by Sarah M. Broom, 2019
Interesting and well-written memoir about growing up in New Orleans East, the youngest of 12 siblings. The home she grows up in, which she calls the Yellow House, was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and then demolished. She has had such an interesting life, growing up the youngest of 12. Her precious mother, Ivory Mae, is a rock. I loved her relationships with two of her brothers, Carl and Michael. She’s a genius, too. Her Mom saved her from a dead-end life when in high school, she went from being an honor student to a loser, her Mom pulled her out of that school and sent her to a private school that cost a lot of money but helped her become the talented young lady she is. She travels from New Orleans to New York City where she writes for Oprah. Hurricane Katrina happens while she is living in New York City. The destruction of her city, displacement of her family, and damage to her childhood home unmoors her. She moves to Burundi, an African country, to help fund-raise and write proposals “to support new radio programming that would advance human rights in Burundi.” After that, she moves back to New Orleans and works for Mayor Ray Nagin, writing speeches that he almost never uses. She only lasts 6 months. When she returns again to New Orleans, it is to live in a quaint apartment in the French Quarter and begin writing this book. I love her writing style, her mother, her brothers, her love of New Orleans, and her wanting to tell this story of the other side of New Orleans, of the people we never really get to see except in a disparaging light; to give these people a face and a name and help us to be more loving and understanding of the down-trodden in New Orleans.
Here are some quotes from the book:
Her mom’s salvation story:
In a lifted moment, singing this song or another one like it, Mom was first saved at the Mission. One minute she was singing about feeling the fire burning then jumping up wildly the next. Elaine went over and held her sister around the waist as if she were a tree. “Don’t hold her, let her go,” people were yelling. Elaine did let go, after a while, and Ivory Mae kept on at her salvation. After this, Ivory Mae began to develop a keen sense that she was God’s kid. That’s what she would call herself, in a possessive way, as if she were an only child. This annoyed Elaine. Ivory Mae now addressed God directly in regular prayers. Father God, she began, and he became for her (and would forever stay) the birth father she never had.
When Simon Broom dies, the author’s father and Ivory Mae’s second husband, she writes about her mother’s feelings:
Simon was her second husband dead. I figured I had two husbands and both of them died so it was time to do the single thing or people would be calling me the men killer. I had God on my side, that was my friend. I didn’t have human friends. I was relying on Him.
Her prayers became even more intimate: Father God, she began, you know my heart, like talking to her best friend.
I like this description of birthday celebrations-imagine doing this for 12 children:
In September, Karen turned sixteen. No birthday passed without a celebration; grief and celebration sometimes look alike. There was always a homemade cake and a gallon of Neapolitan ice cream sitting on a pretty tablecloth, always a small party around the kitchen table.
Here’s her description of being able to see clearly once her mother discovers that she cannot see at the age of 10:
“Trees have leaves.”
According to Mom this is the first thing I say the moment I can see…
…On the way home, riding in the back seat of our yellow Aries I read aloud every single word we pass, from billboards along the interstate and from storefront signs. I read the numbers on the radio dial. the mile markers and exit signs have words, too. We arrive home and I read from the cereal box and from anything that is in front of my working eyes.
I annoy everyone around me by observing out loud what everyone already knows…
This is how she describes shame and the fact that no one ever visited them in the Yellow House:
Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water.
I cannot pinpoint the precise moment when I came to understand that no one outside our family was ever to come inside the Yellow House. During the Livingston days my mother started saying, You know this house not all that comfortable for other people...
…We love interiors. My mother was raised by my grandmother Lolo to make a beautiful home; I love to make beauty out of ordinary spaces. I had not known this back when I was living inside the Yellow House, but I knew it in my adult years when I created rooms that people gravitated to, the kind generally described as warm. Once, a friend came to one of these made places, an apartment in Harlem, and sat in the parlor looking around. The room had made him feel alive, even happy to be alive, he said. And then, “You have things to make a home with.” People are always telling me this. I was the same person when I lived in the Yellow House. I had those qualities that drew me to want to be in a beautiful place surrounded by people I loved, and what this is building to, what I am trying to describe, is the gut-wrenching fact, the discovery even, that by not inviting people in, we were going against our natures.
That is shame. A warring within, a revolt against oneself. It can bury you standing if you let it. Those convoluted feelings manifesting as an adrenaline rush, when I narrowly avoided letting someone see the place where I lived. By the time I was fourteen, the possibility of anyone nonfamily seeing our house was imbued with fantastical power, the anxiety sending my heart to racing, even now, thumping these words out across the page.
When her sister, Lynette, goes against the rule and invites someone over:
But Lynette rallied and changed Mom’s mind, which surprised me and sent Mom into overdrive, doing all she could to the house except remaking it from the foundation up, which was the only important thing to do, the only way to hold the thing up, but we did not have the means for that.
For Deirdre’s arrival, Mom changed curtains, cleaned the chandelier with its faux crystal teardrops, spray-painted the frame of the front room mirror gold again, polished the tables, Sure Cleaned the house with bleach so that we could barely breathe. The house just stood there, a belligerent unyielding child.
…Deirdre came inside. Our welcoming her required that we move against everything we had practiced up until that moment. She confirmed for us without knowing it, what we saw with our own eyes. She was deeply uncomfortable, complaining bitterly about those things that we ourselves hated most: heat, rats, and the bathroom.
…Deirdre confirmed what Mom had already known. You know this house not all that comfortable for other people.
…Shame is a slow creeping at first, a violent implosion later.
One of her brothers, Darryl, ended up an addict, and here’s a description of what happens when he shows up and Carl, Michael, and Eddie beat the tar out of him (3 of his brothers):
Watching from the kitchen window, I’d see Darryl’s clothes on the ground, but no, the clothes were actually him lying down there, a ball of bones in fabric, knees huddled to his face, T-shirt tented, his head disappeared inside. Carl and Michael and Eddie’s anger would fill the yard, their long legs moving in and out, a springy motion, Carl gnawing at the knuckles of his balled fist.
This beating belonged inside, but bringing Darryl in was dangerous now. The fury of the brothers made the neighbors disappear; no one was outside except for the fighting men and their cowering brother. All curtains were pulled tight except for a peeking hole in Ms. Octavia’s bedroom window. I never watched for long. It is a terrible thing to see love misfire in a million different directions: we are beating you because you did a wrong thing as a grown man, because you hurt our mother who we love more than anything, because we can beat sense into you and addiction out of you even though of course we cannot, because if we do not beat you someone else will beat you to death and this will destroy us, too.
Mom would run outside each and every time in slippered feet yelling at the boys to stop–Michael, Carl, Eddie, y’all going too far now–her voice high-pitched and girl-like. Let him be now. She was thin, but curvy, many inches shorter than her sons, but she’d push her hips and legs against their bulk. When they backed away, Darryl was left lying on the grass. I’d stand there at the window watching him not move for the longest time. I never saw him stand up and walk away, but suddenly I’d turn back to look and find him gone.
Days later, he’d call collect from a drug treatment program.
“Hey Mo, Mama there?”
“Hold on. Mamaaaaaaaa.”
What is it, girl, why are you yelling?
“Darryl want you.”
And then the exact same thing would happen time and time again. This pattern–scheme, make amends, relapse, scheme–was who Darryl was to me for all of my childhood and teenagehood and for most of my adult years.
He stole our things to pawn for drugs: Mom’s wedding ring from Simon Broom that she shored in her bedroom drawer. Dad’s set of golf clubs. The banjo? He became responsible for any and all disappearances, whether he was the culprit or not.
We woke some mornings to find Mom’s car missing, which forced her to walk the half mile down Chef Menteur to her job at the nursing home. In the days following, we’d hear stories about how someone else was spotted riding in our car. We understood the danger of this. Whatever slight was committed by whoever “rented” Mom’s car from Darryl in exchange for drug money was also being committed by us. When the car came back to us and if Mom happened to be driving me to school, someone could mistake us for Darryl or for one of his drug friends and unload a round. I became terrified then of being shot, especially in the head. For many years, in many different places, including my dreams, I nursed this fear.
…Darryl awoke in me a new fear, not of strangers whose faces I did not know but of those things, people, scenarios that were most intimate, most known. But I didn’t really know Darryl, did I? He was my older brother that was the fact, but facts are not the story.
I was afraid to look at Darryl in his possession, which is how I thought of his addiction. I did not look at him, had never truly seen his eyes. When I did, many years later, his was a face I ha never seen before.
For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.
This when she does research on the African country, Burundi:
…Rwanda’s hundred-day massacre received attention that Burundi’s twelve-year war never would even though both were predicated on an arbitrary class system imposed by Belgian colonialists. In the nineteenth century, those European foreigners twisted the peacefully interdependent system of human relations between the Hutu, who mainly tilled the land, and the Tutsi, who mostly tended cows, into a murderous one by designating one group superior based on physical differences: the width of noses, span of foreheads, height, gradations of color.
Her work in Burundi was for the Radio Publique Africaine. She describes that radio station as follows:
My work a Radio Publique Africaine would never provide the feeling of achievement that I was used to, but I worked steadily, chasing down money and designing along with the journalists new radio programming–a show called Connaitre Vos Droits where reporters would read the Burundian constitution in Kirundi over the air so people knew their basic rights. Another show would cover the parliament live, a first for Burundi and a major step in holding politicians accountable to voters.
While in Burundi, she wrote long letters to friends and to her Mom. Here is a description of a letter she received from her Mom while in Burundi:
Mom sent a page-long reply on notepaper with flower borders that left little space for writing. Her letter answered none of my questions, ending instead with scripture penned in her oversize script: “Love the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your path.”
Describing her return to New Orleans after Katrina, which she calls the Water:
In the New Orleans I returned to in January 2008, the following things were true: The city’s homeless population had doubled from 6,000 pre-Water to 12,000 post….
There still remained a camp of homeless people, impossible to miss, who had set up tents under the interstate bridge on Claiborne Avenue…That there was–and to some extent has always been–a homeless camp underneath the bridge is not surprising. The interstate bridge, erected in 1968 to provide access to New Orleans East and beyond, ran above part of what was once a thriving black community, above what was once more than 150 homes, over what was once the black shopping district with tailors and clothing stores, five-and-dime stores, restaurants. Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory shopped there as children. My mother shopped there when she had children. The neutral ground where the homeless lived in 2008 was lined back then with more than two hundred great oaks–the longest continuous line of oaks to be found anywhere in America–all of them bulldozed to make way for the concrete bridge…
On her drive to visit all her siblings before settling in New Orleans again in order to write this book, she visits her brother, Darryl, in Texas. He was the one who was the drug addict. Here is her description of him during this visit:
…By night, I was pulling up to Darryl’s handsome two-story house. His four sons burst through the screen door and surrounded me in the car. Before I could step out, they were grabbing suitcases and rolling them inside. Darryl was at a Bible group, they let me know, but he had made red beans and rice, with I dutifully ate. I had not seen my brother in six years, since Grandmother’s funeral…After dinner, I searched for traces of Darryl in the house, his house, spotting an old sweatshirt hanging in the laundry room, “Darryl’s Construction Company” on the front. The boys followed me around and stared, trying to decide who I was to them. Darryl had a younger daughter, Sarai Monique, my namesake…
I was asleep when Sarai and Darryl arrived, but Sarai burst into the room and shook me awake…Darryl appeared in the doorway. Chewing gum. I watched his face. He was heavier than I remembered, which I took as a sign of his being drug-free, a sign of overall good health….
After Darryl kissed me good night, I hid my purse and my car keys. It was an old habit. In the hallway, I heard him say, “OK, group, shut it down.” The house went quiet, as if a light switch had been flipped.
Here she is describing moving into the French Quarter of her beloved New Orleans:
…This is the place to which I belong, but much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are, more often than not, underemployed, underpaid, sometimes suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness. If the city were concentric circles, the farther out from the French Quarter you went–from the original city, it could be reasoned–the less tended to you would be. Those of us living in New Orleans East often felt we were on the outer ring.
When she lives in the French Quarter, sometimes people would take her picture with a zoom lens as she stood on her balcony watering her plants. I like this saying:
“You never know how you look until you get your picture took,” my mother says my father, Simon Broom, was always saying.
Her father, Simon Broom, died when she was 6 months old so she never knew him.
She touches on how the French Quarter has certain codes requiring certain paint colors on its buildings, how the public library is teeming with homeless people outside until it opens and then they are inside, the high murder rate in New Orleans and unsuccessful attempts by government to curb it, and how long (11 years, I think) for her Mom to finally get some money from the Road Home program for her house, the Yellow House.
In the acknowledgements, her last thank you is this:
And finally,
My One: Diandrea Earnesta Rees, for the most incredible accompaniment of my life. Without you, I would never have finished this book. You, artist, make me know. You are the wish and all I never knew to wish for. I love you. I see you. I admire you fellow f.a.c. Keep busting the sky open. No home absent you.