The book opens in New Orleans East, which was once a swampy ecosystem full of cypress trees. Despite its inhospitality to settlement, the people who bought the land believed everything could be drained. The 1960s were “dreaming days” (84) when NASA’s facilities in New Orleans East made the city part of the effort to put a man on the moon. As the city expanded, opportunities seemed endless. This was before “white flight, civil rights, the oil bust, subsidence, before tourism would become the main economic engine and codependent” (262). The dream suggested that developers and planners could win the fight against geography and that expansion and growth would continue and lift people out of poverty. Hurricane Betsy and Hurricane Katrina prove the fallacy at the heart of this dream, for “the dream would not, could not hold, because the foundation was bad” (105).

Similarly, the yellow shotgun house is a promise of future prosperity that never comes to fruition—another dream. Ivory Mae’s attraction to the Yellow House was “nothing resembling love; it was more like dreaming” (394). Ivory Mae is attracted to the potential of the house and to the autonomy and security that home ownership promised.