The Yellow House

Broom's debut memoir is built around a single address: the shotgun house her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961 in New Orleans East — then a hopeful new subdivision near a NASA plant, at the height of the Space Race — and in which she raised twelve children. Broom, the youngest, was born six months before her father Simon's death; after it, the house itself became, in her telling, Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child. Braiding a century of family history with the house's long physical decline and the neighborhood's abandonment, the book moves through the family's dispersal after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the house, and amounts to a redrawing of the city's map: the tourist's New Orleans on one side, and the East — its Black working-class families, its erasures, and its endurance — on the other. Part memoir, part oral history, part urban history, it won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year.

Author: Sarah M. Broom · Original publisher: Grove Press (New York), 2019