60 Time September 30, 2019
TimeOff Books
A TreAsure AwAiTs reAders who encounTer
Red at the Bone, who descend the staircase with a
loose step as 16-year-old Melody does in her coming-
of-age party at the start of the novel. Jacqueline
Woodson’s latest book for adults looks at a middle-
class black family in Brooklyn and the struggles
and triumphs that brought them to this moment,
celebrating the daughter who was the unexpected
product of a teenage romance. The novel is both a
uniquely black story about multi generational love
and upward mobility—and a universal American
tale of striving, failing, then trying again.
Woodson, internationally renowned for her
work for young readers, has published more than
30 books over as many years. In 2014, she won a
National Book Award for Brown Girl Dreaming, a
middle-grade memoir in verse. In Red at the Bone,
the author refines the talent for finding precise
language to describe overwhelm and passion,
confusion and potential she exhibited in that
memoir. In about 200 pages, we are met with
Woodson’s vast range, insight and tenderness,
particularly in her treatment of young people
carrying the weight of old souls.
Teen pregnancy is often treated like a tragedy
in narratives of black life, but the lens here is more
realistic: life goes on. Melody spends her formative
years with her father Aubrey and her maternal
grandmother Sabe while her mother Iris heads off
to college as planned.
At Oberlin, away from the watchful eye of her
parents and her new family, Iris falls for someone,
a sexy and smart young woman who stirs her more
than any man ever has. It’s fitting then that the title
of the novel references that raw desire we all have
to claim the people and things we most want in
life. When Iris imagines the object of her passion
being with another woman, Woodson describes
her jealousy in bracing terms: “She had to take
slow breaths to calm herself down. She felt red at
the bone—like there was something inside of her
undone and bleeding.”
Love, whether requited or not, can be a
killer. And the pangs of love, in its many forms,
reverberate through Woodson’s pages, which
hit close to the marrow of old Brooklyn, with
brown girls and boys, dreaming; their parents and
grandparents, too, wishing for peace, to be settled.
The chapters in Red at the Bone shift back and
forth in time, giving each character a chance to
narrate and moving seamlessly between their
distinct histories. Po’Boy, the patriarch, was a
Morehouse man; Sabe attended Spelman. Aubrey
is content to work in the mail room at the World
Trade Center. Grandmother and granddaughter
are each, in her own right, the culmination of
otherwise deferred dreams. They both present an
opportunity to get things right after generations
of lives pushed off track: Sabe in her stories of
overcoming the terrors of the Tulsa, Okla., race
riots, Melody as she dons the dress her mother
was meant to wear to her own coming-of-age
ceremony, one that never happened. Woodson
evokes black formalism, a post-Reconstruction
movement meant to highlight black dignity
through dress, style and traditions performed
beyond the white gaze, to depict an aspirational
American family surviving the troubles they meet.
And while not a particularly sympathetic
character, Iris represents that resilience. Her
narration reminds us of just how young she and
Aubrey were when they made the choices that
set the course of their lives. Running through the
novel is the realization that all stages of life have
disruptions that will ripple on the surface and also
below: at eye level here are the unresolved tensions
coloring Melody’s ceremony, while beneath them
are the unplanned events that have changed not
just her life, but everyone’s. In telling this story,
Woodson sees to it that we remember that in spite of
our circumstances, for good or for bad, we go on. FICTION
A family grows
in Brooklyn
By Joshunda Sanders
△
Woodson follows
Another Brooklyn,
the 2016 novel that
was her first in two
decades written
for adult readers,
with a compact
family epic