school, a color guard captain, and having a part time job, if I didn’t have to be somewhere else, then I found a reason to leave.  It was and wasn’t sudden, as my father had always traveled for work, so he was gone more than not, but it became more permanent as his things left, then the furniture in his bedroom, and that, combined with my shifts towards college led me to feel like everything changed when we left that house, even though the changes took place well before that.  It wasn’t until our last home, mine and Adam’s that I really felt like I had a home again.  For eight years, I didn’t really have one, just as Broom “no longer used the word “home,” did not feel [she] had one.”  Sitting in my house now, for the vast majority of the last four months, I recall the early days of being in the first home Adam and I bought, painting each and every inch of wall, and I want to do the same here.  Moving to that home, it was just us, but moving into this home, it was us, a 13 month old child, and a two year old, large, energetic dog.  We didn’t have the capacity to paint everything, and still don’t now, but I want to.  I want to make this home (we’ve lived in for seven years) my own through the colors on the walls, colors that I (with Adam’s input, yes, yes) select because this home is mine.  Broom chased her sense of home, and I’ve done the same in some ways, but ultimately, we each have to make that sense of home and decide what it means to us, and how to achieve it.  Is it paint (although I wouldn’t choose Mardi Gras yellow for my kitchen, but to each her own)?  Is it baking in the oven?  It depends on the person.

I give The Yellow House five stars, with a sad smile.  It is well written, engaging, and powerful, just as I expected.  It’s also haunting, tragic, and beautiful.  I doubt I’ll revisit it, particularly the second half, but I’m very interested in seeing what Broom does next.

~Nikki