Summary: Movement IV [Chapter VI: Investigations – After]

Sarah discovered there are no books written about New Orleans East. A city worker in the planning department couldn’t tell her how Wilson Avenue came to have homes, trailer parks, and a junk lot all together. Another worker claimed people can’t just go around questioning things “the way we think they make sense.”

Sarah’s cousin Tony was shot and killed, a personal example of increased gun violence in the city. The violence was condemned, but city officials did not consider any of the contributing factors like educational inequality and unemployment. Her other cousin, James, was in jail, and letters were their only contact.

Sarah took Ivory Mae to visit her half-brother Joseph Soule, who had taken ownership of their father’s house, claiming Lolo’s children were unnatural. At Lionel Soule’s funeral years before, they had not been considered family. Sarah searched archival film for images of her own father, of whom she had just six photos. She thought she found him, playing in a jazz performance, but Ivory Mae said it was not Simon.

Carl, Michael, and Sarah hung out at the empty lot where the Yellow House once stood. There were only two houses left on the street. It had been Carl who had salvaged a few items from the structure after the storm.

Carl asked Sarah to cut the grass on the lot, his way of making the property presentable. From the riding mower, she had a new perspective on the street. Michael interrupted her reflection to bring her back to the front. Carl had punched out a man squatting across the street who he felt threatened their territory. They felt possessive of the lot because “as long as [they] had the ground,” they weren’t homeless.

Eleven years after the storm, Ivory Mae received her Road Home grant for the destroyed property. The lot would be auctioned. Sarah wondered what Carl would do, their story now all that remained.

Analysis: Movement IV [Chapter VI: Investigations – After]

The author layers her family history and autobiography with the history of New Orleans to “see very clearly the interstices where things meet up.” In a 2019 interview in The Atlantic, Broom explained that she “made no distinctions . . . between the house, my family, the street, New Orleans East, New Orleans, America” because “they were all the same subject to me.” Broom is making the case that the story of the Yellow House is in many ways the story of America.

By dividing the memoir into sections called movements, the author plays with the various meanings of the word. Each section is like a movement in a symphony, each portion with its own “rhythm, and pace, and tone, and overall feeling,” as Lauren LeBlanc explains. Movement can also be understood as part of an effort at advocacy. Political or social movements seek to address problems and bring about change. The memoir can be interpreted as part of the author’s effort to “explore systemic disenfranchisement” of Black communities. Finally, movement can be interpreted in terms of the scattering and migration Katrina survivors were forced to undergo and of Broom’s own personal journeys.