The Yellow House

     "The Yellow House" 4112 Wilson Avenue, New Orleans East, Louisiana from 1961 until Hurricane Katrina damaged it beyond repair was home to Ivory Mae who raised twelve children there, the youngest being author Sarah M. Broom.  This memoir tells the story of Broom's ancestors, parents, siblings, other family members, neighbors, and friends.  This also is a story of place: the development and decline of the community just east of New Orleans and New Orleans itself including the French Quarter, both the romanticized image and the real story of the residents and workers.
     Sarah Broom relates her life story as a young girl growing up who kept a journal throughout her life, went away to college, and had various jobs including as a writer for Oprah Magazine, then as a speech writer for Mayor Ray Nagin until she lost faith in his leadership rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
     "We are all born into histories, worlds existing before us.  No place is without history."  As a teenager she states, "I wrote in a notebook (my writing everything down having become, by then, habit.)."  After living in other places, she rented an apartment in the French Quarter. "Thus it could be said that my reaching to understand the French Quarter was a yearning for centrality, a leading role, so to speak, in the story of New Orleans, which is to say the story of America."
     Eleven years after Katrina, "Mom signed away the yellow house and its land, which she had owned for more than half a century."  "The story of our house was the only thing left."