The Yellow House - Nat'l Book Award Non-F ('19)

Sarah Broom's debut book, "The Yellow House" a memoir of her life before, during and after the deadly Katrina Hurricane which displayed millions of New Orleanians.  The yellow house is the family home which tethers Broom's story and the only thing left.  Broom is the keeper of the family's history starting prior to her birth as the youngest of 12 siblings.  Prior to her memoir, Broom was a journalist published in the "NYT Magazine" and "O, Oprah Magazine".  The book is a historic odyssey of indigenous residents & her relatives flooded into diaspora.  Broom writes as an anthropologist and excavator of what remains.  Unfortunately, outside the house, the families' histories & biographies are awash in details that dilute interest.  Perhaps, there's significance in Broom's formidable accounting of and advocating  for her family.  An intimate reckoning of Katrina's  havoc so many of us choose to ignore makes being indifferent impossible.  It took Sarah's family more than 11 years to settle their claim with the city and in the meantime, most had settled elsewhere without being rooted.   Like Humpty Dumpty, the yellow house couldn't be put back together again nor could the lives of so many residents whose homes were destroyed not to mention the number of fatalities.  Neither of these facts, 1,833 deaths or the millions left homeless are noted in this annotative memoir.   Broom found a spirituality to her quest for answers "as an important inner light."  Her flotsam and jetsam of information is immaterial.  However, the disparity, injustice and displacement of mainly the poorer populous of New Orleans is a torrential downfall.  "The Yellow House" casts a beacon on ongoing corruption, a failing criminal justice and health system, poverty, education and lack of economic possibilities that create for the average local the life-and-death nature of life lived in the city. ..where many children graduate from school without knowing how to spell where neglected communities exist everywhere, sometimes a stone's throw from overabundance."  Noted too is much of what's great and praised about New Orleans comes at the expense of its native black people, underemployed, underpaid and buried beneath the mystique of a magical city that keeps out of sight the city's dysfunction and hopelessness.   The Nat'l Book Award ('19) was awarded "The Yellow House."  Broom's talent for journalistic integrity & insight are prevalent.  The auto-biographic deluge suppresses the story of New Orleanians, which is to say the swamping of the city's lower rung population.