The Yellow House

Movement 2 opens when the author is five years old. Broom is the baby of the family. As she plays in a bathroom where Simon suffered a fatal aneurysm six months after she was born, lizards crawl through holes in the screen, the floorboard, and moldy sheetrock. Broom hides in this room because no one else goes in there, and it is the only room in the house with a lock. Everyone else uses the new bathroom. 

Broom writes that she was born in distress and has “been in it ever since” (146). Her Uncle Junius is buried the day she is born in December 1979. Although this is Ivory Mae’s ninth delivery, Broom is her only cesarean section. Ivory Mae has two weeks of bed rest after the birth and heals slowly. No one tells Broom anything about how her father reacted to her birth.

In the summer of 1980, Simon comes home one day with a headache. Ivory Mae finds him slumped over in the bathroom. At the hospital, the doctors say Simon had an aneurysm and that even if he wakes from his coma, he will be a vegetable. Simon dies shortly after, the day before Father’s Day, at the age of 56.