New Orleans – Lemuria Books

Category: New Orleans

By Susan Cushman. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (January 12)

Inspired by the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., New Orleans native and documentary photographer Cheryl Gerber has, in her new book Cherchez la Femme: New Orleans Women, curated an incredible collection of over 200 color photographs and 12 essays, showcasing both famous and lesser-known New Orleans women. Gerber set out to show their “grit and grace” and their “beauty and desire,” and I believe she succeeded in a big way with this gorgeous large format hardcover masterpiece.

Cherchez la femme literally translates as “look for the woman.” In his 1854 novel The Mohicans of Paris, Alexandre Dumas repeats the phrase several times. Since then the French have often used it in a sexist manner, implying that women–or “the woman”–must be the cause of whatever problem is being described. It brings to mind Adam’s reply to God’s question concerning his transgression with the forbidden fruit; he blamed it on “the woman you gave me.”

In her homage to those women, Gerber has turned that phrase on its head, inviting the reader to look for the women who have made and are still making significant contributions to their colorful city.

My use of the word “colorful” is intentional. In the foreword, New Orleans native Anne Gisleson prepares us for the tour de force that Cherchez la Femme is–a tribute to the monumental achievements of colorful women and women of color.

Beginning with the Ursuline nuns and their beloved Lady of Prompt Succor who ran the hosptials and schools for people of all races as early as the War of 1812, and later as French baroness Macaela Pontalba fought to protect and rebuild the historic architecture of her beloved city. Gisleson introduces us to Henriette Delille–a free woman of color who started her won order to feed and educate the poor, since she wasn’t allowed to join the Ursulines.

Gerber’s loving tribute to chef Leah Chase (1923-2019) and Helen Freund’s essay about Chase in the culinary chapter set a celebratory tone for the stories that follow. Gerber organized these into topical chapters: Musicians, Business, Philanthropists and Socialites, Spiritual, Activists, Mardi Gras Indian Queens, Mardi Gras Krewes, Baby Dolls, Social and Pleasure Clubs, and Burlesque. The contributors include publishers, authors, historians, journalists, and educators.

Fifty years ago, the New Orleans-born gospel great Mahalia Jackson debuted at Jazz Fest. In her essay, Alison Fensterstock hails Jackson as “an artist whose powerful creative spark and spiritual passion shaped the sound not only of the city, but also of her nation.”

In her essay, Kathy Finn says that female entrepreneurs–including Voodoo practitioners, strippers, clothing and jewelry designers, and professional sports team owners–are “helping to ensure that the city” retains its unique character far into the future.”

Sue Strachan tells us about a bevy of female philanthropists, lobbyists, social columnists, and fundraisers who have “a passion for making the community a better place.”

The city of New Orleans–named for a young French girl who saw angels and saints and led France in a victory over England, “The Maid of Orleans,”–today “serves as the cauldron where these archetypal forms simmer together: the saints, the nuns, the witches, the mambo…a distinctively feminine spirituality…that runs through the streets…” Constance Adler found her true home there through a Voodoo priestess’ “gestures, words, and smoke at the altar.”

Katy Reckdahl shines a light on many women activists, showing us that “the tradition of resistance in New Orleans is particularly strong.”

Mardi Gras Indian Queens like essay contributor Charice Harrison-Nelson, also known as Maroon Queen Reesie, is one of 16 Indian Queens Gerber photographed for the book. Did I mention this city (and the book) is colorful?

While Krewes were male-dominted in the past, women have become “the architects of a new carnival experience,” as Karen Trahan Leathem explains in her essay.

Kim Vaz-Deville goes into more depth about the Baby Dolls, offering an opportunity for black women who were previously shout out of Mardi Gras. Gerber captures 14 of these dance groups in her amazing photographs.

Social and pleasure clubs keep the tradition of second-line parades alive. Karen Celestan explains in her essay: “The kinetic procession viewed on weekend streets in the Crescent City is nothing less than liquid muscle memory….It is fresh joyfulness, majestic, paying tribute to their ancestors.”

Gerber’s final chapter features an essay by Melanie Warner Spencer, who writes about the resurgence of burlesque. Today’s stars–like Bella Blue, Louisiana native and mother of two–are often trained in classic ballet. Blue is also headmistress of the New Orleans School of Burlesque. Spencer says burlesque “promotes a message of fun, fabulousness, confidence, and body positivity…keeping alive an art farm that is as much a part of the history of New Orleans as streetcars and beignets albeit a dash naughtier.”

“Fun and fabulousness” are also words I would use to describe Cherchez la Femme, a beautiful love letter to the women of New Orleans.

Jackson native Susan Cushman is editor of Southern Writers on Writing and two other anthologies. She is author of short story collection Friends of the Library, the novel Cherry Bomb, and the memoir Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimer’s.

Sarah Broom’s award-winning memoir ‘The Yellow House’ demonstrates the powerful pull of home

By Guest Author

On November 27, 2019

In African-American, Biography/Memoir, New Orleans

By Emily Gatlin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (November 24)

Childhood homes are harbors of our rearing, keepers of our secrets and reflections of our parents. It’s our first understanding of what “home” actually means, and the way it always pulls us back.

Memories made there supersede the physical house itself. We don’t remember the stains on our bedroom carpet, but we know that our feet were warm when we rolled out of bed to get ready for school. The walls were filled with tokens of what we loved, be it a watercolor painting or old family portraits. We don’t remember what the upholstery looked like on the formal dining room chairs, just that on holidays, we gathered as a family and laughed along with stories of our shared history. Often, our parents upsized, downsized, separated, became snowbirds or passed on, but we can still drive by our homes and be filled with warmth and gratitude.

Sarah M. Broom’s memoir The Yellow House takes us on a journey of her life through her New Orleans East home, which was purchased by her mother Ivory Mae in 1961. As a young mother and widow, Ivory Mae invested her entire life savings at nineteen years old to purchase the shotgun house, in what was a promising up-and-coming area of New Orleans, and home to a major NASA plant during the height of the space boom.

Ivory Mae was optimistic about her investment and when she married her second husband Simon Broom, Sarah’s father, they forged their family together through constant home renovations and family additions—twelve children in all—until Simon died when Sarah was only six months old. Ivory Mae’s thirteenth child, the half-finished yellow house, was left in mild disrepair after Simon’s death, but it didn’t really matter. The family held together tightly, and sent each of the twelve children out into the world to find their own way.

Broom left the crumbling home and New Orleans after graduating from high school, but found herself continuously drawn back to the yellow house after career shifts and general twenty-something malaise until ultimately, it was destroyed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She decided to come back to do what she could for her beloved city and other residents in her former neighborhood, becoming a frustrated speechwriter for embattled Mayor Ray Nagin, while getting to know a different side of New Orleans. She did not win many friends that go around.

Recently winning the the National Book Award for nonfiction, The Yellow House is a love letter to Broom’s family, while at the same time a reckoning of politics, race, and class in New Orleans as it deals with the disparity between New Orleans East, which was all but wiped off the map by Katrina, and the more luscious and populated tourist centers of the city.

Broom’s writing is masterful and unflinching, cuts deep to the bone, while being affable and full of love for her native city. She conjures the spirit of New Orleans in a way that only someone who came from its soil can, shining a light on its lesser-known, but always visible residents. They are the ones who fled to the Superdome, cut themselves out of their attics, and remained in New Orleans to try and reclaim their lives any way they could.

While heartbreaking at times, The Yellow House is a necessary read in the fact that it’s a unique firsthand, well-researched exploration of inequality, the American experience, place and identity, and a true definition of family. Broom proves once and for all that you really can go home again.

Emily Gatlin is the Digital Editor of WONDERLUST and the author of The Unknown Hendrix and 101 Greatest American Rock Songs and the Stories Behind Them. She lives in Oxford.

Lemuria selected The Yellow House as its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Signed first editions are available in our online store, and regular hardback editions are available in our physical store.

Author Q & A with Sarah M. Broom

By Guest Author

On September 1, 2019

In African-American, New Orleans, Southern Culture, Southern History

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 1)

In her debut book The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom presents a powerful memoir of the New Orleans she experienced as a child (growing up in a family of 12 children), and the house that swallowed up the dreams and finances of her resilient mother.

Broom earned a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004 and won a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. She was a finalist for the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction in 2011, and has been awarded fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and others.

Today, Broom lives in Harlem.

Sarah M. Broom

The Yellow House is a richly detailed memoir of your life, sharing not just stories of your immediate family but those of at least two preceding generations. Why was it important to you to devote so much detail to previous generations to fully tell this story?

I wanted to provide context, a kind of grounding, to situate the story in a lineage. To begin at the moment of my birth would have been dishonest, and also would have ignored the people who compose me and make me who I am. I was setting up a matriarchal world, establishing the women who preceded me within the City of New Orleans. The story of my mother’s house felt, to me, indistinguishable from the story of my Grandmother Lolo and her many houses.

The neighborhood in which the Yellow House was built was part of New Orleans East, touted in the early 1960s as a “new frontier” and a “Model City” like nothing that had come before it. Describe the idea behind its expected growth, and why it would eventually fail.

New Orleans East was an enormous area of the city, east of the Industrial Canal, a navigation channel opened in 1923. Long before New Orleans East, Inc. arrived, there was a collection of communities within the east including Orangedale Subdivision, where my mother eventually bought the Yellow House. New Orleans East, Inc. began to build out the more easternmost parts of the area, which created a flurry of excitement and news stories. Eventually, the entire area of the city took on the corporate name. The East failed for many reasons–the oil bust, white flight which led to divestment, public policy and city planning choices, and inattention.

Your mother, Ivory Mae Soule Webb, was a 19-year-old widow when she bought the Yellow House in 1961, paying the $3,200 price with life insurance money after her first husband’s death. By 1964, when they moved in, she was remarried to Simon Broom, and they began married life with six children between them. Tell me about your mom’s pride in her home, and how important it was to her to keep everything looking nice, inside and out.

My mother loved to make a beautiful home. She was raised by women who took pride in all the places where she lived. For my mother, owning a house of her own was buying into the American dream. Through home ownership, I suspect she learned quite a bit about the frailty of the American dream, about the critical importance of the solidity of the “ground,” so to speak. (It was) understood through time that her investment might not build wealth for her as it might for someone else.

After several career moves and the devastation of Katrina, you eventually were drawn back to New Orleans. At the end, you state: “The house was the only thing that belonged to all of us.” Ultimately, what did (and does) the Yellow House mean to you and your family?

It is to this day a repository. Witness to our lives. The place our mother paid for, in which she built a world full of joy and surprise and sometimes sadness, but it belonged to her and it still is ours even as a memory.

Lemuria has selected The Yellow House its September 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Category: New Orleans

‘Cherchez la Femme’ shows grit, beauty of New Orleans women

Sarah Broom’s award-winning memoir ‘The Yellow House’ demonstrates the powerful pull of home

Author Q & A with Sarah M. Broom

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