Somewhere in Sarah Broom‘s beautiful memoir The Yellow House, she writes: “We take photos because we do not want to remember wrong.” For memoirists, I believe it’s less about remembering wrong and much more about making sure things, places, homes–and people, especially family, are not forgotten in the first place. In the case of my wife, Bridgett Davis, her inspiring memoir The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In the Detroit Numbers, was not only a remembrance of her late mother. The book honors the entrepreneurial ingenuity Fannie used to secure a middle-class life for her family, and the precarity and joys of that existence in the midst of an evolving Detroit.
In high school, I recall one of my English teachers telling me that you could use James Joyce’s Dubliners as a way to navigate that city. It feels as if you could do the same with The Yellow House. There’s an incredible amount of detail here, drawn from a mental map built over a lifetime. The book is Broom’s way of holding tightly to the memory of a place that no longer exists as it did during her formative years. Through the course of the The Yellow House, we go deep into a family’s history and come to understand what the house meant for both her and her family, especially to her mother Ivory Mae . We also understand how the house and the geography of New Orleans shaped the family’s lives.
We often read social science reports about “the need for reinvestment in neighborhoods.” In The Yellow House, we are given a visceral sense of the disparity of Broom’s New Orleans East vs the better-known French Quarter. It was the latter around which New Orleans built and builds its myths. As Broom notes:
These streets-thirteen parallel, seven intersecting, seventy-eight square blocks, less than a mile walking from Canal Street to Esplanade, three minutes slow driving-contain the most powerful narrative of any story, the city’s origin tale. This less than one square mile is the city’s main economic driver; its greatest asset and investment; its highly funded attempt at presenting to the world a mythology that touts the city’s outsiderness, distinctiveness, diversity, progressiveness, and, ironically, its lackadaisical approach to hardship. When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?
Ultimately, the book is about the struggle to define oneself in the face of two major displacements: The first, of course, was Hurricane Katrina–known among folks in New Orleans as “the Water”. The second was the loss of the Yellow House–already an imperfect dwelling prior to the storm–was demolished because it was uninhabitable afterwards. For whatever it’s worth, I can still drive by my childhood home in Cleveland. I can point to a place that physically still exists. What does it do to your sense of your place in the world when that’s no longer an option?
After living in NYC and traveling abroad, Broom returns to New Orleans and works as a speechwriter for then-mayor Ray Nagin. She writes:
Nagin had survived the Water. He could say, I stayed. I was here. His not leaving meant: I am one of you. That was a Purple Heart in a city where outsiderness is never quite trusted. Before the storm, New Orleans had the highest proportion of native-born residents of an American city-seventy-seven percent in 2000, which meant that only small fraction of New Orleanians ever left for elsewhere. This was why the mass displacement meant so much. And why those, like me, who left and returned had to prove their nativeness all over again.
What makes you an outsider in the city you grew up in? How do you overcome that, especially in a city that’s evolved since you left? How do you hold onto memories when the physical markers of places that held those memories are no longer there? Clearly the memoir is one means of doing so.
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BONUS: Bridgett reviewed The Yellow House for the Women’s Review of Books. Her take, as you’ll see, was way more eloquent that mine.
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