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Jacqueline Woodson, author of the National Book Award-winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, revisits the concerns that animate many of her young adult novels, chief among them being an exploration of what it means to be a young black woman in America, in her recent novel, Red at the Bone. The novel is told from five different perspectives, three generations of a family grappling with history, the inheritance of trauma, oppression, sexuality, ambition, and identity.
The novel begins with a sixteenth birthday coming-out-ceremony for Melody, the product of teen parents who have spent Melody’s entire life negotiating what it means to be responsible for another life. The ceremony is a fraught event for Melody’s mother, Iris, who was not able to participate in the ceremony herself because of her pregnancy, and has maintained a distance from her daughter her entire life. After Melody was born, Iris fled to a college far from her Brooklyn home, Oberlin College in Ohio, where she was able to live out her fantasy of young adulthood without the burden of an infant. Melody was raised by her father, Aubrey, who gave up the opportunity to attend college in order to raise his daughter, settling for what Iris believes to be a mediocre existence, but one that he feels fulfilled by. This is an interesting reversal of the traditional single mother narrative, where the ambitious father leaves his young wife and child in search of financial gain, while the wife is trapped in the home and forced to care for the child on her own, always pining for the man who deserted her. (Aubrey was raised by a single mother in a situation much like this one).
Aubrey and Melody lived in Iris’ parents’ home, and thus Melody shares a generation-skipping closeness with her grandparents, Sabe and Po’Boy. Melody’s grandparents are successful and established black Americans who escaped racial terrorism in Tulsa, Oklahoma to build a full and comfortable life for themselves in Brooklyn. Sabe and Po’Boy cherished the educations the received at historically black colleges, and feel immense pride at the stable family they built through hard work and devotion. It is thus quite understandable that Iris’ teen pregnancy very difficult for them to come to terms with. In a stunning turn of prose by Woodson, Iris reflects, “But when your child shows up with a belly and she’s not even full grown yet, you think for a minute that all those blocks of gold don’t mean a damn thing out in the world if you haven’t even taught your own child how to stay pure. How to hold on. How to grow into womanhood right. You cry into the night until your throat is raw and there’s not another heave left inside of you. Not another drop of water left for your body to squeeze out. Not enough ways left to curse God and yourself.”
This novel is about how desire can wreak havoc on a family in a myriad of ways, how ambition can both hurt and strengthen relationships. Woodson gives language to the anguish and longing felt by Melody and Aubrey at Iris’ desertion, all the while refusing to blame Iris for her desire to explore and better herself. Woodson acknowledges the role that history plays in black families, endowing her elder characters a lyricism that is both authentic and haunting. Red at the Bone is a short novel with a wide scope of ambitions, and manages to address, with a great deal of thoughtfulness, many of the realities of black life without feeling like an over-written polemic.