September's book group gathered again via Zoom to discuss The Yellow House, Sarah Broom's inaugural book released in August 2019. Linda chose the book and hosted the Zoom and attendees included: Annie, Joan, Libby, Maddy, Marylib, Paige, and Sheri. Zanna Cochrane, one of the original B and B book group organizers, joined from her home in Ketchum, Idaho, a welcome addition.
Several readers agreed that the story is multi-layered: personal memoir, extensive family history, and a narrative of decades of remembrances shaped by the vulnerable land where the author's beloved home sat - 4121 Wilson Street, in East New Orleans. Early in Broom's story she reminisces that the house was "on ground that is always soft". (East New Orleans was a no man's land just south of a major thoroughfare and Lake Pontchartrain. The kids had to dangerously cross this highway to go to school.)
In 1961, 19 year old Ivory Mae, a new widow destined to become Sarah's mother, was able to purchase a rapidly constructed shotgun house in a huge urban development intended to provide houses for workers employed in other neighborhoods, businesses, government buildings, and tourist venues - all on higher ground.
Ivory Mae remarried and went on to raise 12 children in this house. The entire time she made every effort to keep the interior as lovely as she could. Ivory May exemplified for her children a strong sense of self-pride and a desire to learn. They would carry these traits through many twists and turns in their lives.
The reader learns about Sarah in her early life within the family and in her hometown. The reader is then treated to Sarah's extensive personal accomplishments and demanding travels to other parts of the world. meanwhile, throughout, she would return to revisit her roots and to check on family members, those near and those far-flung, having had to leave New Orleans after Katrina.
In an interview, Sarah Broom stated that she did not intend to write a book about Katrina, the category 5 hurricane that severely hit New Orleans in 2005 and absolutely destroyed her home area in East New Orleans. The aftermath of this horrific event event led to the complete destruction of what remained of the Broom family's yellow house. However, it may have brought Sarah back to New Orleans to stay as part of her community and to thrive.
This book received a 2019 National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Non Fiction. It provided our book group opportunity for interesting conversation, as well as several recommendations for improvement of a new author's writing style.
For me, the Zoom gathering represented the value of group book discussions.
THE ABOVE WAS BY Linda Hamilton
FURTHER COMMENTS BY other book group members:
Some people thought it was remarkable how Broom recreated her family history through photographs and that she included them in the book. While she never said they were poor, you knew it by some of her fascinating descriptions of the house and what went on in it. There was some feeling with readers that her portrayal did leave out a certain amount of warmth, that it was more just day to day, year to year description.
There was some confusion by readers of who all the characters were, and even though Broom had a big family, it was hard to keep them separated and who was who. Some readers felt that the book also needed editing especially the last part after Katrina hit. Broom changed styles with italics for the statements of other family members especially her mother, and during the "water" had whole paragraphs about what happened to certain people during the water rise. Some felt this was clever, some confusing.
One reader who could not attend wrote in to say: I found the first part very engaging; Sarah's childhood was a poor one marked by great dignity. Her parents were remarkable, and the message each child could be clean and polite and neat despite poverty was very affecting. The middle part was just confusing - we skipped all of her education and rise in visibility and status and ended up in Burundi for no obvious reason. I couldn't understand what the last third was about - Sarah's various positions in government, her family, the yellow house, or East New Orleans.
Another reader disagreed with this assessment that the trip to Burundi had no purpose. This was a country on the edge, of collapse, of trying to recover from a horrible war and ethnic violence, and it needed help. Broom no longer felt like she had a home, and her sense of place and loss was extreme. The Yellow House had burst open and with it she "had burst open". She had moved to Harlem, worked at Oprah and was dissatisfied, and was swayed by a talk and a book and the urge to travel and explore other people and their problems with dislocation, displacement, and disconnection. This travel was vital to her finding herself, exemplified in her long letters home with desire for family, for home, for direction. Through her intense loneliness in a country that was not hers, she found that she had to leave to travel to then come home again. She had to sever herself from the past, to leave her former self and find another. This was the crucial part of the book where I felt it as a launching pad to confidence and thoughtfulness about who she actually was. She also stated that she was "genuinely interested in placing what happened in New Orleans in a more global context to understand how loss, danger, and forced migration play out in other parts of the world."
Another reader said it well: We didn't love the book, but were glad to have read it. I found her writing to be prose-like in places; she could put a thought or feeling into a string of beautiful words that could give me pause. This was (thankfully) not a diatribe on the injustices and inequalities that blacks have endured. But, she was able to point this out within the context of her life story, which gave it more impact and made it more readable for me. The book felt a little over long; further editing was needed. Her choice to go to Burundi was impulsive, perhaps the kind of thing i would have done when i was her age. And she needed to be grounded in something away from New Orleans, family, and the "water". Burundi was by no means fulfilling or grounding, but i think she grew up a bit, and was more prepared to face all the challenges at home.
Several readers agreed that the last third of the book with all the government jobs and moving around that Broom did, was confusing. But the book ended sweetly with Broom and her brother Carl meeting back at the plot of land where the Yellow House had been to mow and clean up the yard. The pride that her mother, Ivory Mae, had imparted was certainly carried on.
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