Summary: Movement II [Chapter VI: Elsewheres – Chapter X: 1999]

Photos show Sarah Broom excelled at school around age 12. As she entered her teens, a time when her siblings moved in and out of home, Sarah started middle school. It was a place of verbal sparring, corporeal punishment, and fights. She disliked it and started cutting classes. Alarmed, Ivory Mae enrolled Sarah in a private Christian school in the suburbs, where she was one of only a handful of Black students.

The family grew more and more ashamed of their home as it fell into further disrepair. Embarrassed, they kept visitors away, which contradicted their naturally hospitable inclinations. The appearance of the family, so carefully dressed by Ivory Mae, belied the state of the home, which deteriorated despite frequent disorganized attempts at repair, like the green vinyl siding placed over the rotting yellow exterior. Crime and police corruption rose. Controlled by drug addiction, Darryl began robbing his own family. Sarah felt increasingly afraid.

Ivory Mae took her children to church. Sarah was baptized, spoke in tongues, and was regularly slayed or “drunk” in the Spirit. She developed a crush on Roy, who played bass in the church. Michael moved back home and worked as a chef in the French Quarter, just as Sarah began to dream of moving away. She discovered the work of James Baldwin.

In 1997, Sarah neared the end of high school as an excellent student. She planned to attend University of North Texas, unaware of local schools with lower tuitions. After Carl and Michael dropped her off at college, she made her dorm room an inviting, comfortable place. The summer after her first year, she went back to New Orleans and took a barista job in the French Quarter, a part of town none of the workers could afford to live in themselves.

The summer of 1999, after studying at two colleges on the East Coast, Sarah went home briefly. She saw her childhood friend Alvin, not realizing it would be for the last time. Her mother called her with the news he had died. He had crashed his car while high. After that summer, she never again slept in the Yellow House, whose roof now leaked, leaving the rugs discolored. Ivory Mae reflected that her children’s lives are evidence of what happened in the home and that in that respect the Yellow House is immortal.

Analysis: Movement II [Chapter VI: Elsewheres – Chapter X: 1999]

The impact of poor public education on Sarah Broom and some of her siblings points to the detrimental effect of inequalities in public education on a larger scale. Sarah went from a student who excelled academically in elementary school to one in danger of dropping out of middle school. She says later that no one was teaching her in middle school. Teachers hit her hands with rulers to demand obedience instead. Michael did drop out despite having an unusually high intelligence score and a perfect math test. Low-quality education and systemic racism threatened to block the Broom children and others in New Orleans East from academic achievement and potential economic advancement. If Sarah and Michael, two clearly intelligent people capable of great achievements, were negatively impacted by inequities in the school system, Broom’s later suggestion that it is a contributing factor in New Orleans’s high crime rate and economic depression seems quite credible.