1. As I move deeper into Sarah M. Broom's lyrical, evocative, and disturbing memoir, The Yellow House, I am growing increasingly absorbed by her style of writing and what she writes about. While, yes, her story focuses on her family's history, her mother's story, the stories of her eleven siblings, and on her own experiences and inward thoughts as she matures out of childhood and adolescence into adulthood, this book is always about New Orleans.
I should say it's always about New Orleans East, in case when I wrote "New Orleans" you immediately pictured the French Quarter, elegant hotels, jazz music coming out of one joint after another, countless vendors selling hurricanes and margaritas dispensed from slurpee machines, some of the world's finest dining, and, of course, the exuberance of Carnival concluding with Mardi Gras.
The yellow house of this book's title is in New Orleans East, a vicinity of New Orleans fifty times larger than the French Quarter and the site of exaggerated promises, shoddy development, dashed hopes, and water. When the levees first broke in late August and early September of 2005 as Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans, the first place to be submerged in unimaginably deep, filthy, toxic, and powerful surges of water was New Orleans East. Sarah M. Broom lived in Harlem in 2005. She worked for O Magazine. But several family members endured Katrina.
Reading the stories of her family members, I thought back to the time of Katrina. I was in suburban Chicago. I went to a barbecue where I sat in stunned silence as people at this get together, professional, upper-ish middle class suburbanites, could only blame the victims of the storm, especially people like Sarah M. Broom's family, black, getting by, people of limited means. "Why didn't they just leave? I don't feel sorry for them. They chose to stay. Why do they live there anyway? Don't they know it's below sea level? What did they think would happen?"
The people at this party, as well as a man I later dined with at Denny's after a Bears football game, were completely hypnotized and outraged by the one thing the television networks seemed most obsessed with: looting and other crimes. The people I was around feasted on rumors about and any footage the networks showed of black people acting in ways that confirmed their cruelest preconceptions of black people being uncivilized and lawless. They delighted in having these preconceptions, in their minds, confirmed.
Sarah M. Broom tells a different story of Katrina as experienced by her mother and some of her sisters and brothers. It's about separation, desperation, fear, escape, relocation, helping others, togetherness, love, rescue, and, ultimately, relief that, in time, all were accounted for.
By the way, not once in her book does Sarah M. Broom ask readers to feel sorry for her or her family; nor does she solicit our pity. Whatever a reader feels rises out of the story's details, out of Sarah M. Broom's eloquence.
I have about 150 pages to go in this enthralling memoir. When I wrapped up my reading, Sarah M. Broom had just quit her job at O Magazine and moved to Burundi.
2. I took a break from The Yellow House and wrapped a cubed block of tofu in paper towels to drain the water from it. Meanwhile, I heated up a couple of tablespoons of green curry paste, added two cans of coconut milk, two tablespoons of soy sauce, fish sauce, and brown sugar to it. I had chopped up some fresh basil leaves and dropped those in along with about three dried kaffir lime leaves. I had sliced an onion and added the slices to this mix and put in the tofu cubes and let it slow cook until the onions were tender.
Earlier, I had made cooked a large batch of chewy white rose rice and not only did I enjoy a bowl of this green curry over the rice for dinner, I have plenty of leftovers. I hope I remember to add green beans to this curry. Maybe some broccoli, too. I just wasn't thinking very clearly when I made the original batch.
3. Once a month, Carol and Paul make a trip to Costco and pick up whatever I ask them to. Today, I requested something I've never bought before. A couple of weeks ago, Carol and Paul prepared a small pork roast for family dinner and mentioned that it was one of three or four small roasts that come in a pack at Costco.
Christy gave me several tins of rubs for my birthday and I decided that a pack of these roasts would be perfect some experimenting with them.
I haven't made any decisions, yet, but the thought of moving my cooking in yet another direction excited me today when Paul delivered the groceries I ordered.
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