Sarah M. Broom on her family's home
How the meaning of a place can change over time + a many-colored plant of the week
Landscapes communicate feeling. Walking, you can grab on to the texture of a place, get up close to the human beings who make it, but driving makes distance, grows fear.
Sarah M. Broom’s virtuoso memoir The Yellow House centers on her family’s home in New Orleans East, a primarily Black neighborhood where the city’s levee system threatens to flood and roads are designed for driving through to somewhere else, not stopping and walking. From a hopeful beginning in 1961 when Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, purchases a house in New Orleans East—at the time considered the hottest development in the area—disinvestment and racist city planning create hazards all around the home. Among them is Chef Menteur Highway, which can turn a walk to the unfortunately named Jefferson Davis Elementary into a brush with death.
Because the setting is New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina looms in the plot. But it’s not the only narrative driving the book. “Those of us who were born to New Orleans already knew its underbelly,” writes Broom. “Storms, of all sorts, were facts of our lives. Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew. I knew, for example, that we lived in an unequal, masquerading world when I was eight and crossing the dangerous Chef Menteur Highway with Alvin. … Katrina’s postscript—the physical wasteland—was only a manifestation of all that ailed me and my family in mind and spirit.”
In a revealing passage, the book revisits Hurricane Betsy in 1965, a long-ago warning about the unequal risks of the levee system in New Orleans. “HUNDREDS MAROONED ON ROOFS AS SWOLLEN WATERS RIP LEVEE. HURRICANE BETSY LEAVES NEW ORLEANS WITH 16-FOOT FLOOD,” reads one headline that nearly describes 2005 as well. The Yellow House never recovers from Betsy, but it would be many years before the family loses it entirely.
For readers interested in place-based writing, The Yellow House tells an essential story about how the meaning of a place can change drastically over time. As the neighborhood begins to disintegrate, so too does the family’s beloved home change from a space where dozens of friends gathered for highballs and music to one that the family feared inviting people into, worrying what they might think about a half-repaired house sinking into unstable ground.
After the family is dispersed across the country and the world by Katrina, Broom’s research project on the Yellow House becomes in part a way of knitting back together the frayed connections between them. She uses a journalist’s analytical rigor in her examinations of the family’s past, but also brings to the fore her family members’ emotional lives of decades ago with startling clarity. I suspect I’ll be thinking about and returning to this book for a long time after finishing it.
Plant of the week: Paper birch
One striking thing about our area is little groves of paper birches (Betula papyrifera) down the road with a view on Quincy Bay or Boston Harbor. What pops out in the drab winter landscape is the whiteness of the bark, but one day I was mesmerized by all the different colors found on birch up close: black, pink, tan, green, seemingly everything except plain white.
When the white outer bark strips away, it reveals a watercolor spectrum of warm tones on the inner bark.
Anyway, if anyone wants more glamour shots of birch, I have a few.
Many profiles of paper birch mention that it’s “short-lived” and “shade-intolerant.” Essentially, it’s a tree that takes hold early on in the development of a forest, often in a spot where weather has created a clearing. Other longer-lived species such as pines can grow up in its shade. As birches die and leave behind their artisinally-designed logs, they help build up organic matter in the soil.
In winter, birch provides a sought-after food source for birds in the form of its catkins—long, cylindrical structures that hold its tiny seeds. Redpolls, a kind of finch mostly found in northerly boreal forests, often move from birch grove to birch grove on their wintering grounds. I’ve so far been unlucky in being at the right birch at the right time to see them, but you never know what might happen tomorrow.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.