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The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom
c.2019, Grove Press
$26.00 / $38.95 Canada
304 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
Sojourner’s Truth Contributor
The back screen door always slammed, loud.
No matter how hard you tried not to let it go, no matter how
much your mother yelled, it always happened at the home
where you were raised. In, slam. Out, slam. It
was the music you grew up to, the song of your childhood
and, as in The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom,
it signified the place where you belonged.
Ivory Mae Webb needed somewhere to raise her children.
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She was a mother and a widow in 1961 and living in her
mother-in-law’s home wasn’t going to work anymore. With two
toddlers and an infant in tow, Ivory Mae spent $3,200 cash
on a ramshackle two-bedroom shotgun house on New Orleans’
east side, becoming the first in her family to own a home.
Three years later, the house was renovated and ready for
occupancy, but the family had grown by then: Ivory Mae was
expecting a second child with her second husband, Simon
Broom, who was raising two girls. The Yellow House at 4121
Wilson Avenue bulged with the newlyweds and their
newly-blended family of seven children.
After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the house was expanded again
– poorly, as it turned out, by Simon, who worked at a nearby
NASA facility and who fancied himself a handyman. Still,
every bit of work he did was needed: over the years, five
more children would join their siblings and every square
inch of the house was used, says author Broom, who came
along last.
Simon died when she was six months old. He never finished
the renovations.
Nor did Ivory Mae, whose oldest did occasional fixes on the
Yellow House as children moved out and sometimes back.
Through the years, the house stood and sometimes sagged, a
place where family was comfortable, even if no one else was.
It was home.
And then Katrina hit…
Home is: a spot for sleeping, four walls and a roof,
somewhere for your stuff, the place for family, the reason
you work. In this book, home is also packed with author
Sarah M. Broom’s relatives, and some of them have more than
one name. Home is a story that goes farther back in time
than you probably need, but it helps you understand that
The Yellow House isn’t just a book and that wasn’t just
a house.
Inside these pages and those walls, readers will find rooms
full of the past in Bloom’s family, of New Orleans, and of
its black residents. They’ll find closets with skeletons
inside, and corners full of dirty laundry, neither of which
are sensationalized. They’ll find a dusty upstairs jammed
with memories. And they’ll witness the kind of easy support
that large, loving families enjoy, and it’s really good
before things got really bad.
The page count here belies the fact that The Yellow House
is a big book: big on story, on history, joy, and sorrow.
It’s a tale of leaving and coming back home, and for fans of
memoir and lovers of place, it’s a slam-dunk.
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