The Yellow House

This memoir is about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a neglected New Orleans neighborhood. In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, a fiercely determined and recently widowed nineteen-year-old, invested her life savings in a shotgun house in then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. It was the height of the Space Race and the area was home to a major NASA plant. The optimism of postwar America seemed endless. In the Yellow House, Ivory Mae and her second husband, Simon Broom, who would be Sarah's father, built domestic tranquility one wobbly renovation at a time, their dreams perpetually under construction. The family would eventually number twelve children. When Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House became Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. A brilliant interweaving of reporting, archival research, and gorgeously rendered family lore, The Yellow House tells the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a daughter who left home only to be continually pulled back, even after the house was wiped off the map by Hurricane Katrina. This book transforms the Yellow House of Ivory Mae's creation into an emblem of civic apathy. She revises the map of New Orleans to include its lesser-known residents, a native daughter deftly demonstrating how the enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, this is an eye-opening memoir of place, identity, race, the insidious rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.--description from dust jacket