The Yellow House

The second half of Movement 3 focuses on Broom’s journey. The lingering trauma of Hurricane Katrina and the loss of the Yellow House affects her greatly. She senses that she no longer has a home. She feels guilt over not being present during the hurricane. This feels like a failure to be present for her family. She also finds failure in the rest of her life. Her love life is unsuccessful, and she is frustrated with her job. Her desire to move to Burundi is an attempt to situate her family’s displacement within a larger global context. She recounts a conversation with Samantha:

I told her about my urge to travel in order to ‘understand more broadly the displacement of my New Orleans family.’ I had said this line so much that it had become like saying my name. I was genuinely interested in placing what happened in New Orleans in a more global context to understand how loss, danger, and forced migration play out in other parts of the world. I was also finding, I can admit now, anthropological, academic language for the urge to distance myself from the fate of my family, which of course was my fate, too (318).

Her desire to know is also a desire for distance. She uses the analogy of a rubber band that’s keeps snapping her back to the same place.

The loss of the Yellow House particularly affects her. While she had complex feelings towards the house, her family is devastated that it was torn down. She writes, “Carl said those people then came and tore our house down. That land clean as a whistle now. Look like nothing was ever there” (302). The fact that the lot looks like there “nothing was ever there” erases Broom’s link to her past. The demolition of the house is an example of the complicated recovery after Katrina. She writes, “what can an abandoned house receive, by way of notification? And when basic services like sanitation and clean water were still lacking, why was there still mail delivery?” Broom gets the city records about the demolition. The house is deemed unsafe to enter. Broom asks a friend who is an engineer which problems were caused by water and which were caused by the structure of the house itself. The foundation of the house was on beams supported by brick piles. This method was not uncommon in Louisiana, but it was not structurally sound enough to withstand severe winds and flooding.

Broom links the demolition of the house to the death of her father. The incomplete add-on that her father built is a tangible record of his life, a link between Broom and the father that she never got to know. While in Burundi, she becomes obsessed with evidence. She writes everything down and searches for paper trails. Evidence proves something once existed, that something is real. The loss of the house complicates her attempts to understand her family’s history. However, the house holds an emotional and psychic weight on Broom. She writes letters addressed to the Yellow House, writing, “Sarah Dohrmann suggested I write to you. You who I do not know but can envision, more than that, can feel. I am unsure of how to go home” (372).

When Broom does return home, the trauma is palpable in the city. She outlines the complex reasons that many people did not return. For example, before the hurricane, Karen rented a three-bedroom house for $350 a month. 55 percent of New Orleans rented before the Hurricane. This is one reason why they don't come back. In 2008, more than 100,000 people, one-third of the city, are still displaced.