Summary: Movement III [Chapter I: Run – Chapter IV: Bury]

Lynette, the sister closest in age to Sarah Broom, lived with Sarah in Harlem, where Sarah worked as an editor for O Magazine. While they attended a jazz concert, their family in New Orleans was evacuating before Hurricane Katrina. Ivory Mae and some of her children and grandchildren went to Mississippi to stay with a cousin, and the roads were crammed with traffic as the population tried to flee all at once. Carl dropped his family off at a shelter and went to the Yellow House. The Broom siblings were scattered.

Carl and Michael grilled and drank the evening away outside the Yellow House. The rain started about 11, and they left. Carl went to his family’s home and fell asleep. He awoke to water on the floor. As it rose, he fled to the attic with his two dogs. Armed with an ax, he chopped his way through the roof as the water kept rising. Several neighbors were on roofs as well. They were stranded for seven days. Sarah had no word from her family except a broken phone call from her mother, who said there was water in their home too. She felt helpless. After waiting for some time outside the overcrowded convention center, Carl and some other men found a boat and paddled around the city, passing floating corpses. A helicopter evacuating the prison picked them up and took them to the airport, where they were given a choice of destinations. Carl ended up in San Antonio. Michael was stranded in the housing projects with over a dozen others. They saw looting and violence as everyone became desperate for food. The water was filthy. There was only speculation about Lolo’s experience as her nursing home was evacuated, the residents bused away.

Byron, Sarah’s brother, flew his mother Ivory Mae and other family to California to stay with him. Sarah joined them, tasked with writing an article about their experience of the storm. It was over 10 days after Katrina before they heard about the fate of Michael or Carl. Carl assumed residency of Lolo’s house, which was unharmed. Family members began settling in California and the other places they had ended up, enrolling in school and finding jobs. They finally located Lolo, who was at a nursing home in Texas. She died one month after the storm.

Of the 12 siblings, only two remained in Louisiana and none in New Orleans. They all went back for Lolo’s burial. It was the first time they had seen Ivory Mae cry. She was distraught at the funeral. Sarah wished she could take off her glasses and not see it, but she wore contacts. She had witnessed how tenderly Ivory Mae had cared for her mother, stricken with Alzheimer’s, in her last years.

Analysis: Movement III [Chapter I: Run – Chapter IV: Bury]

The author creates suspense in the Katrina chapter through foreshadowing and shifts in perspective. The audience knows Katrina will mean the end of the Yellow House, but they don’t know how or if all of the family survive. This partial knowledge of the future and the immense danger posed by the storm makes the scene with Carl and Michael quite suspenseful. They grill and drink as one of the most damaging storms in recent history rapidly approaches. It is like a scene in a horror film where the filmmaker gives enough away for audiences to yell at the screen, “Don’t go in there!”

Broom adds to the suspense by interrupting the accounts to shift from family member to family member at key moments. Carl is stranded on the roof, then the perspective shifts. Ivory Mae shouts into the phone that there is water in the house, and then the perspective is of Sarah on the other end of the line waiting. Broom offers snippets of her family’s experiences, leaving readers as unsure about their fates as she was at the time in her apartment over a thousand miles away in Harlem.