The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is a relatively short, exquisitely written novel (published five years ago) about two Black families, divided by economic status, whose lives become joined when their children conceive a baby. Iris, 16, insists on giving birth to Melody, without any understanding of or commitment to being a mom. Her husband, Aubrey, also a teenager, raises the infant in Brooklyn while Iris completes her high school education and goes off to Oberlin College for four years.

The story opens in 2001 on the 16^th birthday of that infant, Melody, who is being warned by her mother, Iris, about not getting pregnant as a teenager, as Iris had done at 16 years old.  Iris’s mom, Sabe, (Melody’s grandmother) had come from a family whose wealth had turned to ashes in the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma race massacre. They moved to Chicago to rebuild their lives and ultimately to a comfortable brownstone in Brooklyn. With her husband, Sammy Po’boy Simmons, (a skinny, poor teenager from Brooklyn, who had gotten a scholarship to Spellman), Sabe figures importantly in the rearing of Iris’s unwanted baby, Melody. Sabe speaks lyrically about their lives, and she insists that the younger generation never forget their Tulsa legacy. Its lesson, among other things, is that whatever wealth one accumulates is never impervious to external events, and the family is never truly secure. Eighty years later, this message is repeated at the World Trade Center.

Woodson writes lovingly and poetically about all her characters, showing how these three generations of a family, despite their work to get a good education and thrive economically, can be altered not just by external events but by personal crises like unplanned pregnancies. Family inheritance can be monetary but also comprises the scars of racism and its legacy of trauma.

The title, Red at the Bone, appears in different contexts throughout the book and is subject to multiple meanings, sometimes hinting at emotional authenticity when you get down to raw feelings close to the bone. Iris experiences that level of emotion when she gets involved in a short-term lesbian relationship at Oberlin.

Don’t try to track who’s on first in this review. Rather, understand that this intimate portrait, with its shifting first-person, third-person and generational perspectives, captures many expressions of the Black experience in America. Interestingly, the female characters are strong and striving; the male characters are steady and nurturing. It’s a book the richness of which warrants reading a second time.