The things we have forgotten are housed. Our soul is an abode and by remembering houses and rooms, we learn to abide within ourselves.

—Gaston Bachelard

This author is a force to be reckoned with. By tapping the reader’s mind rather than ham-fistedly trying to make points, Broom allows for a gentle and deep-delving trip through her past and present by means of family and places.

When I call my eldest brother, Simon, at his home in North Carolina to explain all of the things I want to know and why, he expresses worry that by writing this all down here, I will disrupt, unravel, and tear down everything the Broom family has ever built. He would like, now, to live in the future and forget about the past.

“There is a lot we have subconsciously agreed that we don’t want to know,” he tells me. When he asks about my project, I am imprecise, lofty, saying I am writing about “architecture and belonging and space.” “It is a problem when you are talking too much,” he says.

I take his sentence down in my notebook at the moment he says it, just as he says it. I have not added a single word. Nor have I taken anything away.

There is a sublime scent around all that Broom writes about the small and the big. She exercises firm control and lets texts feel rhythm in a way that allows the book to breathe.

Just after Eddie was born, Booker T. Washington High School changed its policy. Mothers were no longer accepted. Ivory Mae could, the school suggested, finish at a special school for delinquents, for messed-up kids, but she couldn’t see being set apart in this, the wrong way. She pleaded with the principal to please make an exception and take her back, but she was a poor example for the other girls now. Nothing about her looks and charm could change that he said. She had entered womanhood, her first dream of finishing high school and going to college, dissolved.

Mother spanks me in silence. Afterward I run into the living room where we are not supposed to be and threaten to call “child protection services” on the rotary phone. My mother says, Go right ahead, please call them, and that deflates the whole thing.

The book verges between the then and now as it does for people who are on the very brink between catastrophe and calm, between Hurricane Katrina and the now, somewhat.

Five days since the levees broke. There is nothing to do here except to feel helpless. All of the windows of my duplex are wide open tonight, to let the outside sounds come in. I am being particular about this because my loudmouthed neighbors remind me of home. I sit cross-legged before the television set in my swamp-green painted room, watching CNN on mute, searching only for Carl’s white cotton socks pulled up high, size 13 feet. In the day to day, I neglect serious consideration of any newspaper article except to scan for names and faces of my beloveds—Michael, Carl, Ivory, Karen, Melvin, Brittany. Imagine this being all that you can do. It is as paltry as it sounds.

This is a beautiful book of a person, a family, a city, and a future that grew and continues to grow in spite and because of life.