The Yellow House

The Yellow House is a memoir with a building at its center: the shotgun house in New Orleans East that Sarah M. Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961 as a nineteen year old widow with soldier's insurance money, raised twelve children in, patched and propped and was quietly ashamed of, and lost to Hurricane Katrina, which broke it so thoroughly the city later demolished it with almost no notice. Broom, the twelfth and youngest child, builds around the house a hundred years of family and city. She recovers New Orleans East itself, the swampy promised land of the 1960s where NASA built rockets and Black families bought their piece of the boom, and documents its long abandonment, the disinvestment, the highway, the wetlands sold out from under it, so that when the federal levees failed in 2005 the catastrophe lands as conclusion rather than accident. The chapters scatter and regather the family the way the water did, brothers guarding the ruin, siblings dispersed across states, and Broom's own flight and return, through Harlem magazine work, a strange interlude in Burundi, and a job writing speeches for the mayor of the broken city, until the memoir becomes an argument about place: who gets mythologized in New Orleans, who does the city's actual living, and what a house means to people the country keeps unhoused. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, a rare debut winner, and critics immediately ranked it among the essential American memoirs of its decade.