Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson Narrated by Jacqueline Woodson, Full Cast

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Poignant. Beautiful. Graceful. An unforgettable story about the tethers of family, the ebb and flow of love and the sometimes-hefty price of ambition. Jumping back and forth in time through multiple generations, Red at the Bone is the ultimate portrait of family. The lyrical and poetic prose will leave an indelible imprint long after the back cover is closed.

Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2019 by LitHub and The Millions.

Called one of the Top 10 Literary Fiction titles of Fall by Publishers Weekly.

An extraordinary new novel about the influence of history on a contemporary family, from the*New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of*Another Brooklyn*and*Brown Girl Dreaming.

Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson's extraordinary new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of this child.

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood,*Red at the Bone*most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Read by Jacqueline Woodson, with Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Sabe), Peter Francis James (Po'Boy), Shayna Small (Iris), and Bahni Turpin (Melody)

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/15/2019

Woodson’s beautifully imagined novel (her first novel for adults since 2016’s Another Brooklyn) explores the ways an unplanned pregnancy changes two families. The narrative opens in the spring of 2001, at the coming-of-age party that 16-year-old Melody’s grandparents host for her at their Brooklyn brownstone. A family ritual adapted from cotillion tradition, the event ushers Melody into adulthood as an orchestra plays Prince and her “court” dances around her. Amid the festivity, Melody and her family—her unmarried parents, Iris and Aubrey, and her maternal grandparents, Sabe and Sammy “Po’Boy” Simmons, think of both past and future, delving into extended flashbacks that comprise most of the text. Sabe is proud of the education and affluence she has achieved, but she remains haunted by stories of her family’s losses in the fires of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The discovery that her daughter, Iris, was pregnant at 15 filled her with shame, rage, and panic. After the birth of Melody, Iris, uninterested in marrying mail-room clerk Aubrey, pined for the freedom that her pregnancy curtailed. Leaving Melody to be raised by Aubrey, Sabe, and Po’Boy, she departed for Oberlin College in the early ’90s and, later, to a Manhattan apartment that her daughter is invited to visit but not to see as home. Their relationship is strained as Melody dons the coming-out dress her mother would have worn if she hadn’t been pregnant with Melody. Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Red at the Bone:

“Readers mourning the death of Toni Morrison will find comfort in Sabe’s magnificent cadences as she rues her daughter’s teen pregnancy, which flies in the face of the lessons her mama ingrained in her from the Tulsa race riots of 1921—the massacre by whites that drove her family north and taught them to vigilantly safeguard their social and economic gains. . . . With Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson has indeed risen—even further into the ranks of great literature.” —NPR

“Occasionally mentioned, and never forgotten, is the fact that Iris’s family moved to Brooklyn from the South in 1921 after white people in Tulsa burned down black people’s schools, restaurants, and beauty shops. It’s not just that the past informs the present, nor is it just that the past isn’t past; it’s also the case that the past has to be remembered, has to be kept alive.” —The New York Times

“Red at the Bone is a nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships, jumping back and forth in time and moving bet­ween the characters’ different voices. . . . Underneath it all runs the vexed and violent history of the US. Sabe’s family lost everything in the Tulsa massacre of 1921. . . . Stories may be hidden, but they will come to light.” ­—Financial Times

“Beautiful . . . a generous, big-hearted novel.” —Brit Bennett, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
 
“Profoundly moving . . . With its abiding interest in the miracle of everyday love, Red at the Bone is a proclamation.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A spectacular novel that only [a] legend can pull off, one that wrenches us to confront the life-altering and life-pulling and life-subsuming facts of history, of love, of expectations, of status, of parenthood.” —Ibram X. Kendi in The Atlantic

“A treasure awaits readers who encounter Red at the Bone. . . . [A] universal American tale of striving, failing, then trying again.” —Time

“Sublime . . . This short novel contains immense empathy for each member of its wide ensemble. Thus, as Woodson covers nearly a century, from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to 9/11, her grasp of history’s weight on individuals — and definitive feel for borough life, past and present — proves to be as emotionally transfixing as ever.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A true spell of a book, Woodson is one of those rare writers who make you feel like you can do anything, should do anything. The story of family and young love are timeless human stories—but through Woodson’s sentences, this novel offers us new ways to think and embody our burning world and, perhaps most mercifully, permission to dream—and to change.” —Ocean Vuong, New York Times bestselling author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“Red at the Bone is a narrative steeped in truth. . . . Thank you, Ms. Woodson, for leading me home.” —The Washington Post

“Red at the Bone is a slim novel that has all the heft of a family saga . . . [but] reads like poetry. . . . Woodson nailed the ending, leaving me thoroughly satisfied and awed by her talent.” —Lynn Neary, NPR

“Lyrical, dreamy, and brimming with compassion for her characters.” —Esquire

“[Red at the Bone] subtly explores the ways in which desire can reconfigure our best-laid plans, and its expansive outlook suggests how easily, in African-American life, hard-won privileges can be dissolved.” —The New Yorker

“Vast emotional depth, rich historical understanding, and revelatory pacing . . . Woodson draws the profound magic out of the ordinary. She is unmatched in her ability to evoke emotion.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A remarkable, intergenerational harmony of voices. At its center is hope for both individual and hereditary survival.” —USA Today

“Gorgeous, moving . . . A story of love—romantic and familial—and alienation, grief and triumph, disaster and survival.” —Nylon

“Red at the Bone breaks down the ways in which parenthood changes people for both better and worse and what it means to find your true identity.” —Parade
 
“Slender miracle of a novel [that] performs a magic trick with time. . . . Woodson skips back and forth between the decades so deftly that it feels like it all happens in a heartbeat.” —Family Circle

School Library Journal

07/17/2020

This quick novel opens with Melody's coming-of-age ceremony. She is 16, the same age her mother was when she gave birth to her. Woodson weaves together the perspectives of three generations, alternating among Melody, her parents, and her grandparents. VERDICT This is a story of adolescence told from multiple generational vantage points.—Elliot Riley, Deerfield Academy, MA

SEPTEMBER 2019 - AudioFile

Five talented narrators, including the author, differentiate shifting time periods and three generations of an African-American family. Bahni Turpin aids listeners in understanding the feelings of 16-year-old Melody, who is central to the story. Her caustic comments arise from her mother Iris’s infrequent presence. Shayna Small fills in Iris’s complexities. She is a teen mother who fled home dreaming of a larger life. In contrast, Peter Francis James and Quincy Tyler Bernstine’s rich voices evoke the age, devotion, authority, and histories of Melody’s beloved grandparents. Author Jacqueline Woodson delivers the third-person narrative, connecting the way the protagonists impact each other. Her spare but emotive text leaves lots of room for all these powerful interpretations. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2019 Best Audiobook, 2020 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2019-07-01
Woodson sings a fresh song of Brooklyn, an aria to generations of an African American family.

National Book Award winner Woodson (Harbor Me, 2018, etc.) returns to her cherished Brooklyn, its "cardinals and flowers and bright-colored cars. Little girls with purple ribbons and old women with swollen ankles." For her latest coming-of-age story, Woodson opens in the voice of Melody, waiting on the interior stairs of her grandparents' brownstone. She's 16, making her debut, a "ritual of marking class and time and transition." She insists that the assembled musicians play Prince's risqué "Darling Nikki" as she descends. Melody jabs at her mother, Iris, saying "It's Prince. And it's my ceremony and he's a genius so why are we even still talking about it? You already nixed the words. Let me at least have the music." Woodson famously nails the adolescent voice. But so, too, she burnishes all her characters' perspectives. Iris' sexual yearning for another girl at Oberlin College gives this novel its title: "She felt red at the bone—like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding." By then, Iris had all but abandoned toddler Melody and the toddler's father, Aubrey, in that ancestral brownstone to make her own way. In 21 lyrical chapters, readers hear from both of Iris' parents, who met at Morehouse, and Aubrey's mother, CathyMarie, who stretched the margarine and grape jelly sandwiches to see him grown. Woodson's ear for music—whether Walt Whitman's or A Tribe Called Quest's—is exhilarating, as is her eye for detail. Aubrey and little Melody, holding hands, listen to an old man whose "bottom dentures were loose in his mouth, moving in small circles as he spoke." The novel itself circles elegantly back to its beginning, Melody and Iris in 2001 for a brava finale, but not before braiding the 1921 Race Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the fires of 9/11. The thread is held by Iris' mother, Sabe, who hangs on through her fatal illness "a little while longer. Until Melody and Iris can figure each other out."

In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: "beneath that joy, such a sadness."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169240306
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/17/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,033,330

Read an Excerpt

1

 

But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing. Music filling the brownstone. Black fingers pulling violin bows and strumming cellos, dark lips around horns, a small brown girl with pale pink nails on flute. Malcolm's younger brother, his dark skin glistening, blowing somberly into a harmonica. A broad-shouldered woman on harp. From my place on the stairs, I could see through the windows curious white people stopping in front of the building to listen. And as I descended, the music grew softer, the lyrics inside my head becoming a whisper, I knew a girl named Nikki, guess you could say she was a sex fiend.

No vocalist. The little girl didn't know the words. The broad-shouldered woman, having once belted them out loud while showering, was now saved and refused to remember them. Iris wouldn't allow them to be sung and Malcolm's brother's sweet seven-year-old mouth was full. Still, they moved through my head as though Prince himself were beside me. I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine.

And in the room, there was the pink and the green of my grandmother's sorority, the black and gold of my grandfather's Alpha brothers-gray-haired and straight-backed, flashing gold-capped teeth and baritone A-Phi-A! as I made my entrance. High-pitched calls of Skee-wee answering back to them. Another dream for me in their calling out to each other. Of course you're gonna pledge one day, my grandmother said to me over and over again. When I was a child, she surprised me once with a gift-wrapped hoodie, pale pink with My Grandmother Is An AKA in bright green letters. That's just legacy, Melody, she said. I pledged, your grandfather pledged-

 

Iris didn't.

 

A pause. Then quietly, her lips at my ear, That's because your mama isn't legacy.

This, I whispered back to her, quoting her sorority mantra, is a serious matter.

My grandmother laughed and laughed.

Look back at me on that last day in May. Finally sixteen and the moment like a hand holding me out to the world. Rain giving way to a spectacular sun. Its rays speckling through the stained glass, dancing off the hardwood floors. The orchestra's music lifting through the open windows and out over the block as though it had always belonged to the Brooklyn air. Look at me. Hair flat-ironed and curling over my shoulders. Red lipstick, charcoaled eyes. The dress, Iris's dress, unworn in her closet until that moment. Already, when it was time for her ceremony, I was on my way. Already, at nearly sixteen, her belly told a story a celebration never could. My grandfather's oversize dress shirts backdropping the baby fat still pouting her cheeks, the fine lanugo hair still clinging to the nape of her neck. Still, that afternoon, the years that separated us could have been fifty-Iris standing at the bottom of the stairs watching me. Me looking away from her. Where was I looking? At my father? My grandparents? At anything. At anyone. But her.

Earlier that day, she came into my room as I pulled stockings over my thighs, attempted to clip them to an ivory gartered corset. These too had once belonged to her-unworn, still boxed and wrapped with tissue paper. The fragile stocking struggling against being locked into the garter-this I had learned from my grandmother-and she from her mother and on back-mine the only ceremony skipping a generation of mothers showing daughters. This-the corset wearing, the garters, the silk stockings-was as old as the house my father and I shared with my grandparents. This ritual of marking class and time and transition stumbled back into the days of cotillions, then morphed and morphed again until it was this, some forgotten ancestor's gartered corset-and a pair of new silk stockings, delicate as dust.

I guess you win this round, she said. Prince it is.

I looked up at her. The evening before she'd twisted her hair into tight pin curls, and standing before me, she began to pull them loose, her thick reddish hair springing into coils down over her ears. The baby fat long gone from her cheeks, replaced by high, stunning bones. I pressed my hand against my own face, felt the same structure beneath my skin.

I didn't know it was a competition, Iris.

Once, a long time ago, she was Mommy and I held her neck, her arms, her belly tight with dimpled baby hands. I remember that. How I reached and reached and reached for her. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.

The dress, white and unworn, lay spread out on the bed beside me. Behind it, a framed poster of Rage Against The Machine's 1997 concert. My father and I went because Wu-Tang was opening. I was twelve then and the two of us yelled and rapped and cheered so hard, we both stayed home the next day drinking lemon-honey tea to nurse our sore throats. The poster was professionally framed-the red letters against a gray matte, the oversize black frame picking up the muted colors of the black-and-white photograph. Beside it, another poster. If someone said choose between your mom and dad, I wouldn't need to blink. Wouldn't stutter. I'd run like a little kid and jump into my daddy's arms.

Feels like it's always a competition these days. Somewhere along the way, I became your enemy. She pressed her hand to her throat and held it there, her fingers gently moving across her collarbone as though she were checking to see if it remained intact. A gold bracelet slid down away from her wrist. Tiny diamonds catching the light. I swallowed, at once envying and adoring all the ways in which the word lovely could refer to my mother. So strange still, how different we were.

I had given up on trying to negotiate the stockings into the ridiculous garters and was just sitting there staring at her, elbows on my thighs, hands hanging down.

I don't get it. This is my ceremony and you're trying to be stuck about the music. You blew yours, remember-

No, the baby in my belly blew mine. Remember?

Don't even, Iris. Then for a moment, like so many times before this, I lost the words. Watched them drop . . . No. Dissipate . . . from the air between us. Dissipate. The word had shown up on my SAT prep tests again and again until it landed in this room with us. Between my mother. And me. Don't even. I didn't ask to be born. I didn't say-I didn't say do what you and my dad were doing. You could have waited.

Iris raised an eyebrow at me. I know you're not trying to have some kind of abstinence conversation with me.

You could have. There wasn't some rush to do what you guys did.

You mean have sex? Can you really not even say it? Sex, Melody. It's just a three-letter word.

I can say it. I just don't need to right now.

And if we had . . . waited, as you say. Where would you be?

You regret the hell out of me.

Don't curse. I don't regret you. I couldn't imagine this world without you in it.

Then what is it?

She came over to the bed, sat down on the other side of the dress, and ran her hand longingly over it. There were crocheted white flowers at the wrist. The attached train had alternating silk and satin panels. The seamstress had already been working on it for months before my grandparents found out Iris was pregnant. By the time she started showing, the dress was almost done and paid for.

 

I don't know . . . , she said more to the dress than to me. It's Prince. It's my parents. It's your father. It's me. It's you already sixteen now. Where did all those years go? It's crazy.

There was a catch in her voice I didn't want to hear. Didn't want to deal with. Not now. Not on my day.

It's just Prince, for fuck's sake! It's not like I'm asking to walk in to N.W.A. or Lil' Bow Wow-

Stop cursing, Melody. You're better than that. And N.W.A., Lil' whatever . . . I don't even know what you're saying. She didn't look at me, just continued to run her hand back and forth over the dress. We had the same fingers, long and thin. Piano fingers, people said. But only she played.

I'm just saying it's Prince. And it's my ceremony and he's a genius so why are we even still talking about it? You already nixed the words. Let me at least have the music. Daddy doesn't care. He likes Prince too. Jeez!

For too long we said nothing. There was something moving through me like a razor in my chest-I didn't know then if it was rage or sadness or fear. Maybe Iris felt it too because she moved closer to me, rested her hand on the back of my neck, and pressed her lips into my hair. I wanted more, though-a hug, a kindness whispered into my ear. I wanted her to tell me I was beautiful, that she didn't care what music played, that she loved me. I wanted her to laugh with me about the ridiculousness of garters and stockings.

But instead, she got up, went over to the window, and pulled the curtain back. She stared down at the block as she freed the rest of her curls. It was gray out, drizzling. Downstairs, the orchestra had arrived. I could hear bows being pulled across violins. Could hear my grandfather playing Monk on the piano and imagined his dark fingers, knotted at the knuckles.

Do you like Malcolm?

She turned back to me. Her skin creased at the brow, her eyes-eyes I'd prayed for as a child, Please God let me wake up with Mommy's pretty amber eyes-red-veined now. Please God don't ever let me have eyes like her eyes are right now.

Malcolm? Sure. Yeah. He's still such a sweetie. She looked at me, her mouth turning up into a half smile.

What?

What exactly are you asking me, Melody?

Do you like him . . . for me? Do you think he's a good- I don't know.

 

I looked up at her. Who else was there to ask who had lived through it all? From beginning to baby. First kiss to hands on a body to sex. How did you even begin it? Keep it going? Wasn't it supposed to be now that she gave me the answers. Told me everything?

You guys have known each other'since you were in diapers and he's always been . . . I mean, isn't he?

Isn't he what?

Nothing. Never mind. She put her hands up, surrendering. He seems, she said again, smiling. You just don't seem . . . his type.

Like you would know anything about him. Or me.

Like I said, I've known that boy since he was in diapers.

Yeah, Iris. Both of us were in diapers a long time ago.

We got quiet. Maybe all over the world there were daughters who knew their mothers as young girls and old women, inside and out, deep. I wasn't one of them. Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway here.

I hid you from them, you know, she said-like she was looking into my head finally. Seeing something there. That's how you got here. They were hella good Catholics back then, but you would have been dust.

From who?

Whom, Melody. It's whom.

I was starting to sweat beneath the corset.

Your grandparents. Your beloved grandparents.

You didn't know. You told me you didn't know.

I never said I didn't know. I said I didn't know what to do.

She stopped talking suddenly and looked at me. Hard.

Is your period regular?

What . . . yeah! What the heck, Iris?

She exhaled. Shook her head. Okay, so if you have a regular period and then it just stops and it's not stopping because you're suddenly a super athlete or something-then you're probably pregnant. I'm just saying that to you in case no one else does-

I covered my ears. I'm good. Don't need to hear this. Not today. Not from you. Thanks.

No one ever said it to me. That's why I'm saying it to you. We can talk about this. By the time I was four months pregnant, what I didn't know was that on the other side of pregnancy there was Motherhood.

Of course it was, I said.

Of course it is, she said. I know that now.

How could you not know- You know what- Never mind. I don't get you.

The orchestra was warming up with "Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time." I could hear my grandfather singing the words along with Malcolm's little brother. One voice high. The other low. One voice young and unsure, the other old and clear and deep. 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. But when I looked up at her again, she was biting the edge of her thumbnail, her left eyebrow jumping the way it did when she was stressing.

I told Aubrey, she said, moving her finger away from her mouth and studying it. And then both of us made believe it wasn't happening for a few months. Because we were kids thinking that if we ignored it, it would go away. I hid you until I couldn't anymore, wearing your granddad's button-down shirts, telling him it was the style.

Did you want to miscarry me?

I was a child, Melody. I was younger than you are now! I wanted to see you born. I wanted to hold you. I was stunned that it was true-that you could have sex with someone and that sex could make another human.

I tried to imagine her in my grandfather's clothes. Everything about her was feminine and tailored and perfect. Everything about her felt the opposite of me. I could imagine me in my grandfather's clothes. But not her.

I wanted you. I wanted you growing in my body, I wanted you in my arms, I wanted you over my shoulder-

She got quiet.

And then the wanting was gone, wasn't it?

She shook her head. More time passed before she spoke again.

It wasn't gone. Just different. You're going to learn this. I mean, I hope you learn this. Love changes and changes. Then it changes again. Today, the love is me wanting to see you in that dress, she said. I want to see me in you because Me in that dress was over a long time ago. Sixteen was gone. Then seventeen, eighteen-all of it.

Videos