genre: memoir, non-fiction
From the beginning of Sarah Broom's story, we know that The Yellow House does not survive Katrina in a habitable way. So we also know that this is going to be a story of before and after - the life that Sarah's large family lives in New Orleans before "The Water" and how they and The Yellow House put themselves back together (or not) afterwards.
New Orleans is as much the heart of this story as The Yellow House. Sarah's journey takes her from New Orleans out into the world and back again, over and over, as she tries to figure out her place in her family and in the world she was born into. Her family's history, their purchase and love of the yellow shotgun house on the short end of Wilson, the way her many siblings both stay and scatter - the stories Sarah is told and the things she figures out for herself, all of this is an attempt to put the pieces together after The Water. It is also the story of New Orleans, of course, a place that is so wrapped up on our nature's imagination that its reality (and the people who live there) is often playing second fiddle to what we WANT New Orleans to be.
I listened to the excellent Bahni Turpin narrate this audiobook and it's very well done. It was a quick listen for me, I was engaged in Sarah's story from the start, even if I had a little trouble keeping people straight for a while. The writing is lovely and her ideas struck me, time and again - her thoughtfulness and introspection made me care about her and her family. For me, a person who has visited New Orleans as a tourist twice and truly loved it, this book did the really important job of giving me an insiders look of what it is to be Black and living "off the map" - not in the French Quarter, not in the Garden District "downtown," but in New Orleans just the same, loving this city and depending on it for physical care and safety and a sense of community.
Also, I love house stories, neighborhood stories and place stories. So many times as Sarah was talking to me about where she was, I was on google maps. looking it up. I've looked at the streets where she grew up and played, and I appreciated the photographs that are in the paperback as well. The parts of this book where Sarah was teaching me about New Orleans history, I was all in, I found it fascinating how grand decisions made in boardrooms somewhere can affect the life and livelihood of citizens and I loved to learn about the New Orleans of long ago. Sometimes, when her story was super far afield from The Yellow House and its environs, I felt adrift, maybe that was intentional but I was less interested in those parts of her life, as important as they were to her journey. When she was digging into her family's displacement, that's when I felt most engaged in her story.
While not perfect, I think that Sarah's book is an important piece of work and an excellent blend of memoir and history, set in a specific, beloved place.
content warning: language
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