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| Here we zoom again.... |
Dear Bookclub,
Sarah M. Broom's "The Yellow House" had us clamoring for more on Katrina, reminiscing about our family houses, and appreciating the depth and complication of place, identity, race and inequality. The memoir's heroine, in our admiration, Sarah's mother, Ivory Mae, was a wonder. The heartbreak, resilience, tenacity, and radiance of New Orleans East beamed hard-core. Broom's task to inform the reader of an existence beyond our bubbled recognition loomed large. At times, we considered it too long and cumbersome. But the affection and love for the house was the thread, even when the house no longer existed. Sharing a vast variety of emotion, affection and otherwise, of our homes, past and present, proved a curious exercise. Returning to the day to day struggle Broom reported, the tedium necessary, left an exasperation for a solution:
"In 1970, the mostly white teachers still called students niggers. Things like this still happened: Michael, ten and in fifth grade, scored a perfect grade on a math test. "They put a big old zero on the thing," he said. "And so I'm checkin' it, going ... I don't know what's wrong. It wasn't nothing but adding and subtracting. So I'm saying, this supposed to be right. I said something must be wrong with my brain that this look right to me..... They gave me a zero so it have to be wrong? But everything was right." The white girl sitting in front of him - teacher's pet- turned around to look. "I was embarrassed for her to see my paper. I kept on checkin' it. I couldn't believe it. She said, loud-like, 'Gimme that paper nigger'" and snatched the test from Michael's hand."
And then he stabbed her with his pencil, damning his future. How can that be forgotten? Chef Menteur Highway; cutting the lawn for a house not there; an enlisted man named Edward Webb, seemingly murdered, characterized as a 'hit and run'; the Road Home Program; and on and on.
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| New Orleans |
I love this place.
