Fifty Books Project 2023

 

Red at the Bone by Jaqueline Woodson

 

They had always been soft-spoken.  Because they had always been afraid.  Brooklyn was a new world they didn’t quite understand – the angry Italian boys slamming into their shopping carts as they made their way to the A&P on Wycoff Avenue.  The elevated M train above their heads as they rushed to the check-cashing place on the corner of Gates and Myrtle.  The thick women watching them from the windowsills, their elbows propped onto dingy pillows, eyes slowly moving up the block then down again.  Nosy as they want to be, his mother said more than once.  He never told her how they asked about his father.  Was there one?  Where was he?  And even once, Dark as you are, you sure you your mama’s baby?

 

Jaqueline Woodson is an esteemed children’s book author, four-time winner of the Newbury Medal for the best children’s book of the year.  Now, she is an esteemed novelist as well.  Her first novel for adults, Another Brooklyn, told the story of August who returns to Brooklyn upon the death of her father and reminisces about her relationship with three childhood friends.  It was nominated for a National Book Award in 2016.

 

Red at the Bone has a good deal in common with Another Brooklyn:  both are short, lyrical narratives that move forward and back in time to tell complex family stories in short, condensed incidents.  That Woodson is able to compellingly tell such a complex story in so few words is impressive.  In Red at the Bone the prose is also crystal clear and the complex plot is never confusing.

 

The novel opens on the day of Melody’s sweet 16 party in the summer of 2001 – which family tradition designs as a kind of coming out party.  Melody will dress in white, perform certain dances and represent the next generation of her prosperous clan.  There is extra pressure on Melody because her mother, Iris, missed this event sixteen years earlier because she was pregnant with Melody.  Melody’s grandmother, Sabe, has been grooming Melody for this moment her whole life, and has saved what would have been Iris’s dress for her granddaughter to wear.  

 

From the day of Melody’s party, we move back and forth through the family history, learning of the great grandparents escape from the Tulsa massacre, their move to Brooklyn and how the family became successful Morehouse and Spellman graduates who own a brownstone in Park Slope and send their granddaughter to Riverdale Country Day School.  Iris is the rebel of this group – sexually promiscuous even before she takes up with Aubrey, son of an impoverished single mom, and gets pregnant, then abandons her daughter to go off to Oberlin.  

 

The life of the family, and of each character, revolves around this pregnancy.  We learn how shocking it was to the middle-class Christian parents, how they came to love and accept Aubrey, how Aubrey never really recovers from Iris’s abandonment and how Melody and Iris attempt to maintain a relationship that is as much acquaintance as it is parental.  This is related in detailed scenes told from a variety of points of view.  Iris’s early years at Oberlin and her discovery of her own lesbian feelings are especially detailed and we get a clear picture of the arc previous generations have travelled – the context of the family’s move to Brooklyn after escaping Tulsa and their climb to prosperity is well conveyed with a few carefully chosen details.  Iris and Aubrey’s relationship, the pregnancy, and her move to Oberlin are especially vivid.  

 

However, the book skips over several years.  We see Iris move through college and come to understand that even after graduation she will not be moving back home to be with Aubrey and Melody (who both live in the family brownstone).  Then we lose a period of several years – Melody is 7 when Iris graduates college and doesn’t come home, and then she is sixteen and taking her mother’s place in the family tradition.  Then she is herself bound for Oberlin and mother and daughter have reunited after the death of Aubrey and the grandparents.  How their relationship moves through early adolescence and into adulthood is not even glossed over – we are left to intuit what happens from the end result, with only the day of the party to show their lives between when Melody is seven and when she is nineteen. 

 

However, that end result is both vivid and symbolically satisfying as we see Iris and Melody pay tribute to the others in their last moments in the brownstone and are granted material proof of the family’s progress.  The last page of the book really sings.  In fact, virtually everything here sings, which only makes me long for a more complete narrative of these lives.  With these two novels, Woodson is building a wonderful portrait of Black lives in central Brooklyn in a voice that is thoroughly individual.  While much of the time Woodson’s style feels like powerful compression, at other times the I feel shortchanged.