Red at the Bone

“I closed my eyes for a minute. The song was older than everyone in the house. When the trumpeter picked up a solo and the music lifted past where the voices had just been, I felt like my ribs were shattering. There was so much in all of it. Just. So. Much. I wanted to say to Iris, It all feels like it’s trying to drift out into somebody’s eternity.” 

The orchestra plays “Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time,” a 1928 song, connecting each person in the room to a time before them. This excerpt conveys the power of music, especially in this text. For Melody, it is overwhelming; she can intuit the weight of the legacy being placed on her, the memories stretching out towards her across time through the music. Melody’s response speaks to the profound emotional and restorative influence music enjoys across generations. 

“Maybe this was the moment when I knew I was a part of a long line of almost erased stories. A child of denial. Of magical thinking. Of a time when Iris and my father wanted each other in…that way. The something they were so hungry for in each other becoming me.” 

Here, Woodson’s lyrical prose powerfully encompasses one of the most important theses of the text: resilience living on through bloodlines. Melody’s very existence is poetic; like her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother before her, her life was almost prevented, but in being born, in participating in her family’s traditions, she represents generations of resiliency. She is borne of passion and need and in spite of fear.

“But now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.” 

Melody compares both Iris and herself to Christ, first by revealing that Iris is almost 33, the age Christ was when he died, and then by describing the burden she herself has to uphold the family legacy. This analogy positions Iris’s and Melody’s relationship as the trial they are expected to bear and overcome to heal their family’s generations of trauma. This trauma is referred to as a legacy of “fire and ash and loss,” emphasizing the adverse aspects of heritage and inheritance. Similarly significant is Melody’s reference to the dress she is wearing. Here, the dress marks everything Iris—but really, her parents—missed because of her pregnancy. In a way, the dress is a ghost of who Iris was meant to be. Now, the onus is placed on Melody to fill her mother’s place.

“Malcolm smiles then winks at me, our legs kicking into the air then swinging back behind us. The rest of the court dancing onto the floor to join in—our teenage feet in sync, our hands lifting into the air. 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.” 

Woodson’s work is a celebration of Black voices and lives in its uncompromisingly nuanced study of the variances in the Black experience while permeating the narrative with cultural consciousness. This quote speaks more to the latter, representing the cultural significance of music and dancing in Black culture because of its roots in African traditions. Woodson’s details are important; their feet root them in their cultural practices, while hands outstretched uplift their ancestors. It’s transformative and restorative; Melody is giving glory and power to her heritage and, thus, continuing a narrative.

“When he remembers it, he remembers the hunger, a hollow pain in his stomach. He remembers the opening and closing of the refrigerator door. Again and again. Hoping that by some twist of the government or grace of his mother’s ability to borrow ten dollars from a neighbor […], there would suddenly be a package of bologna to fry up, some thin slices of American cheese, or a jar of mayonnaise and a couple pieces of bread even though he’d had his fill of mayonnaise sandwiches.” 

Each character’s relationship to food conveys their class identity. Aubrey’s marks the degree of poverty he grew up, distancing his life experience from that of any other character. These are defining memories for Aubrey because they are dualistically traumatic. First, he must suffer through hunger and face the indignity of having essential means of survival inaccessible to him. Then, he suffers from not seeing his experience reflected in anyone he loves aside from his mother. His class ostracizes him continuously from Iris and her family—and even, at times, from Melody, who he is thankful will never know poverty.

“But in that moment, as her mother wept, she hugged her stomach and claimed whatever was growing there. She saw it all—a baby rising up inside of her, landing fully formed and beautiful in into the world. She saw a child her parents couldn’t try to control. This baby would belong to her.” 

This image of Iris fighting to keep her child is the inverse of her actual practice of motherhood, which is tainted with resentment and misunderstandings. It reveals the naivete of 15-year-old Iris, desperate to love and be loved by something new. This reveals how deeply she’s misinterpreted the role of a parent; she sees it as control, or the freedom from control. Having been so intensely governed by her parents, Iris’s thoughts suggest that being pregnant will release her from their authority. The irony is that having a baby makes Iris feel more trapped than ever before.

“I don’t know about that fish giving all of its pretty rainbow scales away. Makes me think of your mama. Thought she was still ours. Thought she was still my little girl. But she wasn’t. Thought one day she’d grow up and I’d walk her down the aisle and give her away. Truth is, though, she wasn’t mine to give. Nah sir. She wasn’t mine at all. But it felt like I’d been scaled alive when Sabe told me about you coming. Felt like someone had taken a knife to my skin and just lifted it up off of me. 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.” 

Po’Boy invokes a comparison between Iris and the children’s book The Rainbow Fish. In this tale, a fish is admired for its beautiful scales and learns that in sharing his scales he makes himself and his friends happy. Po’Boy takes a more pessimistic take on the tale, seeing the fish as having lost everything that made him beautiful. It’s a compelling interpretation since it leads him to realize that his daughter—and what makes her beautiful—was never under his control. This reveals the evolution of Po’Boy’s parenting style. Initially, it had been about controlling who Iris was, resulting in having felt to have suffered a profound loss when her pregnancy revealed he couldn’t control her. 

“Now, staring at the picture of her daughter, she remembered again how her own mother had said more than once that there was nothing at all maternal about Iris and wondered if the maternal gene kicked in later.” 

This is an ongoing crisis for Iris—she accepted the responsibility of being a parent before she could realize she didn’t want it. The thematic importance of parenthood is explored explicitly here through Iris’s relationship to her identity as a mother, or rather, the dissociation she feels from this identity. Therefore, this also facilitates the novel’s consideration of the long-standing impact decisions can have and how dangerous they might be when made too young or with too little information. 

“He felt like he had lost something. Something more than his virginity. Like something had been taken from him and he could never get it back.” 

Virginity is a culturally designed concept with real emotional and physical implications. With Aubrey, Woodson explores the power dynamics often at play in early sexual relationships. Aubrey perceives that Iris, as the girl, should be the one to lose something from the interaction, but he is the one left feeling lost. Historically, the veneer of female virginity has been weaponized to control women and their sexuality. Here, Woodson subverts gender expectations and returns power to Iris by highlighting how very disempowered Aubrey is after being emotionally and physically vulnerable with someone more experienced than himself. 

“Before she was his mama, she was a girl in Oakland, growing up in the system. For a long time, Aubrey hadn’t understood what the system was but knew, but the way his mother’s eyes darkened every time she spoke of it, that it wasn’t something he ever wanted to be a part of.” 

Aubrey provides context to who his mother is and why she is the parent she is, showing how systemic barriers have contributed to their generational trauma. He alludes to the system that perpetuates poverty through circular processes that disadvantage low-income and poor individuals by denying them access to economic and social resources. Particularly, he highlights the psychological effects this has had on his mother, resulting in a battle with mental illness that goes untreated and unrecognized by the very system she is trying to escape. The fear of remaining in this cycle haunts Aubrey, awakening a severe class awareness and a desire to escape a similar future. 

“The strange thing was the shame that came with knowing this. He tried not to inhale the cheap Lysol smell, tried not to look as the vase filled with dusty plastic flowers.” 

This quote showcases the class disparity between Iris and Aubrey, which is made clear for the first time as Aubrey brings Iris to his family home. She is positioned as a foreign object in the place, her very presence a foil to the poverty around her. This ties Aubrey’s class identity with shame, instilling a sense of inferiority within him that he carries throughout his relationship to Iris. Woodson accomplishes this primarily through sensory imagery, emphasizing how the smells and sights of homes can further mark class and status. 

“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 tries to call it a riot, but it was a massacre.” 

The narrative of the Tulsa Massacre is significant to Woodson’s goals with this text, especially in the characters’ relationship to the legacy of this specific trauma. The 1921 Massacre, once referred to as a riot to control the narrative and prevent proper reparations from being made, was 24 hours of horrific and targeted violence by White mobs against Black businesses and Black lives perpetrated. Due to inaccurate historic records, the original death count was only 36, but most historians today believe about 300 lives were lost. The impact of these attacks was felt for generations; lives and livelihoods could not be rebuilt, and many Black families chose to leave Tulsa. This is a defining piece of personal history for Sabe and, consequently, Iris and Melody. The implicit memory of this trauma informs Sabe’s relationship to property and place, perhaps being one reason it is so important for her family to achieve and maintain high social and economic status. 

“Every day since she was a baby, I’ve told Iris the story. How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries—everything—just good and gone. 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 now that my grandbaby carries the goneness too.” 

This quote touches upon the psychological imprint racism leaves on an entire culture, and how this form of trauma affects generations and generations of families. Sabe’s life has been partially defined by the sensation of “goneness”—a dark inheritance borne from facing indescribable hate. This heavy heirloom is passed down through each generation because it has not been addressed and healed, turning trauma into behaviors and values. As the novel continues, Woodson shows Melody as the cure for this goneness, for her existence is the realization of stories remembered. 

“It was freedom. A letting go. Even this early on she knew she could never be happy at home again. She had outgrown Brooklyn and Aubrey and even Melody. Was that cruel? To be the child’s mother but even at nineteen have this gut sense she’d done all she could for her? She had given her life.” 

Aside from revealing more about Iris’s morally ambiguous character, this quote serves as an example of the unconventional story arc Woodson offers readers. Rather than being a teenage pregnancy tale that emphasizes all that is lost in exchange for the liberating love of a child, the text offers each aspect of a character’s life as fact, not part of a greater edifying plan. Melody’s birth did indeed alter their lives, but she did not ruin them. Here, Iris’s brutal honesty works more to demonstrate her own need for self-discovery and protection. Her disinterest in being a mother is not cold abandonment of her child, but a desire to see her own needs fulfilled. 

“Watch the ballplayers sit at their own black table and the white girls blend back into their white worlds, tossing their hair over their shoulders. Tearing their chicken away from the bone with forks and delicate fingers. Eating it past the point where any of us eat it—where it’s not cooked all the way through near the bone.” 

Melody recognizes the race undercurrents at play in her high school cafeteria, alluding to the self-segregation happening within schools as a facet of social conditioning. Right before this, Melody describes the ways White girls would chase Black ball players in hallways and “behind the pool” (120). Melody’s observations demonstrate the fetishization of race, particularly done by White women onto Black men, which explicitly marginalizes Black women. These White girls desire their Black classmates in the shadows but settle back into their White social circle in public. Melody metaphorizes her distaste for this by describing how the White girls eat the undercooked flesh close to the bone.

“She was all he had now and she knew it. It was a strange power. Jump for me, Aubrey. And he jumped. Only after would he ask, Why?” 

The small passage emphasizes the uneven power dynamics within Iris and Aubrey’s relationship, which begins with their first sexual encounter and only amplifies as Aubrey moves into her family home and remains behind to raise their daughter. This power stems partially from desire, partially from love, but also from Aubrey’s clear sense of lacking. His esteem has suffered over the years, particularly from Iris’s repeated rejections, and this quote proves that he’d do anything for her despite her not feeling the same. 

“What the fuck have I done? For days afterward, […] Iris stared out her hospital window and saw the enormity of a life she hadn’t even lived yet. The baby’s eyes carried everything in them […]. The eyes were too beautiful. Too hungry.” 

In this moment, Woodson’s focus on the decisions these characters make—often under duress or when uninformed—is culminated by Iris’s realization that motherhood is permanent. The heavy weight of being responsible for another life is put upon her shoulders when she is still a child herself, and the complexities of this experience are too much. Melody’s birth is a promise and a closed door; Iris is both obsessed with and repulsed by her child, showing that she is simply too young for this role.

“It’s poor around here, Melody said. It’s not poor where we live. […] This place feels like from a long time ago. It feels like it’s in the past tense.” 

Melody, even at a young age, notices the destructively transformative nature of gentrification. Her comment highlights the disparity in experience between herself and her father. While Aubrey lived in survival mode—just trying to make it through each day—his daughter lives in abundance. This is such a nuanced and distinct experience that is both uplifting and isolating for Aubrey. More than anything, Melody’s observation reveals how low-income and underserved communities often feel untouched by time precisely because they have been left behind. 

“She felt red at the bone—like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding. She wanted this thing with Jam to last. Already, she saw them growing old together—Jam with her arm around Iris’s waist in the darkness. […] She wasn’t gay or lesbian or queer of whatever else. It was just Jam she wanted [.]”

Part of Iris’s journey of self-discovery is her experience with queer desire and love, which leaves her feeling emotionally raw. However, her inability to be open and vulnerable with her partners is ultimately destructive. To be “red at the bone” is to be exposed, to embrace emotions not fulling developed—and this terrifies Iris. With this aspect of the narrative, Woodson offers Iris partial amnesty from her disinterest from motherhood; she is still so young, and her time away at college proves that she is still only half-formed—red at the bone—and finding herself. 

“She nursed the child because she was supposed to feel some deep electric connectedness to her and didn’t. So she gave her what she had—her body. This physical part of her, staring down into the child’s eyes or into the pages of a textbook or, simply, out the window while Melody lay across her. And sucked and sucked and sucked.” 

The motif of body parts and bodily functions depicts Iris’s approach to motherhood. Driven by repressed guilt, Iris offers Melody the only part of her available at the moment: her body. Still healing from her own fraught mother-daughter relationship, Iris cannot foster the kind of interconnectedness she imagined having with her child. Instead, Iris offers an alternative visage of parenthood, one of literal life-giving, of feeding the body but neglecting the soul. This quote also betrays the negative associations Iris holds towards motherhood; she views her child as a draining source, the ceaseless needing as something that eats Iris alive. 

“And I remember when they finally placed me at her breast, how I latched on so tight and hard, there was fear in her eyes. How absolutely hungry I was once. For her. For her. For her.” 

Here, Melody echoes the language used by her mother to describe their first encounter. However, Woodson reverses the perspective, offering insight into how Iris’s emotions informed Melody’s perception of her mother for the rest of her life. This hunger Melody has for her mother is emotional. Woodson alludes to the emotional inaccessibility of Iris, signifying Melody’s ability to detect this detachment early on. Melody ingests Iris’s emotional response to her birth, scarring Melody and showing how desperate the child was for her mother. 

“Other boys followed and I learned quickly not to love them, to love the feeling of them inside me, the taste of their mouths, the way they held me. But nothing more. That way, we were good. That way I was good.” 

This is the root of Iris emotional detachment. Her first sexual experience occurs early on in her adolescence and is quickly followed by rejection. From then on, she associates emotional vulnerability with the pain of rejection and learns to dissociate her emotional self from physical pleasure. This first experience is also formative in molding her appetite for desire; she enjoys sex and finds liberation within it. Woodson, though, does not use Iris’s pregnancy to punish her; in the end, Melody plays a role in Iris’s deliverance from generational trauma. 

“Some deep and buried DNA ballooned into a memory of her mother’s stories of Tulsa. She had felt this. And Sabe felt it. And she knew that as her child watched on the television in her classroom, she felt the embers of Tulsa burning.” 

This is the visceral memory of trauma—it is the recollection of a tragedy one hasn’t lived but that they feel in their bones. After never connecting with her mother’s stories of Tulsa, Iris comes to understand the pain that is not bound to time or individual lives. Aubrey’s death awakens the memory of this pain, and Iris knows it is a pain that will reside within her bones, within her daughter’s. Here, Woodson shows how trauma becomes folklore, and folklore becomes lived experiences.