The Yellow House Themes

Home

The idea of home is a fractured one for Sarah Broom. In many ways, the fate of the Yellow House is the story of home for her and her family. In the beginning, home is a place the older children feel safe in and proud of. The Yellow House is the site of parties and outdoor movie nights. Over time, as it deteriorates, along with the rest of New Orleans East, home is a safety they find only in their mother rather than the structure itself. Broom says, “My mother was . . . the house that was safe.” The physical house is full of cracks and holes even before Katrina. Crime is rampant, and even the police are a threat. Sarah longs to leave this home, to escape its weight and shame. After Katrina, the house is left uninhabitable, broken beyond repair. Broom feels she has “burst open” just like the house. Then, suddenly, it is gone, demolished without notice.

Once the Yellow House is gone, the nature of home changes. In its absence, Broom claims that “without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up.” She and her family now contain the memories the house once did. Speaking of her children, Ivory Mae claims “the house lives in them.” They are home for each other and must bear up under stresses and pressures, battered as they might be.

Unfulfilled Dreams

The theme at the heart of the memoir—and the one that evokes such melancholy—is unfulfilled dreams. Sarah Broom shares her family history. Both her mother and grandmother were single mothers for most of their lives, struggling to provide for their children. It was only the insurance money from the death of her first husband that enabled Ivory Mae to become a homeowner. The Yellow House embodies her dreams of stability, respectability, and beauty. Yet, “from the beginning it was sinking at the back.” The home deteriorated, plagued by the swampy ground on which it was built and flooding, first from Hurricane Betsy and then Katrina. It becomes “a falling-down house cradling a vision of what it could and should be.” When the house is demolished, so too are Ivory Mae’s dreams. 

Author Sarah Broom only knew the Yellow House as a place of peeling paint, holes in floorboards, and faulty wiring. She was aware her private school tuition was paid with money they needed for repairs and food. Of her family, Broom says, “We knew what dreams cost–we’d been doing it . . . all our lives.” Those “unrealized dreams could pummel you if you weren’t careful.”

Of course, the story of the Yellow House is just one example in the wider story of New Orleans East. Billed as a new frontier offering the promise of city expansion, New Orleans East was created by draining a low-lying swamp between bodies of water. Wealthy out-of-state developers imagined a shining city with hundreds of thousands of new residents. It began well enough as a suburb and home to NASA’s rocket manufacturing plant, booming during the space race. All too soon, it devolved into a site for public housing unwelcome in prosperous parts of town and suffered from crime-ridden streets and poor city services. Instead of the “model city” developers dreamed of, New Orleans East eventually became a slum.

Discrimination

Racial discrimination is a problem in New Orleans according to the author Sarah Broom, who calls it a “city fixated on and obsessed with gradations of color.” Even the Black community has internalized racist attitudes, preferring light skin over dark skin. Ivory Mae considers her own light brown skin “good” and, as a girl, ostracized a darker child as a “lil black boy.”

Like most Southern towns and cities, New Orleans was segregated when Ivory Mae was growing up, and Black residents faced discrimination. There were signs banning people of color and dogs from their local park. Schools in New Orleans remained segregated even after Brown vs. Board of Education ruled against such practices in 1954. When the first three Black students were integrated into a white school in 1960, everyone else withdrew, leaving just the three Black students. Sarah Broom’s own brother was called racial slurs by a teacher and given a zero on a perfect test. Police officers question the author, in her own home, about the ownership of the laptop on which she is doing homework.

Segregation continued, in effect, long after it ceased to be a civic policy. Although it began as a mostly white suburb, over time New Orleans East became a Black and Vietnamese immigrant neighborhood that received minimal city services and low-quality public education. After Katrina, while white residents and tourists enjoy streets cleaned daily in the French Quarter, residents of color in New Orleans East don’t even have functioning streetlights for safety at night. Ivory Mae describes the discriminatory treatment as “a whole different set of rules.” Indeed, the author knew from a young age that “we lived in an unequal masquerading world.”