Bro, how you doing? Holding on?

Man, you know how it goes. One day chicken.
Next day bone.

-Two old men talking, Prologue to Red at the Bone

Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep, and it carries even more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future. Grand/mother Sabe’s two-year-old mother was left scarred as a child from the fires of Tulsa in 1921, and forced with her family to migrate north; eighty years later, Sabe swears she will never return to Oklahoma. Grand/father, Po’Boy, and Sabe provide a comfortable, respectable home to their only child, Iris, which her teenage pregnancy shatters then uproots. At the same moment, loyal, loving, at-risk Aubrey finds his way into their family by loving Iris and fathering her baby at age sixteen.

Red at the Bone alternates in point of view between sixteen-year-old Melody, her parents, and her grandparents. The novel opens in 2001 as Melody prepares to come-of-age in a traditional ceremony, one her conception interrupted for her own mother sixteen years prior. As Woodson’s prose jump between characters in Melody’s family tree, the reader empathizes, suffers, and laughs with each of them. Every character comes to life with their unique, first-person voices; and as the novel progresses, I found their losses personal and deeply touching. Through masterful storytelling, this family drama becomes every family’s drama, and we, as readers, might—for a moment—occupy the pain and generational trauma affiliated with this country’s racist history, even if we were born white and never experienced those hurts firsthand. And here lies much of Red at the Bone’s power; it is at once a well-crafted, moving story, but it also inspires us to live the pain of American racism, to recognize its multi-generational impact, and to engage in conversations about things we, as readers, might not personally face on day-to-day basis.

Woodson’s characters embody various faces of African American experiences, and emphasize the importance of a stable family. Po’Boy and Sabe’s solid, committed relationship anchor their family—amidst its complicated, painful history—and their genuine love and loyalty serve as a keel to stabilize them in turbulent waters as they navigate towards safe harbor. In contrast, Aubrey and his mother wander the country, barely surviving, just the two of them. His father, a ghost to drug-use, silently haunts his mother, and forces her to carry the burden of raising a new generation of Black man alone. Aubrey endures, but when Melody brings him into Sabe and Po’Boy’s family, he witnesses a different kind of Black experience; one where attending college and making something of one’s self beyond the rough hands menial labor is possible. Woodson’s families confront myriad challenges specific to their Blackness (questions of passing white, inherited trauma, premature death, same-sex desire, and life among ghetto drug dealers, for example), as well as many human ones (teenage pregnancy, drug-use, grandparents raising grandchildren, to name a few). This slender novel eloquently brings each character to life, and places their burdens, their triumphs and loves, directly into the heart of its reader; Woodson masterfully transports all her readers, like young Aubrey, into Po’Boy and Sabe’s family circle.

Coming in just under two hundred pages, Red at the Bone packs a punch for its reader. Woodson alludes to things like the Great Migration (scrutinized in Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 The Warmth of Other Suns) and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 (of which many people were unfamiliar until recently as it has been in the news a great deal of late). Red at the Bone roots intimate family drama in the facts of America’s racist history. In the summer of Black Lives Matter, as so many people find themselves contemplating things like white fragility and how to be anti-racist, this book is a must-read for everyone.

A Few Great Passages:

“We got quiet. Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn’t one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here” (11).

“Love changes and changes. Then it changes again. Today, the love is me wanting to see you in that dress, she said. I want to see me in you because Me in that dress was over a long time ago. Sixteen was gone. Then seventeen, eighteen—all of it” (15).

“[T]here were so many ways to hang from a cross—a mother’s love you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy” (17).

“Look how beautifully black we are. And as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen, I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered” (19).

“This child he made and raised and loved. God, how he loved every single cell dividing. The coarseness of her hair, the deep vulnerable hollow in her neck, the half-moons beneath her nails. Those show how many boyfriends your gonna have. Watch out, world! Ans he tears when they began to fade. Does that mean no one’s ever going to love me, Daddy?” (23).

“Her deeply tanned skin and dark gray eyes made people look at her, then look at him. She’d always kept her hair cut short, but that year it had grown into loose curls with so much gray and blond moving through it. They didn’t match, the two of them. When he held his arm against hers and asked why, she laughed and said, The Black ancestors beat the crap out of the white ones and said, Let this baby on through” (28-29).

“Even a man’s gonna cry. You can’t help it. The mind going everywhere. From the blessing of a new life coming and that thinking filling up your throat to your own daughter’s childhood snatched right out from under you. Thought I would have Iris as a little girl longer than I did. But sitting here with you asleep in my lap, I can’t imagine life any other way. Every moment for all generations was leading to you here on my lap, your head against your granddaddy’s chest, already four years old. Hair smelling like coconut oil. Something beneath that, though. Little-girl sweat—almost sour, but then just when I think that’s what it is, it turns, sweetens somehow” (45-46).

“Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching” (49).

“Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included. Every last one. That was 1921. History tires to call it a riot, but it was a massacre. Those white men brought in their warplanes and dropped bombs on my mama’s neighborhood. God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story. I must have heard it a hundred times by the time I was school age. I knew. And I made sure Iris knew. And I’m going to make sure Melody knows too, because if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story” (80-81).

“So even though you feel like you’re never gonna get out of bed again, you rise. You decide you’ve had enough of the neighbors with their looks and their whispers and you rise. You keep your eyes on the priest when your own church people give you their backs on a Sunday and you rise. You rise in your Lord & Taylor cashmere coat and refuse to let shame stand beside you. And when the priest calls your only child into his chambers, rests his had too high up on her thigh, and tells her about the place in hell that is waiting for her, you return only once more—to damn him. To damn them all. And rise” (84).

“And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know no that grandbaby carries the goneness too” (85).

“But both of them need to know that inside the goneness you gotta carry so many other things. The running. The saving” (85).

“Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t
even know it was out of?” (Seeing Sabe for the first time… love at first sight)

“They say you don’t remember early stuff, that you’re just suddenly six and having your first memories,. But that’s not true. I can go back to five and four and three. I can go back to thirteen and ten and six” (143).

“You’re never leaving this world, Daddy. Cuz then you’d be leaving me. I’m never leaving you and you’re never leaving me. That’s all she wrote” (153).

“She wasn’t gay or lesbian or queer or whatever else. It was just Jam she wanted—her softness, the way she laughed. The way she lifted a cigarette to Iris’s lips and held it while she pulled. Watched as she exhaled smoke, then leaned over and kissed her, her eyes always slightly hooded, like she had just gotten laid and was still thinking about it. Jam she was in love with and would be in love with always” (162).

“Sitting here this afternoon, I’m thinking about that poem by . . . I think it’s Dunbar, I’m not so sure anymore. Age will do that to you. Soon as something starts coming to your mind, it snatches it back. Makes you forget the stuff you want to remember. Brings back the memories you’re busy trying to forget” (178).

“Used to get Po’Boy laughing when I read Dunbar’s poems just the way the man intended them to be read. Used to make him go You see how my Sabe do with those poems. Talented as she wants to be! We both loved how he wrote. He was truly saying, Can we just be who we are, people? Can we just take off our masks and laugh and dance and eat and talk? But then he has the never to have that name Paul Laurence Dunbar—like you need to say it with your pinky pointing out” (179-180)

A Few Great Passages:

“We got quiet. Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn’t one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here” (11).

“Love changes and changes. Then it changes again. Today, the love is me wanting to see you in that dress, she said. I want to see me in you because Me in that dress was over a long time ago. Sixteen was gone. Then seventeen, eighteen—all of it” (15).

“[T]here were so many ways to hung from a cross—a mother’s love you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy” (17).

“Look how beautifully black we are. And as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen, I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered” (19).

“This child he made and raised and loved. God, how he loved every single cell dividing. The coarseness of her hair, the deep vulnerable hollow in her neck, the half-moons beneath her nails. Those show how many boyfriends your gonna have. Watch out, world! Ans he tears when they began to fade. Does that mean no one’s ever going to love me, Daddy?” (23).

“Her deeply tanned skin and dark gray eyes made people look at her, then look at him. She’d always kept her hair cut short, but that year it had grown into loose curls with so much gray and blond moving through it. They didn’t match, the two of them. When he held his arm against hers and asked why, she laughed and said, The Black ancestors beat the crap out of the white ones and said, Let this baby on through” (28-29).

“Even a man’s gonna cry. You can’t help it. The mind going everywhere. From the blessing of a new life coming and that thinking filling up your throat to your own daughter’s childhood snatched right out from under you. Thought I would have Iris as a little girl longer than I did. But sitting here with you asleep in my lap, I can’t imagine life any other way. Every moment for all generations was leading to you here on my lap, your head against your granddaddy’s chest, already four years old. Hair smelling like coconut oil. Something beneath that, though. Little-girl sweat—almost sour, but then just when I think that’s what it is, it turns, sweetens somehow” (45-46).

“Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching” (49).

“Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included. Every last one. That was 1921. History tires to call it a riot, but it was a massacre. Those white men brought in their warplanes and dropped bombs on my mama’s neighborhood. God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story. I must have heard it a hundred times by the time I was school age. I knew. And I made sure Iris knew. And I’m going to make sure Melody knows too, because if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story” (80-81).

“So even thought you feel like you’re never gonna get out of bed again, you rise. You decide you’ve had enough of the neighbors with their looks and their whispers and you rise. You keep your eyes on the priest when your own church people give you their backs on a Sunday and you rise. You rise in your Lord & Taylor cashmere coat and refuse to let shame stand beside you. And when the priest calls your only child into his chambers, rests his had too high up on her thigh, and tells her about the place in hell that is waiting for her, you return only once more—to damn him. To damn them all. And rise” (84).