RED AT THE BONE: The selves we inherit & invent
Season 2, Episode 1 Transcript
(Note: check out our list of Books on Antiracism, Black History, and Black Liberation, which you may purchase through The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org*)
T: Happy Wednesday! I’m Tamara Crawford, here with Vina Orden. And this is The Lift Up podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. Welcome to Season 2, Episode 1. In this episode, we start off our season with the book Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson.
Red at the Bone, published in 2019, is a beautifully written, complex story that explores identity, gentrification, education and ambition, class and status, and parenthood, whilst exploring the lasting impact of decisions made or forced upon young people — way before they even know who they are, or what they want.
It has been listed as a New York Times Top 10 Bestseller, as The Times “100 Best Summer Reads” in 2019, and long-listed for the Women’s Prize in 2020. Additionally, it has been listed as one of the books of the year by the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, USA Today, O, The Oprah Magazine, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, NPR, New York Public Library, Library Journal, Kirkus, BookRiot, She Reads, and The Undefeated.
So, let’s get right to it …
Hi, Vina! Happy belated New Year! Aside from this crazy start to 2021 (I was seriously about ready to cancel my subscription for this year and wait for 2022), how have you been? Did you have a really good holiday season?
V: It is so great to be back here talking books with you, Tamara! Thanks for asking about my holidays — they were actually pretty quiet for me. Usually, my partner and I just house-hop from one set of relatives to another. But this year, probably like a lot of people, we ended up joining Zoom parties from our couch. But at least it was, you know, relatively relaxing.
My family did get some great news over the holidays …
T: Oh, yeah?
V: Yeah. So, as you know, I’ve been editing my dad’s sci-fi/fantasy children’s book set in the Bronx. And actually, I started working on it around the same time we dropped our sci-fi episode, featuring N.K. Jemisin. It was kind of fun — he ended up reading The City We Became while I was editing his book , so that was pretty awesome.
So anyway, through community organizing, I ended up meeting the Creative Director of Laurente & Hall, which is this publisher based in New York, and they’re committed to amplifying under-represented creators and communities, which really is very much in line with what we’re trying to do here on The Lift Up. So, I am just really excited to announce that they’ll be publishing my dad’s book, called New Yoyd, this summer!
T: Oh my gosh!
V: I know — I can’t believe it! Yeah, so that was really, really fun. But yeah, what about you? How were your holidays? I mean, I don’t even know what London’s like these days.
T: Well, I mean, first of all, your dad’s news is such amazing news! So, huge congratulations to your dad! I really can’t wait to see his book published.
So, the holidays were really slow for me — I was unfortunately ill during the whole holiday season, which I think was my body telling me I needed a break, so I’m really glad we took one.
V: Self-care is really important.
T: Indeed — lighting a lot of candles around here. London is still under lockdown. As you’ve seen in the news, Covid unfortunately got way out of control here, so we were put back under restrictions. But, you know, in the midst of all that bleakness, we did get one day of snow in London. And, seriously, I literally cheered like a little kid, and got some hot cocoa, and was watching the snow fall from my window — just super-excited. So, that’s how it’s going here in London. Lots of rain at the moment. Hopefully, we’ll see a little bit of the back end of the rain in a week or so, and then we’ll get a little bit of sunshine, help brighten up the winter just a touch … So, anyway, let’s talk about this book Red at the Bone …
V: Yeah. So, I am glad we chose this as our first book of Season 2 … Season 2, can you believe it?
T: I can’t believe it!
V: What really struck me about Red at the Bone is that it’s a story of family, told from the perspectives of members from different generations. And in many ways, it is a love story of family; so, I do think it’s the perfect read for Valentine’s Day, as we come up to that.
Also, as our listeners in the US may know, February is Black History Month. And one of the things that is just so powerful about this book is how it weaves in the lesser-known but critically important moments in African American history to help us understand their lasting impact on the lives of the characters in this book.
So, for example, I don’t recall ever learning in school about the Great Northward Migration of 6 million African Americans from the rural south to cities in the north , and this happened between 1915 through 1970. So, in the case of the family in Red at the Bone, they moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Chicago, to Brooklyn, New York. And because of this book, I finally started reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which to be honest, had been sitting on my bookshelf for a few years now. But I do highly recommend that book as a follow-up to this one if you’re interested in learning more about this history.
Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns explains that Blacks left the tobacco farms, rice plantations, and cotton fields of the South
… for cities they had whispered of among themselves or had seen in a mail-order catalog … The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such. Their every step was controlled by the meticulous laws of Jim Crow, a nineteenth-century minstrel figure that would become shorthand for the violently enforced codes of the southern caste system … it was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.
And so for me, a lot of the tension in Red at the Bone is between an older generation, represented by Sabe and Po’Boy who were part of that Great Migration from Tulsa and who operate in “survival mode”; so for them, it’s about protecting their human dignity. Compared to the succeeding generations, represented by Iris and the daughter she has at fifteen, Melody, who both struggle with the pressures of having to always do the right thing, but also needing to grow into their own selves and to move from that survival mode of the older generation to more of a thriving mindset.
T: Exactly. I don’t remember learning about Tulsa either, and it wasn’t until I read this book that I started to learn about what had happened — as well as that history coming out more often, especially last year as people started illuminating more about Black history in the United States. And I think it’s a great recommendation that you’ve made in The Warmth of Other Suns, so I definitely look forward to picking that one up!
Back to your point on Red at the Bone, I love how this book is centered around this family and from the viewpoints of the various family members. I love the way Woodson has crafted this, because sometimes it’s really easy to get lost in the back and forth between voices and the stories. But this novel flows so well, and you really feel like you’ve gotten into the family dynamic. And I think it’s so important that you mention Tulsa as key to what drives Sabe and Po’Boy, because it is this history that stays with them and shapes the future. And I also think sometimes as young adults, when young adults don’t live that history, they may not understand why it was so important. And there’s this one point in the book where Sabe is explaining why she keeps this history alive, and she says:
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. But both of them need to know that inside the goneness you gotta carry so many other things. The running. The saving. The surviving.
And there’s a part in the story where Iris retorts that this is not her story, it’s Sabe’s. And you can tell it hurts Sabe to acknowledge this. But I also think this is why she continues to tell this story and keeps that gold under the staircase. Because that history and the need to keep that gold was passed down from her mother to her — that value of having gold, and keeping it, and what it means to “hold on to what is yours.” And I find that’s a sentiment that plays throughout the book, holding on to what is yours.
V: Yeah. And it’s just fascinating, my grandmother — and it’s that same kind of mentality of just holding on to what you have because you never know — she grew up in [World War II] in the Philippines, and so, she’s the kind of person who would not put her money in the bank and would just hide it under a mattress. So, that totally resonated with me too.
And I do think that a lot of the books we’ve read for this podcast are grounded in some kind of a hidden or forgotten history. And as an adult, I wonder if we’d be in a different place, especially here in the US, if we were taught a more complete history. For instance, it would have been so fascinating to learn more about the two Black senators and fifteen congressmen elected after the Civil War during the Reconstruction Era (so, we’re talking between 1870 and 1876).
But that would also mean explaining why there wouldn’t be another Black senator elected for almost a hundred years until the Civil Rights Era! It would be having to tell the story of the Southern Democratic Party, which was then mostly white planters and businessmen, and how they supported paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, or the White League in Louisiana, or the Red Shirts in Mississippi and North and South Carolina, in terrorizing these Black politicians who mostly ran under the opposition party, Lincoln’s Republican Party, as well as Black political organizers and voters.
It would also mean explaining then the mass exodus of white supremacist Southern Democrats to the Republican Party after one of their own, President Lyndon Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It’s amazing how this history comes around, and I do wonder how history will record the Trump presidency, which in many ways was all about erasing the legacy of Barack Obama, our country’s first Black president. And also how, or if, the white supremacist insurrection of January 6 will be remembered. As Woodson said in one of her interviews, “The way we remember history is by having it repeated and having it taught.”
And this brings up another theme that Woodson explores in Red at the Bone — and that’s of class and ambition. So, there’s one scene where Iris, who gets accepted to Oberlin and chooses to leave her husband Aubrey behind with their baby in Brooklyn, tries to fit in with the other “normal” college kids. So, in this scene, she’s having a conversation with a classmate she’s attracted to. And I’m just going to read a little bit from this:
You’re from New York, right?
Yeah, Brooklyn …
Been there my whole life, Iris said. Till now.
New Orleans, Jam said. First gen. You?
First what?
You the first in your tribe to go to college?
Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.
Nah. She had learned how to answer it simply.
Aubrey wouldn’t have been first gen either. But before she left for Oberlin, she watched from her bed as he rose at six every morning, changed Melody’s diaper, brought her to Iris, then showered, shaved, and dressed for work. High school had been all he needed, he told her. I’m good with a diploma and a job …
If he had taken the SATs, Iris knew he probably would have scored high enough to get into any school he’d chosen. But he was done. He was good. Some mornings he whistled softly. Iris didn’t understand his happiness …
What she saw was a future past this moment of the three of them crowded into one bedroom every morning. A future bigger than the three of them living in her parents’ brownstone …
As the acceptance letters started coming in, first Barnard, then Vassar, and finally Oberlin, she saw the chance to unrut herself. She saw the way out.
T: It’s really interesting you mentioning the point about history. Earlier this week, I was just thinking that there’s so much missing from the history that is being taught, that maybe a more complete history book needs to be written and constantly updated. And it reminded me that there’s a really good book here in the UK written by historian David Olusoga called Black and British: A Forgotten History. It walks back in history and tells as much as it can from a Black British point of view. And I’ll have to hunt to see if we have done this in the US, but I think it would be great to do this from a diasporic perspective.
So, I think class and ambition are definitely key themes here that highlight the differences between Iris and Aubrey and their families, and it is interesting you mention their conversation around Iris going to Oberlin. I was so sad for Aubrey, because he loved Iris so much he gave up his own dreams and his own further education to stay home and take care of Melody, and accepting his fate and finding happiness in that situation.
And I think it’s also interesting to see how parenthood shapes about in the story and the strong connections between Iris and Po’Boy and Melody and Aubrey. For Melody and Aubrey, because of his decision to stay behind and take care of Melody, he develops this deep bond and connection with her — something that Melody doesn’t have with Iris, especially as she never calls her mother “mother” but only by her first name, Iris. And without giving too much away, you can see how well Woodson illuminates that strained connection between Iris and Melody, and the conflict in Iris wanting to be a type of mother figure to her on this coming-out day but not really knowing how, especially after all these years of rejecting traditional motherhood.
And I think there’s an interesting thread here that fits in this narrative of class and ambition, and that is the story of Aubrey and his mother CathyMarie. Their bond is so close, and it’s so sweet. And there’s a point in the book where CathyMarie talks to Aubrey about being a girl in Oakland, coming up in the system, and you get this view that everything she has tried to do is to keep Aubrey out of the system. And I found this particular passage interesting, and I’ve pieced it together from a couple of passages through this section:
For a long time, Aubrey hadn’t understood what the system was but knew, by 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. Fuck around, she said, and your behind’s gonna end up in the system … He knew the system was the white woman on the beach who asked his mother why he wasn’t in school on a weekday and the grocery store dude who side-eyed him, then asked his mother if she had any other foster children … But the system had paid for college. And even for the short time that she’d been in grad school … The system paid for the therapist his mama talked to when the system itself was coming back to haunt her dreams, she told him. But she never told him how it haunted her. You don’t need to know that, she said. I don’t need to pass that down to you.
And I think this ties in with the fact that she tried so hard to keep Aubrey out of this cycle of the system, but as she tells him after meeting Iris for the first time, “Fast nights make long days,” almost as if she could predict what was going to happen between him and Iris.
V: Yeah, I love that relationship between Aubrey and his single mom CathyMarie too. And it’s just amazing how, for a relatively slim book, we get to know the many characters actually so deeply in what’s really a saga of these two families.
So, we haven’t actually talked about the title of the book yet, Red at the Bone. The phrase comes up in the scene where Iris has sex with Jam for the first time in college:
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 she was in love with and would be in love with always. This naked, skin-peeled-back desire for someone was so new that it hurt. It felt too fragile — like Jam could turn to dust in her hands. Could walk away.
I love how the title is slipped into this moment when Iris just feels so raw and “undone,” in her words. Especially because Woodson says that the title came to her as “I was thinking about the way we are all sort of still in development, still ‘cooking’ in a way.” And I just love that image.
And this particular scene also brought me back to an earlier scene narrated this time by Aubrey when he and Iris have sex for the first time:
It was summer 1984 and Iris had a copy of the paperback sticking out of her jeans pocket. Both of them had been blown away by the book — how Orwell had imagined something completely different from the year they were living in. It had made Aubrey love Iris even more — the thought of a world where he wasn’t able to love her scared him.
I love you, he whispered into her ear as they lay side by side on her bed. I love you so much, Iris … He waited for Iris to tell him she loved him back, but instead, she reached inside his pants, then into his underwear, and wrapped her hand around him …
I love you, he said again, because if he whispered anything else, he was sure he would cry …
She was smiling at him — that I know something about you smile, and he could only look away, out past the matching curtains and window fan, into the late afternoon. 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 … why was he feeling like this? Why was he feeling like some promise the universe made had been broken?
Both of these scenes are just so powerful because I don’t think we’re used to reading in the mainstream about a woman undone by her passion for another woman, or a man who’s the vulnerable one who loses something in the act of sex.
T: I know! With Iris, it finally felt like she began to understand what love was for her and started to understand herself a bit more through meeting Jam and going to Oberlin. But then for Aubrey, his tenderness and devotion was so sweetly portrayed. And I really felt his undying love for Iris, so much so that I felt so heartbroken for him when she couldn’t say that she loved him back.
It’s interesting about the title, because there was another passage in the book that I thought connected the title to the story for me. And it was in the beginning when Melody is reflecting on her coming-out ceremony and all the guests — the friends, the family, the friends of family — and her history and her identity:
This was their perfect moment. Another almost-erased history unaborted. And this house with its hundred-plus years. This house with its stained glass and leaded windows. This house with its generations cheering, saying, Dance, y’all and Ashe and The ancestors are in the house, say what? I and everything around me was their dream come true now. If this moment was a sentence, I’d be the period. This house and these people, I kept thinking. This house and these people. Who they fuck were they anyway? I didn’t know Iris. But truly, did I know any of them? Honestly? Deeply? Skin, blood, bone, and marrow?
And it made me think about the bonds of blood that run deep in our bones that carry family histories, hopes, dreams, and conflicts. And so this passage also helped tie the title to the story for me.
V: There are so many other stories in this book — so, there’s the lifelong love between Sabe and Po’Boy; the relationship that develops between Aubrey’s mother CathyMarie and Iris, which is a little bit surprising but really comes out of their shared ambitions; you mentioned Po’Boy and Aubrey’s paternal relationship with Melody and the fathers in this family who really take care of their children; and Melody and Iris’ troubled relationship. But I’m glad that at the end of the book, it does hint at some kind of potential reconciliation (or maybe that’s what I’m hoping would happen) …
T: Or maybe some kind of understanding, yeah …
V: Yeah. And it really is such a beautiful book. It’s literally melodic too — I mean, there are so many references to music. And in that passage that you just read about the coming-out … I mean, she’s coming out to Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” and it plays in the entire background of the scene you just read. Yeah, there’s just so much lyricism in this book as well.
And I do hope our listeners enjoyed reading Red at the Bone along with us! As always, you can find all of the books featured on our show on bookshop.org/shop/theliftuppod (all one word). We’ll also post a transcript of the show, along with links to things mentioned in the show, next week on our blog on medium.com/the-lift-up-podcast.
T: Yeah. And Prince’s “Darling Nikki” — that song just streamed through my head the whole time, actually. It stuck in my head this week. You know, you can’t be mad at having Prince stuck in your head …
V: No — I want to start dancing to it now!
T: Exactly … There’s just so much to talk about with this book, but we really don’t want to spoil it for everyone. We really want you guys to dig in to this. I love how she touches on the college experiences and Prep for Prep. Being a Prep Alum, it was interesting to see it mentioned in a work of fiction, and the University experiences reminded me of my time at UVA. There are these points on identity and discovery for so many of the characters — there’s so much more in this book, and it’s such an amazing read. So, if you haven’t read it already, we really can’t wait for you all to dig in, and read it, and interact with us about this book.
And to close it out, we want to give you a heads-up on what we’re reading in March. We are reading Breast and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami, a Japanese author. We’re so excited to be reading this book — it’s gotten a lot of traction last year in Japan, so we can’t wait to talk about it next month. So what you guys can do is you can go ahead and feel free to send us any questions or suggestions through our Instagram page, again @theliftuppod, and thank you so much again for listening to us here at The Lift Up Podcast.
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