In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighbourhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighbourhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the house would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.