Red at the Bone

Throughout the narrative, the concept of holding on to someone or something appears repeatedly to portray the characters’ consciousness of their own mortality and articulate the effects that centuries of systemic racism and government-sanctioned hate crimes have had on generations of Black American families. In essence, Sabe’s recollections in Chapter 7 are a study in generational trauma. Sabe inherited the trauma of the Tulsa Massacre from her mother, who was a toddler at the time, and this has resulted in financial planning/economic views that dictate her relationship to capital. Sabe, and others who have lived through or inherited similar experiences, has every reason not to trust the institutions that non-Black Americans inherently trust. The trauma of knowing that everything can be taken away from you—because history has shown that it can be—is extremely difficult to root out. This culture of injustice engenders a counterculture of distrust.

Therefore, the fact that Sabe’s reaction to Iris’s pregnancy reflect her relationship to property makes sense. She see Iris’s pregnancy as a loss of childhood and loss of autonomy. For Sabe, holding on is so much more than hiding a few gold bricks beneath the floorboards; it’s holding on to yourself, your values, and your legacy. At first, Sabe believes that Iris has shunned this responsibility, but when Melody is given a family name—the name she inherited from the great-grandmother who survived the Tulsa Massacre—everything shifts. Melody becomes the legacy, the culmination of generations of dreams. Then, Sabe’s belief in holding on—in firmly rooting herself into a place or idea—is usurped with her decision to rise. Rising requires release, that she loosen her grip on the past and lift herself up to the future. Watching Melody descend the stairs, knowing their legacies are intact, Sabe is empowered to do so.

Chapter 8 similarly builds on the exploration of familial ties and cultural heritage through Po’Boy’s memories. First, Woodson considers the theme of desire, showing that time has allowed Po’Boy to look back on Iris and Aubrey’s situation with empathy and even some sadness. He knows they behaved as most teenagers do, “with hormones running through them that they didn’t even understand” (94). His thought highlights the human body’s instinct for sexual desire, portraying it as humankind’s most base and natural drive. It also highlights the severity of the impact this emotion carries; for Aubrey and Iris, their hormones drove them, but they lived the most extreme consequence of these relationships and their lives were forever altered by desire. Although no one would wish for Melody to not exist, the underlying thread between all other characters is the inescapability of the fact that Aubrey and Iris’s lives could have been so much different—the tragedy being that they had to make a life-changing decision when they were only children.

The rest of the chapter serves to provide context and characterization for Po’Boy. The defining moment of his life is meeting Sabe, and the love they have for each other carries them through each hardship. They work relentlessly hard for the life they want, and briefly, Woodson touches upon the real-life racial wealth and home-ownership gap as she describes the efforts they take to buy a house. This is also clear because of the frequent mentions in other chapters that Sabe and Po’Boy moved into a predominantly White neighborhood.

The most significant moment of the chapter is Po’Boy’s emphasis on their desire to have more children after their firstborn dies. Their joy in conceiving, though, is starkly contrasted by the grief of losing Po’Boy’s mother. This is a tactful attempt on Woodson’s part to showcase the balance achieved in welcoming children as legacies; though one life has been lost, the new life carries a piece of everyone before them, thus maintaining their legacies. Iris’s birth, just like Melody’s, represents hope, resilience, and legacies coming to fruition.

The first important moment to note in Chapter 9 is how Iris’s rejection of motherhood does not involve rejecting Melody. The freedom Iris alludes to reveals the restrictions parenthood has imposed on her life, namely that she cannot participate fully in the normal college experience, as much as she might try. This suggests that the pressures of raising a child, of being needed so severely, is too much for Iris, who is still trying to discover herself. However, in describing Melody as an extension of her own body, she articulates a biologically programmed connection that is at conflict with her individual desires and needs.

Then, the chapter transitions into Iris’s characterization, specifically communicating the disconnection between Iris’s sense of individual self and cultural self. Under Jam’s gaze, Iris begins to question her relationship to her Black identity: “Iris had felt the master all over her—her not-quite-light skin, her light brown eyes” (104). For the first time, when faced with someone with a stronger connection to their racial and cultural identity, Iris feels her own sense of lacking. This is exacerbated by Jam’s curiosity over where Iris is from, meaning she wonders where Iris’s ancestral roots are. This question is indicative of the duality of diaspora. For descendants of the African diaspora, some individuals are empowered to name their heritage and establish connections to a history that was severed from them. Iris, however, struggles with this. Instead, her disconnection from her ancestral inheritance is evinced by her relationship to her mother’s attempts to pass on the stories from Tulsa. Iris’s response to the trauma of Tulsa is to reject it and claim that it has nothing to do with her. Iris reveals a level of self-awareness in this as she decides to use this part of her identity to make herself more interesting to Jam. In doing so, Iris inadvertently acknowledges that people’s connection to the past enriches their present.

Then the chapter shifts gears once more to focus on more ramifications of Iris’s teenage pregnancy. Along with altering the trajectory of her life, Iris’s pregnancy alienates her from her peers, resulting in a difficulty in connecting with girls her age. This memory also reveals a bit more about Iris’s relationship to Sabe. In briefly showing that Sabe refused to let Iris’s school degrade her, the chapter demonstrates that Sabe’s parenting style is fiercely protective and fiercely reliant on the promises of education. This latter concept is crucial to the text, and it is especially relevant to this chapter as Cathy Marie undertakes educating Iris. This relationship further characterizes Cathy Marie, proving her to be an intelligent, overworked, and passionate person. It also illustrates how education is connected both to class identity and personal advancement. To Iris, her parents, and Cathy Marie, Iris’s only path forward is with an education. For her parents, the idea is rooted in elitism and maintaining the expectations associated with their class position. For Cathy Marie, however, it is about the promise of a better life, a life that now includes her son and grandchild.