The dark underbelly of New Orleans revealed by Hurricane Katrina

Home, as James Baldwin wrote, is perhaps ‘not a place but simply an irrevocable condition’. Sarah M. Broom’s National Book Award-winning memoir The Yellow House is a sweeping social history and condition report of the New Orleans neighbourhood in which she grew up.

The youngest of 12 children in a blended household, Broom was born in 1979 in New Orleans East, seven miles from the iconic street lamps and streetcars of the French Quarter. Her mother, Ivory Mae, bought a house in 1961 with insurance money from the death of her first husband. Widowed at the age of 19 with two children and one on the way, Ivory Mae attended night school to obtain her diploma and worked as a nurse’s aide to support her family.

The Yellow House became so called with the addition of yellow siding, belying the decay within. Ivory Mae’s second husband, Broom’s father, was handy, but more adept at starting than finishing projects.