Announcer: Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the of the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho, by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With additional funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation.

Sarah Broom, Author: I wanted to sort of play with the idea of map-making, the idea of cartography.

To actually expand the map, to start to revise what it means to be a historical place.

Marcia Franklin, Host: coming up, I talk with National Book Award-winning author Sarah Broom about her memoir, "The Yellow House."

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," next.

Stay tuned.

(Music) Hello and welcome to Dialogue.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

When Sarah Broom was growing up, she would hide and eavesdrop on conversations.

And there were plenty of them, she was the youngest of 12 children.

Broom was able to recount those conversations so well that her family named her "the tape recorder."

Decades later, she would use that skill to pay homage to what she had seen and heard – and what was missing.

In her memoir, "The Yellow House," Broom puts her childhood neighborhood of New Orleans East and her house back on the map, so to speak, after they had been ignored for decades.

Trained as a reporter, Broom combined journalism and archival research with storytelling to show that long before hurricane Katrina had ravaged the area – and the yellow house -- governmental neglect and amnesia had set the stage for disaster.

But it's also a tender story of family architecture.

In 2019, the work won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

The judges' citation read in part: "If Sarah M. Broom's "The Yellow House"   was simply an indictment of state sanctioned terror on the gulf coast, it would be a stunning literary achievement.

Broom, however, shows us that such an account without breathtaking rendering of family and environment is, at best, brittle."

I spoke with Sarah Broom at the 2021 Sun Valley Writers' Conference about her memoir – and about houses as metaphors.

Franklin: Before we start talking about your wonderful book, "The Yellow House," I do want to ask you about the past year and some that we've gone through, which has just been, um, there, there really is no template for it.

Broom: Sure.

Franklin: And I want to know how it has been for you as a person, and how it has been for you as a writer.

What we have gone through, and what we're frankly still going through?

Broom: Well, this year and a half or so, and even today has just been so tricky, because I think in certain ways for everyone, life was distilled, right, to its essence.

And we thought a lot about, I certainly thought a lot about the things that mattered.

And then of course, all of us were stranded at home looking at our houses and the people we loved and, and also feeling, I think, an enormous amount of fear about what was happening in the world and what would come next.

And for me, it was such a tricky time, because I had published this book that appeared in 2019, sort of right before the pandemic.

And I just found myself thinking so much about the writers who had work coming out in the middle of a pandemic and how strange that must have been, especially for first-time authors, the way that I was.

I kept, uh, really empathizing so much with that and thinking, and, and also being, feeling that I was in a kind of interstitial space, right?

In the time between having gotten a book into the world and making something new.

So I think the entire time was just so difficult and so fraught, and we're not through it yet.

I mean, I think for so many black writers, right, the subject of what does it mean to be American has haunted us for so long.

I mean, I can think now of the work of Baldwin and the work of Morrison and the work of Du Bois, and the work of Richard Wright, and the work of so many, um, who have already been, trying to talk, really, about this current moment.

Octavia Butler's someone who was writing about this moment before it even happened in so many ways.

And so I think, you know, that project, right, of, of really considering what the American myth is and how we kind of deconstruct it is, I think, will be my perpetual obsession.

Franklin: Well, I love what you, I love and respect what you, what you said in the book that "disaster makes us see the world as others have always seen it."

And, you know, in the case of "The Yellow House," you're talking about Katrina and floods, but we can also apply that to the past year and a half.

The violence that we saw is, has always been there.

Broom: Sure.

Franklin: Underneath the current.

And that you, you write about it and sometimes it's not outward violence.

Sometimes it's a violence that's done through laws or the lack of laws, or as you put it, point out about this place where you grew up, namelessness, you know, in the not-naming of things, there's a certain violence that happens, because it's in an erasure.

Broom: Absolutely.

And that is really the project, right, of thinking about systemic injustice.

Because what we know is that sort of historical violence that is essentially baked into the soil that determines or predetermines what my life was going to look like to some degree, even on the day I was born.

That that is a kind of violence.

And what we know also through evidence is that there is generational trauma.

That something my great-great-grandmother experienced, right, could be passed on to me in fact.

And so this sort of question of what violence means, what it looks like, and what the sort of traces are through the generations, is still something I'm quite interested in exploring because I, I think the writer, Gail Jones, for instance, is always trying to think about these sort of generational loops and what gets passed on.

Franklin: Well, let's talk about a house as a repository of memory of what gets passed down.

Even as a child, you paid attention to your house.

What, what drew you in so early about the house that you lived in?

Broom: You know, that's such a good question.

I think part of it is that I'm just deeply drawn to place.

And I don't know if there's any way to explain this beyond it's the way another person would notice color.

That's the way I notice the granular detail of place.

And I remember being so very young, and paying a lot of attention to our doors and our windows and being obsessed with the view from the window, what I could see out of the window.

And I remember, for instance, being so young and looking out the window of our yellow house and seeing the rainwater pooling between the houses and thinking, "Oh, that's so odd.

That's so interesting."

Right?

And so I think part of it is just maybe because I'm so interested in detail, and a house is a thing that is full of detail.

And then of course I couldn't see for a very long time; I had terrible eyesight.

And so I think when you have terrible eyesight, you're always interested in getting up close to something.

And then, because I didn't get glasses until I was about 10, by the time I could see I was, you know, hooked to every single detail, um, in the world that I sort of lived in.

I think that had a lot to do with it.

Franklin: And a house is a metaphor as well for us.

Broom: It is.

The house is a perfect metaphor, right?

Because it, it is a kind of container of the self.

I mean, if we believe what the philosopher Gaston Bachelard says, he says, you know, houses are -- our soul is an abode.

And if we think about houses and rooms and all the places we sort of tap into our soul, that's what he believed.

And I think also a house was just for a writer sort of gold, right?

Because you get to talk about the American house, you get to talk about the Louisianan house and what it actually means to be contained in a certain space.

You know, and for me, because, you know, at a certain point, the house became dilapidated, it allowed me to think about what houses are meant to do -- the ways that they can or cannot contain you, and how you could in fact be very disappointed in space, how houses aren't necessarily for me exempt from all those wide-ranging emotions.

Franklin: This could in fact be an autobiography of a house.

Broom: Yes.

Franklin: You know, in many ways.

The house also relates to absence.

I mean, there's the presence of your mother who bought this house when she was only 19; there's the presence of your 11 siblings, who are either in or pass through the house, but there's the absence of your father as well, which I thought was so poignantly drawn in the house.

It's holding him.

Broom: It is holding him.

And it's, you know, he was a kind of absent presence for me, always.

Um, my father having died when I was six months, and, and me just feeling like the traces of him were everywhere.

You know, he was one of these guys who my mother called a Jack of all Trades.

You know, he was always trying to fix something himself.

And it was the sort of the bane of my mother's existence.

She would say, "Why not get a professional?"

Right?

Which insulted him.

But because of this, there were so many incomplete things, right?

I mean, the stairs were temporary.

We could see through the walls because he hadn't patched them up.

And after he died, though, these things became his traces, became the way we could feel close to him in some way.

And, you know, I think for me, I've always been very interested in absence.

It's an easier way for me to describe something once it's gone, you know?

Uh, and so I think my father was really, um, a kind of mystery and a kind of energy that I was interested in discovering.

Franklin: This book and your interest in maps and your interest in place also broadened -- shows the house in situ, right?

I mean, it's, you broaden out in the book and you show the house on the short end of a long street in a particular area of New Orleans that does not get its due -- now is getting its due, uh, New Orleans East.

Talk more about why you wanted to do that.

Broom: You know, mapping, first of all, is so important to me.

It's really one of the ways I think I tell time.

And one of the ways I ground myself.

And I was so struck always by how we were sort of situated in New Orleans East.

That we were in this area of the city that was so vast, that was actually so vital to American history, that had one of the most important NASA space facilities in the United States of America.

And yet no one had ever heard of New Orleans East.

On a very, very practical level, when I was growing up in this part of the city, I was struck by the way we were sort of cut off from the rest of the street by this very dangerous highway called Chef Menteur highway.

And you know, my sister was hit by a car... Franklin: That was so incredibly scary... Broom: ...on that highway!

Franklin: ...and poignant in your book.

I mean, I was just… Broom: And we grew up knowing that.

You know, we'd take a look at her skin grafts and say, "That's because of crossing Chef Menteur highway."

My childhood friend ultimately died on that highway.

It was a sort of a horror scene.

But for me as the writer, it was so interesting to think about, how do, how do streets get designed like this?

What happened in the city planning process?

Who were the creators?

What happens with zoning?

And so I think why I chose to think so much about this was I wanted to sort of play with the idea of map-making, the idea of cartography, to actually expand the map, to start to revise what it means to be a historical place, right?

If I deem the yellow house historical, then why can't it be historical?

Because it certainly has history.

And so I think in a way I thought of myself as speaking for everyone who came from these kinds of unknown places, wherever your place is in the world.

Franklin: Right, because there is the, the total dominance when people hear about New Orleans on the French Quarter.

Broom: Sure.

Franklin: And jazz music and the French quarter.

And, and, and to the exclusion of pretty much everything else in the city.

Broom: And the French Quarter is one square mile, literally one square mile.

So what I feel about New Orleans East is that it's vast, it's really about 40,000, um, acres, actually, in terms of its total size as part of the city.

And so I think there are many different experiences of life in New Orleans East.

And my job was to talk about mine.

And, you know, I come from a very, I have a very specific point of view, which is that I haven't lived in New Orleans my whole life.

Um, I left after college and I've always gone back pretty regularly.

And I actually think that gives me a kind of, uh, insight into what's happening because the distance is really useful for me.

Franklin: Um, Katrina obviously figures in this book because it was a huge impetus for you to write it in the first place to talk about how, what happened with the house.

Or as you call it "The Water."

Um, the, the book though is not about Katrina.

But it helps us unearth, you know, the lack of foundation that was there, that was, as you say, baked in, and what happens when something like Katrina occurs.

Broom: I think so.

I mean, I want it to really put Katrina in context.

Because one of the things that, um, aggravates me is that often it's talked about out of context, right, as the sort of thing that transformed, uh, Black New Orleanians lives forever, um, and many other people's lives forever.

And, you know, Hurricane Betsy happened in 1965, exactly 40 years before.

Franklin: That was really interesting for me to read.

Broom: Yes, and the parallels are eerie, eerie.

There was time to do something different, right?

And Katrina, the reason, part of the reason that I call it "Water" is because I want to move beyond the idea of Katrina.

Because Katrina, the storm itself caused some damage, but really the damage was caused by the official negligence of the levies breaching.

And that's what I call "official negligence."

And so that makes what happened in August, 2005, one in a very long line of official negligences that were done against, you know, poor Black people in New Orleans, specifically.

Because those are the people, as we know, historically who live on the lower lands, right?

We know that environmentally, the people who are most affected, right, have the least amount of money.

And so these are the sort of crucial things.

And then I think by talking about water, I could talk not just about that particular storm, but about even a pandemic, which I didn't know about then, or the sort of forces that overwhelm all of us.

I mean, thinking about climate change and climate disaster, um, there are things happening in the world now that we've never seen before.

Right?

And, and I think the idea of water could take all of that in.

Franklin: This book is heavily reported.

It is a memoir, it's a description, a beautiful description of a house, of your siblings.

It's also heavily reported, because your background is in journalism.

And, um, we, we learn so much through your diligence in going through, uh, house titles and, and history that really had never been pulled forward before.

How, what's the balance there between, you know, that reporting -- including interviewing your family members as a reporter would, and kind of trying to suss out what's fact from fiction, you know, in family lore.

How do you balance that with, you know, the need obviously to, for it to also emote, you know what I mean, and bring, bring yourself forward?

Broom: You know, that's such a good question.

I mean, I, I felt that all I could bring to this book was the things I best, I knew how to do best.

And I knew that it would be impossible for me to be objective, trying to tell the story of my family.

And so I thought, for instance, "I'll interview all of them and then fact check whatever stories they told me."

So I could be a kind of ethnographer in the actual interviews, right?

A kind of participant observer... Franklin: Well you were known as a tape recorder.

Broom: Right.

And I could be my tape recorder self.

Franklin: When you were a child, yeah.

Broom: Um, but then I could go and use what they told me to actually uncover doors in the archives and in primary sources.

And, you know, it was such an education to take an address that was not given any historical value and just pay close attention to how much time it would take for me to unfold the history of it.

And I kept, of course, comparing this to the five seconds it took me to find the history of the French Quarter apartment I was living in.

And, you know, suddenly I knew back in the 1700s that it was owned by free people of color.

And I literally knew that because all of the information had been stored in one library and I could find it quite easily.

And, so it was, being a reporter and being, and thinking about facts and thinking about evidence when it came to a place where those facts and evidence weren't, they weren't written down, they weren't stored often.

They weren't saved.

There were no books about New Orleans East that I could consult.

Right?

I mean, I was essentially finding it all for the very first time.

And in a way that felt also like the limitation of the work, right?

I could only tell so much story in a single book.

So I think ultimately I kind of felt like I was at the tip of the iceberg by the time I'd written it, that I was only telling a very small portion of a very large story.

Franklin: Mm hmm.

Your, um, descriptions of Katrina, um, and your, and your brother, you know, we saw the news reports about people on top of houses and he was one of those people.

I mean, they, they are so vivid; they brought back so many memories for me of helplessness as you know, you watched people ask, you know, dying.

Broom: Well, I mean, the, the memory even of that is hard even now.

Right?

Um, and I think in a way, for me, that was why I want it to collect the stories as these oral histories that they were, because they gave me just as the writer, the distance I needed to actually craft the thing.

Because, you know, in the process of crafting, it's pretty emotionless for me, I'm not feeling anything except how harrowing it is to write.

But in the collecting of it, in the year where I focused all of my energy in just collecting all of the stories, it was painful to do.

And I remember so many times being, you know, I did, I think 150 interviews with my brother, Carl.

And, you know, in the book, they're sort of seamless pieces.

But in real life, they were fragmented, because it was so hard often for us to have the conversation in the first place.

Right?

And we'd distract ourselves or we'd say, "Why don't we go and have, you know, boiled shrimp instead of talking about this?"

Or, um, so I think that part of it, the accumulation of history and of story and hearing my brother, his voice crack, you know, or, or seeing him not able to remember, were the parts that I, I remember even now and that cause great feeling in me.

Franklin: And you've been back to the site, obviously, where your house stood.

And we don't have a lot of time to talk about how that happened, but it's, um, I, I dare anyone to read that and not be angry at, at what, what occurred and why that house is no longer there, at least physically no longer there.

But what, what was that like to see that leveled space?

Broom: Just completely disorienting, you know, and there's this way in the book that I try to talk about what it means to have touchstones in your life and what it means to have sort of landmarks and things that, you know, if you close your eyes, you would know where something is.

And I think the experience of injustice actually is a disorienting, displaced feeling.

And so to sort of show up to this place that my mother bought when she was 19 years old, with every cent she had -- a widow -- a place where my mother built an entire world for me and my 11 siblings, and for it not to be there, it's the sort of lost feeling that you, you don't want.

Franklin: Yeah.

Broom: Right?

It's a complete disorientation, I think, of the self.

Franklin: Your mother is the rock in the story, the through-line.

Um, really gave you so much in the way of appreciating words.

Broom: Mm hmm.

Franklin: How, how is she with all of the attention now on the book, with the, with the, um, National Book Award and having her life in the book?

Broom: Mm hmm.

I think it's a lot for her.

I know that it's hard to be written about, right?

And my mother had read the book in a very hypercritical way.

She was sort of like, "Ah, I like this; not sure about that."

And I think it was her way of detaching a little bit from the character of herself in the book, right?

Because it's all true, but it's still one sliver of maybe who she is.

Franklin: I can't be the only one who read this book and wondered about the intermediary steps that took you from New Orleans East to U.C.

Berkeley School of Journalism, eventually, to working as a, as a, as a journalist.

Um, I know you don't talk about your upcoming works.

I totally empathize with that.

Um, because it's something that, you know, you don't want to put into the world yet.

But I can say I hope that we will see more of memoir from you.

And, um, I look forward to that.

Might that be a possibility?

Broom: I think you'll see more of many types of genres from me.

Is that, is that good?

Is that a good answer?

Franklin That's a good… Broom: You know, I'm so superstitious about writing.

It feels so fragile to me, like a spider web, and I never want to collapse it by talking about it.

But I want to make a body of work.

You know, all of my writerly heroes have bodies of work.

So I want to be that way.

Franklin: I totally get that.

Broom: Yeah.

Franklin: Could you tell me what it was like to receive, to first hear that you were the recipient of the National Book Award and then to be in that space with your mother, yes?

And to receive it?

Broom: Uh, well, when I was sitting at the table and they called my name, I lost my hearing for, uh, definitely, um, about a minute.

And I just looked around and people were cheering.

And I looked at my mother who had a tear rolling down her eye.

And I just, I don't know how I got to the stage exactly.

But I did.

And literally crossing the room of literary publishing to the stage, I thought about what a distance I've come.

And it just felt so sort of great.

Right?

Um, and to have my mother in the audience and to be able to publicly, um, honor her for her absolute hunger of words, of learning, of making, uh, the kinds of sounds in life that could create a writer.

Franklin: Well, thank you for closing that distance for us in opening up a world that many of us didn't know about.

Broom: Thank you.

Franklin: I certainly learned so much, and I plan to tell others about the book as well, and encourage them to read it.

So thank you.

Broom: Thank you so much.

This was really wonderful.

Franklin: I hope you've enjoyed this interview with Sarah Broom, the author of "The Yellow House."

Our conversation was taped at the 2021 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the organizers of that wonderful event, to our guests, and to the Dialogue team.

If you'd like to watch this interview again, or any of the nearly 70 conversations I've taped at the Sun Valley Writers ' Conference, check out our website.

Just go to idahoptv.org and click on "Dialogue."

For Dialogue, I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for tuning in.

(Music) Announcer: Presentation of Dialogue on on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the of the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho; by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With additional funding by the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation.