The Yellow House Major and Minor Quotes

“Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret.” (Introduction)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: The author opens the memoir by asking readers to imagine New Orleans as if they were looking down on the city from high above. She notes that a person doing this would not be able to see Carl sitting on the empty lot that once held their home. Even a drive through the city toward the street on which their home stood needs her explanation to make sense of her experience. People looking at New Orleans from a distance have the benefit of perspective. For example, they can see where New Orleans East sits in relation to the rest of the city and the bodies of water that surround it. That distance means they will also miss its larger significance, seeing only a pretty tourist destination rather than the countless buildings, even those still standing, that housed her memories and continue to tell a very different story. Outsiders viewing the city from buses touring the aftermath of Katrina can hardly help but misinterpret the cleanup efforts. They know nothing of the failure of Road Home or the cost of disenfranchisement.

“The facts of the world before me . . . give shape and context to my own life.” (Introduction)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: Most memoirs are autobiographical nonfiction that portray the writer’s own experience of a significant event or time period. Author Sarah Broom begins her story long before her life began with the lives of her parents, grandparents, and older siblings. She sees their experiences as having powerful influences on her own. Even the history of her city serves to provide context for her life. This is what Broom means when she claims, “My beginning precedes me.” Without an understanding of “the world before me,” her life cannot be fully understood.

Broom’s history has shaped her in various ways. Her appreciation for beauty and her name come from her great-grandmother, Sarah McCutcheon. Her deep sense of loss and desire to understand herself are in large part attributable to never knowing her father, who died when she was an infant. Her sense of shame <Prod: link shame to Q6> about her home stems from choices made by a city decades before her birth that led to its deterioration into an uninhabitable state while 12 people still called it home. Even the motivation for writing the memoir comes from “the facts of the world before me.” She wants to “put Katrina in context, to situate it as one in a long line of things that are literally baked into the soil of this place,” as she told Lauren LeBlanc in a 2019 interview for The Atlantic.

“The favoritism came through in the double-standard ways of all prejudice.” (Movement I: Chapter II. Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: Ivory Mae and her brother Joseph had light skin. The double standard is in the way people obviously preferred Ivory Mae. She was chosen to play the lead parts in school plays, not because of talent in acting or singing but because she was “pretty colored,” as her teachers said. The Soule children learned not only to value their complexion as “good” but also to disdain those with dark skin. The author claims they “internalized this colorism,” which was evident from the way her mother described taunting and rejecting a neighbor boy as “that lil black boy.” Yet she balked at the idea that her own mother should be considered “like those black people I didn’t like” for her darker skin. Joseph later reflected that “I guess we saw it sort of like the white man saw it . . . as people being lower than us.” The author gives this example of the insidiousness of internalized racism in New Orleans as an example of it as a “city fixated on and obsessed with gradations of color.”

“From the start, the house was sinking in the back.” (Movement 1: Chapter V. Short End, Long Street)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: From the first year the Broom family moved into the Yellow House, it was deteriorating, succumbing to the lack of suitable ground underneath it. The house—and all of New Orleans East—had been built on “cypress swamp, its ground too soft to support trees or the weight of three humans.” Drained to make way for lucrative city expansion, necessary infrastructure was not put into place to make it suitable for building or safe for living, surrounded as it was by waterways. The author describes a childhood fear where “the ground eats things whole” like quicksand.

From that first year of living in the Yellow House, Ivory Mae, who knew “it needed to be built back up,” was working to make the home habitable and beautiful. She hauled truckloads of gravel to sure up the foundation at the back, fighting against the spongy ground. The addition to the house is built with a small rectangle and second story, Simon “mistrusting the ground.” The Broom family try to make their home nice, but they are fighting against the inevitable sinking, cracking, mold, and decay.

“The house becoming, around this time, Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.” (Movement II: Chapter II. Origins)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: Ivory Mae worked to make her home beautiful and presentable in the same way she dressed and instructed her children. It worked for the most part with her children, but the house was more than her efforts could manage. When she first moved in, she decorated the home with nice furniture and rugs. She sewed curtains with the same machine she used to make all of her children’s clothes. The home was clean and presentable. There would soon come a time, though, when people would not believe a family who looked as tidy as the Brooms could live in a home as run-down as the Yellow House.

When Simon Broom died, he left a number of projects in the Yellow House unfinished. There were missing walls and a temporary staircase to the new second-story room. The bathroom where he died deteriorated into peeling walls, exposed wiring, and a collapsing sink. With Simon gone, no one remained to repair the house. At this time the house was no longer a source of pride but yet another member of the family Ivory Mae needed to take care of, and it resisted her like a wayward toddler.

“Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest . . . like water.” (Movement II: Chapter VII. Interiors)

—Sarah Bloom

Analysis: As the Yellow House fell into greater and greater disrepair, it became a source of embarrassment to the Broom family. By nature a hospitable family who once enjoyed hosting parties at home, they slowly began to hide its state from outsiders. The realization that they were ashamed for people to see their home wasn’t immediately obvious to Sarah Broom, although her mom was always saying, “You know this house isn’t all that comfortable to other people.” The recognition crept up on Sarah like the silent rising of the tide. It was a quiet realization shared by the whole family.

What was “a slow creeping at first, becomes a violent implosion later.” When a friend visited and expressed revulsion at the conditions of the home—the rats, the bathroom, the heat—they were forced to face the shame that had before been only implicit. They felt judged and embarrassed. No more visitors were ever invited. They couldn’t erase the shame no matter how much Ivory Mae scoured the place with Sure Clean, so they hid the house from everyone else.

“Remembering is a chair that is hard to sit still in.” (Movement III: Chapter V. Trace)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: To liken remembering to a chair that is difficult to sit still in suggests the act of recalling is uncomfortable. Author Sarah Broom situates this comment in her recollection of driving to see the Yellow House for the first time after Hurricane Katrina. They drove past familiar landmarks, everything in an unfamiliar, post-disaster state. Police stop them at a checkpoint. Carl has to show his NASA ID to allow them to enter their own neighborhood. Stop signs at flower height replace working streetlights. The nursing home where Ivory Mae had worked has a parking lot of abandoned cars. She can’t recall the other sights on the way. New Orleans East was not the same place, making memories of the drive and of the way it was a source of discomfort. Like a chair, the memories are something she can rest on. However, the hardness of those memories makes it uncomfortable to remain.

“Katrina’s postscript—physical wasteland . . . was only a manifestation of all that ailed . . . my family.” (Movement III: Chapter VII. Forget)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: Media coverage of the aftermath of and city response to Hurricane Katrina shocked outsiders. The images of people trapped, calling for help, or floating dead in flooded streets alarmed the public. It did not shock Sarah Broom or anyone else in her family because people “born to New Orleans already knew its underbelly.” They had faced discrimination in already poorly performing schools. Broom said, “No one was teaching me.” They had been afraid of the very police charged with protecting them. They had even been terrified to cross the dangerous highway that had been built in the middle of their community, dividing it. Residents had no choice but to cross the highway for daily needs.

The fact that she “lived in an unequal, masquerading world” was the reality of discrimination that Broom recognized even as a child. A lack of preparation or adequate response to a very predictable disaster is exactly what poor residents like the Broom family expect from the city. The storm only added to the problems that already weighed them down. The “physical wasteland” of New Orleans East after Katrina is an exhibit, a visible representation of the suffering they face.

“Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up.” (Movement IV: Chapter VI. Investigations)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: Before its demolition, the Yellow House had been Sarah Broom’s connection to her father. While it was standing, he was not truly gone, but once it was gone, just as suddenly as he had been gone, she had nothing. She realized that the house contained her as much as her father. It was ruined, “burst open; I had burst open.” The home, which had housed them all, all their experiences, was gone. In its absence, Broom realized that they are now the home, the container of their family memories. Ivory Mae said her children “have become the house.”

Broom asked a friend who was an engineer to interpret the city’s report on the home’s condition, written before the demolition, what Broom called its autopsy. The friend told her that “cracks help a house resolve its internal pressures and stresses.” In this way, the house can remain standing. Broom said when the house fell, “something in me opened up.” Cracked and broken as they were, the Broom family could now become the home that bears up.

“The story of our house was the only thing left.” (After)

—Sarah Broom

Analysis: Sarah Broom chooses to end her memoir with this sentence. It can be read as a literal statement. Her home was demolished by the city after the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, leaving just an empty lot behind. The lot would be auctioned off so soon an observer from above would not even see Carl “babysitting ruins,” as the memoir began. All that the Broom family had left of their home were their memories.

There are more ways to interpret the sentiment of the final sentence. In one sense, the statement is a melancholy one. After a lifetime of work, their home has vanished with almost nothing to show for it. In another sense, the claim is freeing. The home had become an “unruly child” that refused to stay clean and habitable despite all their efforts. It was a source of shame, a place they came to hide from others out of embarrassment from its sad state. To have nothing but the story of the home means they can move forward without the physical structure draining them. Likely, the final sentiment is one of resignation. The home is gone, and now they can act as their own containers for memories. Its story still belongs to them, and there is nothing more they can do. As Broom says: “What else?”