A House and a Family in New Orleans
Sarah Broom has written a loving memoir of her family,
her life, and the yellow house where much of it happened. Broom is the 12th
of twelve children born to Ivory Mae in 1979 and her father would die shortly
after. Seventeen years earlier her mom, at age 19, purchased a yellow house in
the down and out neighborhood of New Orleans East for $3,200 cash with the
money coming from the life insurance proceeds from her first husband. She
re-marries and her second husband brings some stability to her family as he has
a steady job as a maintenance worker in the nearby NASA facility in Michaud,
Louisiana.
A small house with twelve children would normally be
chaotic, but the chaos is added to because it is an on-going do-it-yourself
construction project that was to say the least, done poorly. The plumbing is
erratic, electrical wires are exposed and the flooring comes apart. Yet the
family held together and many of its members ultimately thrived even in the
face rampant racial discrimination in the form of poor schools and the lack of
basic governmental services. Indeed, the demise of the immediate neighborhood
of the yellow house was accelerated by the placement of public housing within its
midst. In part, Broom’s book is a social history of New Orleans from 1960 to
the present. It is not pretty and New Orleans East, just seven miles from the
famed French Quarter, is a world apart.
The house has its demise with Hurricane Katrina in
2005. The entire neighborhood is swept away in the water and with that the
yellow house’s minimal foundation. It was demolished. Many of the family
including the author had already moved out of New Orleans, but the coming of
the water made the exodus permanent.
The rest of the book is a partial autobiography of
Broom. We see her as bright kid in a failing public school who then goes to a
Christian high school. She does well enough there to go on to college at North
Texas University and then to U.C. Berkeley for a master’s degree in journalism.
It is unfortunate that she spends very little time on her time in college and
nothing on her decision to go to Berkely and her time there. She also doesn’t
mention how she got her job at Oprah’s O Magazine.
She does however go into great deal her experience as
journalist in Burundi which was in the midst of a civil war. She goes there as
a result of meeting Samantha Power at a dinner in New York City. It was quite
the harrowing experience. On her return she ends up being a press flack for New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. While there she witnessed the underbelly of New
Orleans corruption.
Broom is a fine writer, and her story is inspirational
in the sense that few would have predicted when she was growing up in New
Orleans, she would rise to become a noted journalist and author. It is a
tribute to her mother who raised her by herself and to her.
For the full Amazon URL see: A House and a Family in New Orleans (amazon.com)
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