Summary: Movement III [Chapter V: Trace – Chapter VIII: Perdido]

After the funeral, some of the family went to see the Yellow House. Shifted from off its foundations, the house’s addition had split away, exposing the original green siding. All the windows were broken. The family stopped by the house, where Carl rode out the storm, so he could share his memories.

The Yellow House was torn down with none of the family there to see it go. A notice of the demolition was sent to the mailbox of the empty home. Carl, the only one who would have seen the letter, was hospitalized for health problems he believed were related to ingesting dirty storm water. Sarah Broom read the report of the home’s condition done by the city, which she called an autopsy. The hurricane waters had come into a city surrounded by water via humanmade waterways, overwhelming poorly maintained levees. Gone with the house were all traces of Sarah’s father, Simon Broom.

The failure of the city’s response to Katrina was all over the news, but it was nothing new or anything the residents didn’t already know. President Bush urged residents to return to New Orleans, ignoring financial barriers and the lack of basic services in many areas. Sarah traveled abroad to distract herself from her sense of displacement and loss. In New York, she met Samantha Power (born 1970), a future diplomat, who suggested she go to Burundi if she wanted to understand what happened to her family in a “global context.” Burundi had experienced genocide in which tens of thousands died. Sarah took a job with Alexis Sinduhije (born 1967), who was starting an independent radio station in his home country. The move was an escape of sorts, but Sarah was lonely. The violence in the country and creeping disillusionment with her work cut her job short. She accepted a position as a speechwriter for New Orleans’s mayor, Ray Nagin (born 1956).

The work for the mayor’s office promised to be a way to make a difference, but Sarah thought it would be a way to get “evidence about how the city was run from inside it.” Mayor Nagin was unpopular, partly because of his comments about New Orleans being a “chocolate city,” and he had only managed to win reelection after Katrina by busing Black residents in to vote. He often went off script and made offensive comments, which left Sarah scrambling to draft media responses. One-third of the population was gone, and basic services were still lacking. Nagin was more concerned about his legacy than effecting real change, and the Road Home grant campaign offered far less than real costs to homeowners who lost property. Even with Sarah working to push it through, Ivory Mae’s application alone took seven years to complete, as paperwork was constantly lost. Sarah realized the recovery she was tasked with writing about was fiction and left her job.

Analysis: Movement III [Chapter V: Trace – Chapter VIII: Perdido]

The deterioration, flooding, and eventual demolition of the Yellow House is an example of what Martha Anne Toll calls “the relentless divestment of wealth from the African American family no matter how hard they work.” Developers planned city expansion in a swamp surrounded with waterways without necessary planning or infrastructure to avoid inevitable flooding and sinking foundations. As their promises of a new frontier for New Orleans failed to come to fruition, the once white majority area became mostly populated by Blacks and Vietnamese immigrants. City government did little to address the multiple ills facing New Orleans East, and Broom’s family history shows the costs were borne by its residents. Ivory Mae worked constantly only to see her home sink, crack, leak, and flood due in large part to civic failures. Then she isn’t even properly notified of her property’s demolition. Later chapters reveal that she is left with a fraction of what it would cost to rebuild, and a handful of salvaged things is all she has to pass on to her children after a lifetime of work. As Lauren LeBlanc claims, the story of the Broom family and the Yellow House is one of “systemic disenfranchisement.”

If there were a theme to this period of Sarah Broom’s life, it would be disillusionment. She’s lost a serious relationship she thought would lead to marriage. She feels guilty she wasn’t able to help her family during or after the storm, so she seeks to make a difference at an independent radio station in Burundi only to find her efforts insignificant in the face of the violence and instability in the country. The leader of the radio station also proves to be less interested in the station than in his political career. She leaves that job only to find herself in a similar position in the office of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. She ends up writing speeches that do more to promote his supposed legacy than actual recovery efforts. As readers will learn in later chapters, the Road Home program is mired in incompetence and red tape, and even working from inside government she can’t make it move any faster for her mother, leading to a series of disappointments and failed hopes.