Best Quotes from The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom with Page Numbers

"In the world before me, the world into which I was born and the world to which I belong, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, Amelia, was born in 1915 or 1916..."

"These women, who lived in close proximity, composed a home. They were the real place—more real than the City of New Orleans—where Amelia resided."

"What you decided to call yourself, these women seemed to say, was genealogy too."

"Each meal was a creation, derived from scratch, the smell and taste unified."

"Cooking had to be done right because food carried around in it all kinds of evil and all kinds of good just waiting to be wrought."

"You didn’t make eye contact with adults either. You spoke to other children if you were a child. These were protections."

"Lolo worked for what she wanted, but what she set her sights on was always changing."

"You got champagne taste with beer money."

"Whatever seasoning my mother and her brother and sister chopped for food had to be so fine it would not be visible in the finished dish."

"She has what my mother calls dancing eyes, what I call laughing eyes. Instead of smiling, she just knows."

It paid to be his chosen.

The past played tricks, Lolo knew. The present was a created thing.

Maybe this was what led her to try her fate in Chicago around 1942.

Hold your heads up. If they didn’t have a penny in their pocket no one had to know that.

It’s how you carry yourself.

Lolo always told us we could be whatever we wanted to be.

When we were growing up, we never thought of white people as superior to us.

The women kept their white cloaks in a wooden armoire in the church; the men wore long white robes with wide sleeves and kingly crowns made of felt.

One minute she was singing about feeling the fire burning then jumping up wildly the next.

Once we touched each other, it was on.

She was going to be somebody.

He was crazy about her though. Could not get enough of just looking in her face.

Ivory Mae couldn’t stand Webb; he got on her nerves, bad.

They had between them the kind of intimacy born of growing up near another person.

I really didn’t need to have no wedding gown.

Your mama wasn’t in they class either.

Nothing about her looks and charm could change that.

The couple spoke their vows.

There they might have seen Ernie K-Doe perform, long before he had a name.

What’s done is done. Gone. Over and done with.

"He seemed a man in possession of himself, if not things."

"One thing was certain: Simon had not simply happened to her, as had Webb. Simon Broom felt like a choice. She took him on."

"People say family friends taught him how to act citified then, and that is how he came to speak proper, learn to dress sharp, and have the high-class bearing that my mother fell for."

"I’ll sleep when I’m dead."

"She asked questions. She spoke her wants and wishes. She had already seen what silence brought."

"That first year after my mom died, I went crazy. I was in a shell-shocked state almost."

"The new woman, as Deborah and Valeria saw her, walked quietly around with little expression; they remember her as mostly silent with exploring, sometimes critical eyes."

"Eventually, the girls were taken to meet the strangers."

"He was the kind of man who always had another place where he urgently needed to be."

"What flourished between them, those delirious feelings."

Namelessness is a form of naming.

The dream is staggering—to transform a flat, low wilderness into a city, the size of Baton Rouge, within the city of New Orleans.

If ever the future can be studied from the past, New Orleans, augmented by its last remaining section, is surely destined for a tomorrow that neither the facile pen of the journalist nor the measured phrases of a lawyer can express.

I always dreamt I would have this house that was so pretty.

When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.

The women stayed home while the men and boys worked.

Their immediate neighbors...had one daughter, Karen, whom they obsessed over and thus ruined.

The short end of Wilson stayed still in a way, anchored as it was by the houses on one side of the street.

The word seemed extended, floating like a blimp; you could still hear it as you flew out of there and back across the street to the side where you belonged.

The land did not refuse her advances. She kept going.

"This ain’t no damn movie."

"The water was sweeping us down the street."

"What happened during Hurricane Betsy: one-hundred-plus-mile-per-hour winds blew in from the east."

"I can tell my grandkids about this. That’s how awesome Betsy was."

"Nothing like this will ever happen again."

"The dream would not, could not hold, because the foundation was bad."

"The now unrestrained salt water that flowed in from the Gulf would damage surrounding wetlands and lagoons."

"The city’s vulnerability to widespread flooding shocked the nation."

"Who is this Teller who comes in here making unauthorized, ridiculous, and irresponsible statements?"

"Everyone vowed to rebuild higher, better."

She was too young to understand loss then, but she knew now.

Everything was used; nothing existed solely for show.

Every step you took in it was an important point on its map.

Big booties squeezed into the den of the house; highballs aplenty...people milling about in the yard, telling stories, lying, and smoking.

If the house was Mom’s beginnings, if the house was her world, she had to find within it a seat.

Mom learned mothering by doing and by Lolo.

Big changes, the ones that reset the compass of a place, never appear so at the outset.

But nothing ever was, no, but nothing ever was.

You could see all the way to her arm and leg meat straight through to the bone.

Mom often dreamt vivid scenarios where her sister, Elaine, and her brother, Joseph, were in mortal danger and she flew above them wanting to rescue them, except she couldn’t figure out how to land.

This small bathroom where my father sat on the toilet after work and died... is for me a playroom full of things no adult ever touches.

Careful when coming down that my lavender jelly-sandaled foot does not step into the medium-size hole in the floorboard that will eventually become a large hole letting in more sound and outside creatures.

I like best to hear the voices in the house calling for me and not being able to find me where I am.

I take full advantage of this, especially when I want to get away from my big brother Troy whose nerves are always bad.

I memorize the room’s insides, learning right then and there the geography of hiding.

That is your and only your privates, that belongs to you, that is off-limits.

If anyone ever touches you down there you make sure to let me know right away.

Mom’s voice, when she is worried, has the same girlish sound as it does when she’s entertained by whatever small thing I am finding hilarious.

It takes a long time for me to know why I don’t have a daddy, but I am the babiest, I am told, last and smallest.

Babies don’t need to understand.

I am born; my father dies.

Of all the children to appear from my mother’s womb, I was her only cesarean section.

The bed takes all your strength, she started saying. From then on, she’d avoid it, except for sleep.

I have the notion that a new baby come into the world ought to be cause for celebration.

You were a tiny baby, but you were the only one to witness me dragging him like that.

Mom dressed like a widow. Simon Sr. was dressed as if headed to a jazz gig.

Daddy bought all us boys a black suit before he died. 'Every man s’posed to always have a suit.'

Even though Daddy played in Doc Paulin’s brass band, there was no jazz funeral.

The house becoming, around this time, Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.

I sometimes felt that the absence of that detail somehow disturbed my own personal narrative.

When he started to speak again, weeks later, his body held his father’s stalwart positioning, as if during the silence he had decided on a permanent way to be.

My main goal after Simon died was to raise all my kids and I didn’t want anybody to help me.

It was my Independence Day.

I am your mother. My job is to instruct you on right from wrong. What you do with that is up to you.

You don’t depend on nobody for nothing, you make your own money.

Her prayers became even more intimate: Father God, she began, you know my heart, like talking to her best friend.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

Everything we did together we held hands. He was my friend.

But I am a wandering child.

I had a lil baby. What can a lil baby know?

My growing-up world contains five points on a map, like five fingers on a spread hand.

This world of mine, it must be said outright, is a blur. I can see, but only up close.

I needed, I always felt, to get out in front of things (people and circumstances) before they could yell boo.

In St. Rose, I see certain things for the first time.

Each year I gain a new fear related to blindness or to water or to falling or to the soft ground that we live on.

School is just across Chef Highway and church is just down Chef Highway.

I become Sarah on the first day of kindergarten.

Tell those people I say, 'Sarah,' I say.

I have been named Sarah... for her love of beauty... and for her love of God.

Had they not read the questions?

"When a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again."

"Big Karen’s death makes her more real. That is how my world works."

"If the teacher asks a question based on something she’s written on the board, I’ll say something smart-alecky to hide the fact that I have no idea what she’s written."

"It is hard to know what you cannot see."

"Now everything is particular and distinct, the house a nosy child’s dreamworld."

"Every single word we pass, from billboards along the interstate and from storefront signs."

"Sometimes, when I want the world to go blurry again, I remove my glasses when passing by these scenes."

"I take this to explain her meanness and every single thing about her."

"I can see detailed versions of everyone I thought I already knew."

"This is what you can aspire to, blind kiddo."

We take photos because we do not want to remember wrong.

You’ll have what you say.

How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity?

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.

The goal of every school day is to avoid getting ribbed.

The things that get you targeted have to do with the unavoidable conditions of our lives.

It’s hard to heal from scorn.

You’re not going to ever be anything.

I begin to cultivate an obsession with the house’s windows and doors.

Mom always thought words had enormous power.

Shame is a slow creeping.

The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water.

By not inviting people in, we were going against our natures.

That is shame. A warring within, a revolt against oneself.

You could say we became the Yellow House.

What was worse? The house or hiding the house?

A house has to be maintained.

Mom’s cleanings were exorcisms.

We knew what dreams cost; we had been doing it—dreaming and paying—all of our lives.

Is this why we resorted to boiling water on the stove and carrying it through the lavender room where I slept?

High school, for me, boiled down to my desire to leave it for an elsewhere that I did not yet know.

Writing, I found, was interiority, and so was God.

Spirit-filled, Victory’s congregants spoke in tongues, a private language accessible only to God.

You had to do it without shame, with no self-consciousness whatsoever.

I had discovered that by writing things down, I could remove myself from whatever physical plane I was on.

My spiritual drunkenness made me well known around the church.

No one had any interest in the condition of our life. It was not entirely their fault.

I was carried off to the principal’s office... the principal called Pastor Frank to find out what exactly I had been drinking.

If we don’t change, we perish.

The world change every day; nothing stays the same.

I had sworn off church.

It felt like life stopped there—for me.

In its formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions.

The cost of my ignorance about college was high.

I was ravenous about learning.

I was for the first time in my life thus far, inviting people into my space without bad feelings or trepidation of any kind.

I laid a crocheted spread Mom made—burgundy, green, and red in an African motif.

Those tourists passing through were the people and the stories deemed to matter.

I did not yet understand the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from.

Success is earned.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

“Home was a regression. New Orleans East without a car was stuck.”

“Where you sleep the night speaks a great deal about your position in the world.”

“Even though it was a rag, it was beautiful.”

“I always thought I was gonna be able to get the house done.”

“I feel like everybody grown up should have a legacy, like a house or something, to leave for the next generation.”

“The house was there, and then it wasn’t. That’s strange, how something could be and then it’s not.”

“You could fathom that.”

“And then you see the lives of the children, and they become the living people of the house.”

“In that way, the house can’t die.”

Harlem is the only place in the world where we want to be.

You gotta realize … the Yellow House was up and running.

Never panic, Mo. You can never panic.

Shit, I gotta go through this attic now.

You must have been hungry.

The old folks across the way was telling stories about they had a big alligator in the water.

We were just fishing somewhere.

Imagine this being all that you can do.

I wasn’t worried about getting on no bus.

You thinking that’s mannequins floating by you, but when you get by it that body smell so bad.

But there were nine people living in it now: six adults and three children.

It appeared as house on the outside but was shelter for the dispossessed within.

He seemed able to transport us back to a feeling of home.

For a moment it could appear Herman was gaining, but small Justin left him far behind.

Herman became a hero.

Life tried to settle.

I yelled into the phone, 'CUUUUUUUUURRRRLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!'

He was a forty-year-old man living in his grandmother’s house.

Every moment we had was a moment to write down.

It was hard to know exactly how her illness came to be or how it progressed.

It felt wrong to me, too, not to have Grandmother’s death in newsprint for someone other than those of us in the family to know.

This was the first time I could recall being physically surrounded by every single one of my brothers.

They act like animals, my mother would say. That’s their way of saying hello and I love you.

This your baby, Ivory. Ivory Mae. How you feeling today, Lo?

These things combined made a woman of Lolo so that she was not only Mother, so that she was not only Grandmother, so that she exceeded her titles and her roles to become a person, and this was honor.

I don’t feel like Lolo is gone. She had gotten to be such a part of my life.

Grandmother forgot how to eat. Ivory Mae showed up to feed her.

You know what I’m saying?

It was the most awful calling out of someone’s name.

I centered everything around going to take care of her.

Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in.

Somehow, standing as we were—spaced perfectly apart—made me think of the time... when I wandered through Providence Memorial Cemetery.

It felt unnatural. When we did find the men, they were nowhere near where Michael thought, but they were close together in the ground.

I felt that old, childish shame again. I did want the Yellow House gone, but mostly from mind, wanted to be free from its lock and chain of memory.

The House called.

You tell on yourself.

To whom, I wonder, was it directed? My siblings and I who had let the house weaken, or the limping, fractured structure itself?

We were here, it was apparent, as witnesses to what Carl had come through.

Carl was convinced. He stayed in the hospital an additional thirty days post-surgery after incurring an infection from the hospitalization itself.

I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me.

Forget. This bent toward amnesia, my search for a haven, finally led me away from New Orleans altogether.

Remembering hurts, but forgetting is Herculean.

I knew that we lived in an unequal, masquerading world.

The giant matter of who could afford to return home.

Every piece of furniture had the appearance of age.

I tried to pinpoint, but found myself confused.

The city’s delights mattered more than its people.

I was mostly silent. When I did speak, my voice trembled.

What I sought in Burundi was understanding from people who ought to already know how to resolve the loss and migrations.

But the distance only clarified; it could not induce forgetting.

"I decided to return here because I was afraid to."

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively..."

"It’s time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans."

"No one stopped dancing; 2007 became 2008."

"This moment... was 'an opportunity to do something.'"

"The notion of evidence had taken on great importance to me during my time in Burundi."

"The discomfort of the wetness I carried around that day made the memory stick."

"I felt the entire right side of my face go slack. I would think, 'Have I just stroked out?' but not move to do something about it."

"We can’t get distracted now. We can’t stop now."

"Her voice went from cheer to disbelief. You did?"

Paying attention to being alive was how poet Jack Gilbert described what I wanted to do for a year in New Orleans.

I still could not, however, fully imagine a house of my own.

The force of his exit only made it feel so. I grieved the loss of him as I would the dead.

Whenever I felt, I felt sad.

How to resurrect a house with words?

Everyone tells stories, but have we listened to Troy’s stories? We have to be quiet and invite someone not so up front to say something.

My main thing is legacy. After I’m gone I want everyone to love each other and understand each other.

I searched for traces of Darryl in the house, his house, spotting an old sweatshirt hanging in the laundry room.

It was him. I grabbed and hugged Darryl two or three times. Like I hadn’t in my life before.

We get agitated in the same ways, too, when we haven’t had enough time alone, what Mom calls my acting ugly or my Monique self.

"Those of us living in New Orleans East often felt we were on the outer ring."

"How had one square mile come to stand in for an entire city?"

"If the city were concentric circles, the farther out from the French Quarter you went...the less tended to you would be."

"I have a deep connection to this city’s soil. It grew me."

"When you come from a mythologized place, as I do, who are you in that story?"

"Much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are...suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness."

"I wanted to know what it would be like to live in the French Quarter."

"I wanted, I wrote in my notebook, not to avert my eyes."

"Those were the easily explained reasons."

"I scrubbed every surface of the place with Sure Clean."

Living where Carl does requires Maroon-like levels of self-sufficiency and independence.

The East is less dressed up; it’s where the city’s dysfunctions are laid bare.

I had believed with absolute certainty that he did, but how would I have actually known since we do not stick around to see our dead deposited into the ground?

Searching alone in the great big graveyard made me jittery.

It felt good, leaving with something from our land in our hands.

This is worse than Wilson, Mom said of McCoy.

Carl called this place where he lived his 'lil room' or sometimes 'chicken shack' or 'my studio apartment' when he was trying to be funny.

I fretted over the seemingly inevitable flat tire.

One streetlight illuminated a metal box enclosed in wire fencing that belonged to the electric company.

The dead are relegated to the Old Road, too.

"Be a tourist in your own hometown!"

"What does living here do for you?"

"I don’t know yet; I’m trying to know the answer."

"Sometimes when we were playing out our morning ritual together, she stuck out her tongue at me and giggled, grabbing every simple pleasure."

"Nothing moved forward no matter what we did. No amount of effort seemed enough to unpause Mom’s life."

"I never thought you would become a nomad, she said to me one day. Which hurt."

"Look at how they clean the streets every day. Look like it’s so different, a whole different set of rules."

"The historicized past is everywhere I walk in my daily rituals."

"Sometimes, people’s response to my being from New Orleans is a sound—moans, gasps of re-memory—which generally precedes their own story."

"Who has the rights to the story of a place?"

No place is without history.

We are all born into histories, worlds existing before us.

The East was not too young for history; it was just that in the official story of New Orleans, its stories and people were relegated to the sidelines.

I had to search original deeds, chains of titles, successions.

We lived on an industrial-zoned street where the houses were the exceptions.

My questions did not belong there in the City Planning Commission Offices, for they were, at base, unanswerable.

With careful planning, you maximize value by avoiding conflict.

The objective of planning is to provide for these normal functions and to promote the greatest convenience, safety, and general well-being.

I was trying to figure out how a residential neighborhood became an industrial one.

I’m trying to build up an image.

They got us afraid to breathe out here.

What about the debilitating inadequacies of the educational system and the paltry job market?

Save a tourist and bury a native.

It was a terrible introduction.

All right bey, I don’t need to know all of that.

Whatever you do, Mo, you can never panic.

I was thinking about how rare it was, our staying to watch Tony lowered into ground.

James never dated the letters, never mentioned holidays or birthdays or time in general.

It takes me a long time to know what to say next.

We are the owners, the three of us, and that’s the way it should be.

Calling places by what they originally were, especially when the landscape is marred, is one way to fight erasure.

The house is still triumphant, in a way, by the fact of its existence and the posturing of its arches in the front.

What will they say about the world they came from and the world before them?

I do not accept this dire and grim view, precisely because of the children.

We’re not trying to push out their heritage. We can tell them we lived on this place, too.

The street mostly changes in the small, cumulative ways of decay.

The rigorous care for pressing clothes is a lesson passed down through generations.

Even after the street turned against itself, becoming the junkyard it always tended toward, the postman still delivered.

We’ll dig a hole and put one up,

They had DANGEROUS. DO NOT ENTER. Fucking right.

We were cutting grass for the look of it, making a small blot of pretty in a world of ugly.

The land could be taken away from us for any and for no reason—American History 101—so we wanted to avoid appearing on the long indecipherable list of blighted properties.

You had to be OK with being alone, riding, knowing that underneath you the blades were doing their work.

Cutting grass could seem so simple an act, so light... but there was a precision to it.

He was the keeper of memory... drawing a line around what belonged to us, what was ours.

As long as we had the ground, I took it to mean, we were not homeless, which was Carl’s definition of tragedy.

There’s a certain beauty in making the things that belonged to us presentable.

The thing Carl was holding on to—overgrown land needing a cut—and Poochie, new to the street, but finally the owner of something, however precarious and fragile.

Cutting grass was ritual; it was order.

For your first time, you did pretty good.