Upon accepting her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in the film Fences in 2017, Viola Davis said the following: “People ask me all the time, ‘What kind of stories do you want to tell, Viola?’ And I say, ‘Exhume those bodies.’ Exhume those stories — the stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition. People who fell in love and lost. I became an artist, and thank God I did because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life. So here’s to August Wilson, who exhumed and exalted the ordinary people.” In her first published book Sarah Broom, a native of New Orleans, does just what Viola Davis called artists to do. Broom exhumed the bodies.
As a memoir the book from the beginning read a bit like the Book of Genesis from the Bible since family relations, and how people were connected, took precedence for setting the stage for the rest of the memoir which serves many functions: as an act of resistance to the erasure of the culture and history of a place urban planners and politicians sought to eliminate, as a allegory for the four I’s of oppression (namely ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized), as a testament to the resilience of the people disproportionately affected by the storm from New Orleans East, and as a relic of the Broom family having been displaced after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
Resistance. Broom found clever ways of weaving the theme of resistance throughout her work. The examples I picked up on were through her hairstyling, where she chose to sleep after the loss of a loved one, and through the eyes of her mother, Ivory Mae. Firstly, in her early life Broom’s choice in hair grooming served as a symbol of resistance. In her words: “I wanted my hair to project a freedom I did not feel” (p. 243). Western society idolizes straight hair. As a black woman, even at a young age, Broom makes the conscious choice to reject straight hair as the acceptable standard of beauty. Broom allowed her hair to just be, exist, without interference…undoubtedly a freedom she intuitively knew she may never get to experience in her lifetime. The second instance of resistance observed was following the death of Broom’s childhood friend Alvin. Broom no longer could sleep in her home, the Yellow House. She instead opted to rest in other people’s homes. When writing about that decision made in the fall of 1999 she said, “where you sleep the night speaks a great deal about your position in the world” (p. 253). The Yellow House was many things by Ivory Mae’s own recognition it was a place not suitable for everyone. Despite her best efforts to keep the place clean, the Yellow House remained a bit like a living mausoleum of her deceased husband’s shoddy and incomplete handiwork. The third instance of resistance is through Ivory Mae’s character and actions. Ivory Mae, having married and started a family young, had an incomplete high school education. She didn’t allow her marriages or need to provide for her children get in the way of her dream of becoming a nurse. The journey was not easy, she failed her nursing exam multiple times, but she eventually became a nurse. Another form of resistance is through Ivory Mae’s rejection of the Yellow House’s demolition. As Broom’s mother put it, “when I look at you all [her children], I don’t really see the house, but I see what happened from the house. And so in that way, the house can’t die” (p. 256). The hurricane may have turned the Broom’s into displaced persons and damaged their home in addition to previous damage that existed; the city of New Orleans may have demolished the Yellow House; but, Ivory Mae refuses to accept the house is gone. To her, the house is alive and well because what it represented still exists through the lives of her children. Resistance also surfaced through the theme of belonging.
Belonging is one of many themes that appear in the memoir. In her closing paragraph to the chapter titled “Erase”, Broom writes: “I had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not” (p. 307). Although Broom left New Orleans East, and by extension the Yellow House after Katrina, they were always a part of her. As she put it: “It is hard, too, to talk about returning to a place you have not physically left…moving back to New Orleans and successfully living there had been a goal of mine ever since leaving” (p. 380). Despite Broom’s connection to New Orleans her sojourns rendered her a foreigner to people who returned sooner after Katrina. Broom mused: “foreignness, I had discovered, could become a geography and a job, as could the perpetual search for a haven” (p. 344). The pain of being perceived as an outsider may only be part of the complexity of returning to the place to which one belongs. Broom claims, “it is the return not the going away that matters, I always wanted to say. That painful snapping back into place” (p. 333). In the section titled “Movement IV Do You Know What It Means? Investigations” one of the three epigraphs is a quote from Joan Didion stating: “A place belongs to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image” (p. 377) . In a sense, Broom resists the notion she’s an outsider because while she physically left the land she remained forever tethered to the property by memory and in spirit. Later on, Broom cites W.G. Sebald, a German writer and academic, having written: “the East stands for lost causes”. However, Broom rejects Sebald’s the interpretation because there are still people, children, living in the area. Where there are inhabitants there must me a place to which they belong.
Oppression. All oppression, at it’s root, can be traced back to ideology. The idea that one group is better than another group is ideological oppression. That superior group then usher in what we call institutional oppression. Systems developed that reinforce the idea that the superior group is better than all other groups and therefore deserves/enjoys certain privileges. Institutional oppression begets interpersonal oppression, how people relate to each other by reinforcing the idea of supremacy. Lastly, there’s internalized oppression. This is when the oppressed groups co-opt the superior ideology and believe themselves to be inferior. All four I’s of oppression, as they are known, are observable in the memoir. The ideological oppression reared it’s head through the idea that the heart of the city of New Orleans, i.e. the French Quarter (to be read white area) was more important then the rest of the city on the outskirts like New Orleans East (to be read black/brown).
Institutional/systematic oppression is evident in the statements made by then President George Bush urging displaced New Orleanians to return home. Broom noted: “His speech…failed to address levee failure or the lack of clean running water or bus service, trash pickup, mental health services, jobs” (p. 314). To tell people they can just return is to assume they have the financial means and political capital to do so. This was never the case for the people of New Orleans East. Additionally, Broom asserts: “New Orleans represents: blatant backwardness about the things that count…when basic services like sanitation and clean water were still lacking, why was there still mail delivery?” (p. 304). Sanitation and clean water are always a given for those hailing from affluent locations. But what about those lower down on the socio-economic ladder? They have to fight for the rights to clean water, think about the First Nations with the Dakota Access Pipeline, or the residents of Flint Michigan. And even fighting for those rights goes largely unheard, is met with violence, and the demands are seldom met unless a group with the social/political capital to force that change gets involved. To add insult to injury, regarding the mail delivery that never ceases, the Broom family continued to receive mail addressed to the house that was demolished. Like, how?! Further more, Broom understood prior to Katrina that she was living in a place that was inherently unequal. “Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew. I knew, for example, that we lived in an unequal, masquerading world when I was eight and crossing the dangerous Chef Menteur Highway with Alvin. I knew it at Livingston Middle School when I did not learn because no one was teaching me. I knew it in 1994, when we were petrified, afraid the law might kill us–knew it before, during, and after the Water. Katrina’s postscript–the physical wasteland–was only a manifestation of all that ailed me and my family in mind and spirit” (p.308). Here the author is just raffling off to the reader all the different ways institutional oppression sought to keep her and her community down. Unsurprising, Broom later asserts that the city of New Orleans is dysfunctional: “ongoing corruption, a failing criminal justice and health system, poverty, education, and lack of economic possibilities that create for the average local the life-and-death nature of life lived in the city” (p. 429-430). In short, if Bush wanted the displaced New Orleanians to come home, then he needed to address the dysfunction. He needed to upend corruption. He needed to address the criminal justice system which neither rehabilitates criminals nor provides justice. He needed to provide programs to support communities suffering from poverty. He needed to enforce antiracist education and infuse it with abolitionist teaching. He needed to create bettering paying jobs with on the job training so people could afford to live in newer more expensive New Orleans.
Interpersonal oppression in New Orleans was easy to come by in Broom’s youth as well as the lives of her predecessors. There was an affinity for light skin. So, if you weren’t a white New Orleanian, then being a lighter skinned person was the next best thing. What was at the bottom of that hierarchy? Dark black.
The last I of oppression, internalized, appeared throughout the work as well. One example of internalized oppression is through Broom’s statement: “I did not yet understand the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from” (p.245). Stating where you are from in New Orleans is not like representing the college you attended with pride, it’s actively acknowledging that you are divulging a lot more about yourself and your people; it’s allowing yourself exposure to intimidate details about your family’s wealth/position or lack thereof. Another example of internalized oppression is through the emotion of shame. Broom states, “shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it, like water” (p. 198). The shame Broom references is the state of the Yellow House, whose condition was a hodgepodge of subpar work. When Broom wrote a letter to her friend stating: “I desire to dream in another language, which would place me in a different world altogether. Ultimate displacement” (p. 326) the argument could be made that she’s internalized the oppression from having been a resident of New Orleans East and the only way out of the oppression isn’t by leaving the state, but by leaving the country and starting a new.
As mentioned earlier, the memoir serves as a testament to the resilience of the people disproportionately affected by the storm from New Orleans East. We appreciate the resilience through the themes of loss, possession, and hope. The first loss Broom experienced in her young life at six months of age was the loss of her father, Simon Broom. Broom writes, “I have heard it said that a person is emotionally stunted at the age when major trauma hits. But what can the mind or body know at six months” (p. 148)? In a way her siblings constant remind her that she’s the youngest of the brood. Broom refuses to have her siblings overshadow her. She maybe the youngest, but she collected not only her siblings’ memories but her own to publish the memoir. Broom wrote: “Unrealized dreams could pummel you, if you weren’t careful” (p. 214). Broom references her mother’s dream of owning her own home. This is a wish that Ivory Mae never quite obtains, since the Yellow House wasn’t even up to her own standards it was more of her late husband’s style. Later, we observe loss through Broom’s actions, specifically Broom’s obsessive detail in recording information: “I was still writing everything down, as I had learned to do during high school in the Yellow House, especially rote detail as if by doing so, I was making things real, findable, fighting disappearance” (p. 345). For someone who experienced loss so frequently it was as if Broom needed something she knew would remain even if it was only her words. Another loss was more of a separation between Broom and her nephew James. James was incarcerated. When writing about her on and off correspondences with her nephew she wrote: “James calls prison ‘going dead’–makes me feel like I have unlawfully survived” (p.444). There’s a sense of responsibility/guilt Broom feels at being free while her kin remains confined. The next way we see resilience is through possession.
Possession is another theme running through the text. Our names become one of the first things we possess in this world. And yet, our names can also become the shackles that hold us back. Broom writes: “Sarah and Monique, such different titles, in sound, in length, and in feel. I have felt for so long that those two names did not like each other, that each had conspired, somehow, against the other. That the contained, proper one, Sarah, told the raw, lots-of-space-to-move-around-in Monique that it was better than she. The names allowed be to split myself in two, in a way as a decisive gesture. In it’s formality, the name Sarah gave nothing away, whereas Monique raised questions and could show up as a presence in someone’s mind long before I did. My mother, understanding the politics of naming in a racially divided city, knew this” (p. 241). People who know Broom well call her Monique. In fact, it wasn’t until she starting attending school that she was called Sarah. At one point in the memoir one of her older brothers calls her Sarah frequently, which she questions. As far as Broom was concerned family called her Monique, outsiders called her Sarah. She possessed both names, but one was more her authentic self while the other was just the assimilated version. Broom questions the notion of ownership: “Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in a place? Or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?” (p. 431). Broom inquires of us who owns in this world, and what makes it so that they do? As Broom concluded “The story of our house was the only thing left” (p.484). Ownership, for Broom, is memory. Something that can never be taken away. Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, signed away the rights to the house and land shortly after her sister’s death (p. 483). The saddest part about the eleven year struggle over justice from the damage brought by Hurricane Katrina (a process undoubtedly prolonged by the negligence of ever changing attorneys handling the case and bureaucracy), was that in effect signing over the rights of the house and land was the end of the dream that Broom’s siblings and mother had for the place; to fix it up and have a place that they not only could truly call their own, but also matched up with the image of themselves they projected to those who never knew what the inside of that Yellow House looked like. While that dream of fixing the house dies, there remained one thing that never could die. Hope.
Perhaps the embodiment of hope itself is through the character Ivory Mae, Broom’s mother. Ivory Mae continues to dream of a well-built house of her own (p.214). This dream continues to play a role in the conversations and decisions Ivory makes throughout the retelling of Broom’s life. For example in a conversation with her children Ivory Mae stated the following: “I’m still hoping one day to have my own house, a personal house for Ivory” (p. 456). Ivory Mae’s physical house was no longer existent, she lived in her mother’s house. However, her family and the memories they made there continue to live and thrive in a way the house and other residents in New Orleans East never could.