44 pages • 1-hour read
The Yellow House
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Movement 2, Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Movement 2: “The Grieving House”
Movement 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Elsewhere”
Broom reflects on photographs of herself as a young teenager. There are no photographs of her between grades seven through nine because she doesn’t have any academic or athletic achievements to document with a photograph. Her sister Karen has two children and graduates from Southern University of New Orleans. They all live in the Yellow House.
Between 1991 and 1996, Broom’s life is defined by the people around her. She is awkward and uncomfortable in her body. Lynette is 18 when Broom is 13. Lynette loves fashion magazines and plans to study in New York City. In 1993, she leaves for the Pratt Institute of Technology to study fashion design.
Broom excels at teasing her peers. She likes verbal sparring but not physical fights. Because of her name-calling, her teacher often punishes her. When the punishment hurts, Broom explodes, “yelling profanities and whatever else would help me avoid shedding tears in front of my peers, which was the last thing on earth I want anyone to say about me: that I break, that I broke, that a teacher broke me” (189). She dislikes school. She has crushes on “hard, light-skinned boys” (190). She starts skipping school. Ivory Mae asks Eddie to help straighten Broom out, but it doesn’t work. Broom is enrolled in Word of Faith Academy, a private school connected to a megachurch. She is one of five Black students. She loses touch with her neighborhood and her old friends.
Movement 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Interiors”
No one outside Broom’s family is invited inside the Yellow House. As a result, the author inherits her mother’s shame of the house. When Lynette wants to have friends over, her mother says, “You know this house not all that comfortable for other people” (198). In the present day, Lynette says that this shame about the house interfered with her making friends because friendship “meant that people were going to want to come into your life, and they weren’t going to come nowhere near that house” (198). Shame becomes a powerful force in their life.
In the 1990s, Ivory Mae has yellow siding installed. Michael marries and moves into a house in a middle-class neighborhood. As the house falls apart, Ivory Mae spends more time cleaning. When Broom is a sophomore, there is a string of unsolved crime which scares her. Meanwhile, Amelia’s memory deteriorates. Darryl, whom Broom now fears, steals from the family to fund his crack addiction.
Movement 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Tongues”
By her junior year, Broom finds comfort in writing and church. She attends a megachurch called Victory Fellowship where “congregants spoke in tongues, a private language accessible only to God. I spoke in tongues as did my mother and sister Karen” (226). Speaking in tongues was an exercise in letting go of control. Broom becomes well known as someone who was “touched” (229) by the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile, Broom becomes interested in James Baldwin. She writes that Michael and Baldwin “taught me to follow a crooked line of thought” (232). Lonely and longing to travel, Broom dreams of Birmingham, England. She gets her first passport, but it never gets a stamp.
Movement 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Distances”
By 1997, Broom stops going to church. In her senior year, she has nearly a 4.0 grade point average and is the yearbook senior editor. She goes to prom alone. She decides to attend the University of North Texas where Roy, a bass player on whom she has a crush, is a student. Despite her strong academic record, she is not encouraged to apply to university at her school. Although she is not technically dating Roy, Broom imagines him as her boyfriend. They exchange letters and kiss after church. The lies she tells, however, create space between them.
College comes with high costs. She pays out-of-state tuition, which she didn’t know existed until she received her bill. Her high school was not an official high school, so she is required to take remedial classes. She studies anthropology with a minor in journalism. She does well but is still disappointed in herself. She makes friends, goes to the library, and works. After her first year of college, Broom returns to the Yellow House and works in the French Quarter.
Movement 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “1999”
In 1999, Broom returns to the Yellow House after her sophomore year of college. She does a student exchange program and spends a semester at University of Massachusetts–Amherst and another semester at William Paterson University in New Jersey. She travels to eight cities.
Back in New Orleans East, a cop questions her about her cousin James. Later, her mom calls her to tell her Alvin is dead after a fatal car crash. Meanwhile, James is sentenced to 20 years in prison for armed robbery. He comes to Alvin’s funeral with his legs and hands shackled. After Alvin dies, Broom never sleeps in the Yellow House again. Ivory Mae moves to St. Rose to live with Elaine in their mother’s old house, while Troy and Carl stay in the Yellow House.
Movement 2, Chapters 6-10 Analysis
Broom further develops the theme of vision in Chapter 6. Broom writes, “We take photos because we do not want to remember wrong” (185). Throughout Movement 2, Broom uses family photographs as source material for her stories. She describes her family members’ outfits, expressions, poses. She uses these photographs to confirm their character or their experiences.
Shame also resurfaces in Movement 2. This time, it’s Broom who experiences shame. Broom goes to extreme lengths to hide her home from outsiders. She loses her best and only friend when she won’t invite her over. Broom is also ashamed more generally, writing, “I am ashamed of our car even though it is brand-new. I am ashamed if Mom wears rollers in her hair. She is gentle and kind and gorgeous, and she loves me” (196). The shame is confirmed when Lynette invites a friend to visit. Ivory Mae does everything she can to fix up the house. When her friend arrives, she “was deeply uncomfortable, complaining bitterly about those things that we ourselves hated most: heats, rats, and the bathroom” (217). Despite this feeling of shame, the house was also “my mother’s pride and joy” (198). Amelia raised Ivory Mae to make interiors beautiful. Broom also loved to make ordinary spaces beautiful. She concludes that by not inviting people into the Yellow House, they “were going against our natures” (198). Shame is then defined by Broom as a “warring within, a revolt against oneself” (199).
On the subject of vision and perception, Broom is concerned with what lies behind the surface. This is the most explicitly expressed in the discussion of the house. The yellow siding hides a decaying interior that they all feel shame about. But because they present so well in the world, no one would guess that they lived that way. Ivory Mae reflects, “Everybody just assume by you always looking nice and driving your car and all, everybody just assume that whatever place you was in was, you know, the way you look” (254).
This creates a tension where they can’t fully express themselves because they are concerned with the surface. Ivory Mae continues, “If a book comes out, people are gonna say, Well this can’t be the people I knew. You know what I’m saying? I was living a lie, you know?” (254) This idea is developed more pointedly in the contrast between the myths of New Orleans and the realities Broom and her family face. Broom reflects that while she used the mythology of New Orleans to construct her identity, that mythology was far from the reality of where she was raised. She writes of police violence, of crime, and of rising murders. Broom explains:
In 1994, policeman Len Davis, also known as Robocop and the Desire Terrorist, who in his off time guarded a cocaine warehouse, ordered the murder of a woman who confidentially (she thought) reported his pistol-whipping of a seventeen-year-old to the police department. The informant was thirty-two years old, a mother of three. Her name was Kim Groves and she was dead. One of 424 murders that year. Those are just the highlights. Tourism rose (211).
In making this contrast between the violence that people who lived in the city faced versus the stereotypes or myths that drove tourism, Broom asks us to consider what lies beneath the stories we tell and the images we celebrate. Broom chooses to uncover the surfaces that she constructs, moving deeper towards self-knowledge by accepting who she is and where she comes from.
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