cbr16 bingo Rage
New Orleans East is a section of town, within the city’s borders, that is nothing like the rest of New Orleans. It was reclaimed swampland, drained by a couple of Texan developers in the 1950s for the city of tomorrow. New Orleans was booming at the time, with a massive NASA plant building the Titan rockets. (Made sense – there was a harbor and it was halfway between Houston and Cape Canaveral.) New Orleans East was supposed to draw in all the workers who would need housing. Except it never really materialized. However, it was where the author’s mother, Ivory Mae Broom, used the insurance money from her first husband’s death to buy a wooden yellow-painted shotgun house, her treasured Yellow House.
Another husband and eleven children later, the Yellow House had seen better days. The author, Sarah Broom, was the last of the eleven children, born just a couple months before her father’s death from an aneurism. As she explains. “When you are the babiest in a family with eleven older points of view, eleven disparate rallying cries, eleven demanding and pay-attention-to-me voices, . . . developing your own seems a matter of survival.” And so she does, heading off to Texas to attend college, and eventually going to New York as a writer for Oprah’s magazine.
And that is when Katrina hit. But it was more than just a hurricane. Within hours after the worst of the winds had gone through, the shoddily built levees collapsed, and entire neighborhoods, including the ramshackle one in which the Yellow House was located, were abruptly under ten feet of water or more. Sent back to write a personal account for the magazine, Broom comes to realize the full scope of the destruction systematic racism has had on the generations of black New Orleans residents. There was going to be no quick solution, no easy answer. FEMA was a joke, because those who needed assistance were not important to the power structure of the city or the state, or even the federal government at the time. I well remember the scenes on the news, the bewilderment of those of us elsewhere as to why no one seemed to be able to do a damned thing.
Parenthetically, I also loved her account of her early childhood days. The pitch-perfect eternal cry of the baby sister, “Mah!” made me crack up. Us older sisters still give our youngest sibling grief over that.