Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

  Iris turned back to the window. Silent again.

  I stared at her back. 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. Me so in love with her that as a small child, I cried whenever my father put his arms around her. Said, She’s mine, and cried harder when they laughed. A long line of screaming fights leading to us here now. Sixteen years of one or the other of us pushing away. She had won. Not me. Now, here was this, her standing with her back to me, hair half-done, half slip and bra beneath her satin robe, a woman too often confused for my sister. Here she was, in all of her deep unknowing knowing that this was the place, this was the time to keep me here by letting me know how easy it would have been to stay fifteen. That the people I loved almost as much as I loved my own father would have determined me optional. Two words spoken early enough, I’m pregnant, would have meant the end of my beginning. The end of so many beginnings.

  Her back was narrow and straight, her shoulders squared beneath the delicate satin of her robe. She was fourteen months away from her thirty-third birthday. The age Christ was when he died, hung up on a cross and left to slowly bleed. In school, we’d been asked to discuss this image—Literal or Metaphoric. Truth or Fiction. It was Whitman who said, Argue not concerning God. At the time we were in ninth grade—new to our beliefs and the power of our voices. So we argued. 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.

  That evening, as the music lifted up, I made my way slowly down the stairs and into the crowded room. When I looked for Iris, I found her standing beside my father, him in black, her in dark blue. Her hand on the now flat belly that could have expelled me. As the orchestra lifted into “Darling Nikki,” I took small breaths to keep tears from coming. I had not expected this—to feel the close of a chapter. The girlhood of my life over now.

  Amen. The end. Amen.

  Cameras flashed as Malcolm took my hand, led me to the center of the gathered circle where my grandparents sat, somber and proud.

  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 Ashé and The ancestors are in the house, say what? I and everything and everyone 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 the fuck were they anyway? I didn’t know Iris. But truly, did I know any of them? Honestly? Deeply? Skin, blood, bone, and marrow?

  Malcolm put his arms around my waist, whispered in my ear, We so dark and lovely, got them feeling all black and blue.

  * * *

  —

  Look closely. It’s the spring of 2001 and I am finally sixteen. How many hundreds of ancestors knew a moment like this? Before the narrative of their lives changed once again forever, there was Bach and Ellington, Monk and Ma Rainey, Hooker and Holiday. Before the world as they knew it ended, they stepped out in heels with straightening-comb burns on their ears, gartered stockings, and lipstick for the first time.

  Now Malcolm lifts my hand as we begin a slow cakewalk while a trumpet blows Armstrong into the room. 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.

  2

  His daughter was descending the stairs. As the orchestra his in-laws paid for played, she was taking each step as though the world had stopped for her, as though this moment were the only moment on earth with her in it. And she was fine as hell—this girl, no, this woman. This seed of his, this cry into the night. This apology of a child, Iris, I didn’t mean to. Damn. I’m so, so sorry. When had it happened—her with so much of Iris, the cheekbones, the slant of the eyes, the smile with so much . . . what was that thing behind their smiles? Some long-held secret about you. Both of them knowing you, knowing what you’d been up to, as though they could see, taste, and smell it on you. Aubrey had seen that smile so many times over the past fourteen, no fifteen, sixteen years. Where were the years? And still.

  And still, this moment with Melody walking toward them and this whack-ass rendering of Prince filling the house.

  Aubrey leaned back against the wall, his hands felt unsure suddenly. Iris had hers pressed to her mouth. But what is the father of the child supposed to do with his hands? His big open hands. Where were they supposed to go when all they wanted was to reach out for this child, hug her, hide her from the world? These hands that had learned at seventeen how to snatch smelly diapers away from her tiny body, rub A&D ointment over her rashed behind, hold her until the stinging stopped. Until the crying stopped. Hold her—over his shoulder with his massive hand behind her fragile head, then on his chest, in his lap, in his arms, on his back, both shoulders, his hand on her shoulder as she scooted too fast away from him. . . . Who was this now, descending the stairs? This child he made and raised and loved. God, how he loved every single cell dividing. The coarseness of her hair, the deep vulnerable hollow in her neck, the half-moons beneath her nails. Those show how many boyfriends you’re gonna have. Watch out, world! And her tears when they began to fade. Does that mean no one’s ever going to love me, Daddy?

  His baby girl was coming down those stairs and he was crying now, outright and silently, and no one had told him what to do with his hands. As he slid them into his pockets, Iris shot him a look. He pulled them out again, quickly wiped at his eyes. Clasped behind him? Against the wall? Arms raised, fingers laced on top of his head? Arms folded? What was the right thing? Why did he never know the damn right thing to do?

  Always, there was this echo in his gut, this hunger for something not quite remembered but almost joyful. No, it was joy. Before Melody. Before Iris. When he was still a boy. In the half memory, he’s walking behind his mother. Corpus Christi. Houston. New Orleans. Mobile. Tallahassee, the two of them following the coastline, always staying near to the water. It was an almost memory of the feel of the water. The smell of it. The warm foam against his bare feet. For so long, he believed it was the true ocean. He’d thought it never-ending. And when he squatted to dig crabs from the sand, he’d thought he could dig to another country, step out of the sand on the other side, and meet boys his own age there. Chump dreams. Soft, childish dreams. He was a boy in cutoff shorts and a ragged T-shirt following behind his near white mother. That’s all. And those nights when he woke up alone in the tiny apartments they’d found—over beauty shops and behind hardware stores and down long, dim, urine-scented hallways—he knew she’d gone off to meet up with a friend who she’d come home smelling of, pulling wrinkled bills from her pocket, then running a bath so hot, the bathroom floor grew slippery from the steam. Who were these friends? How come he never met them? Chump-ass dummy he was.

  When he’d finally gotten the courage to ask—was he nine? ten? it’s such a blur now—if his own dad had been a friend, his mother smiled such a deep and heartbreaking smile, he’d wanted to take the question back. Cut it into pieces. Make believe it wasn’t now a part of the air between them.

  Nah, Aubrey. Your daddy was free and clear love.

  He liked to think about that. That two people had loved each other and made him.

  He knew the story now. Now that he was a man. Now that he had his own child. His father was a musician, blue black and
beautiful, his mother said one afternoon. Where were they living then? Another beach town, but where? He remembered that it was raining, but the rain was warm. His shorts were soaking wet and he was shirtless. Maybe he’d swum just before his mother said, It’s time for us to talk about the man who made you. Then I don’t want to talk about it again. That clear?

  Maybe he’d nodded so vigorously his head hurt. He’d been hungry for this story. For years and years he’d wanted it. Once, as a very small boy, he’d reached for the hand of a man who stood smoking on the boardwalk. The man was tall, cream colored, and squinting out at the water. Aubrey was stunned by the beauty of the man’s free hand—the long fingers curling over the metal railing separating them from the water and sand. His mother was gone. Maybe in the bathroom. Maybe buying a loaded hot dog for them to share—extra everything. Sauerkraut and onions spilling over their fingers. Extra packets of ketchup for him to nurse later, sucking them flat. Whatever the reason, he was alone with the man so close, Aubrey could see the spray of dark freckles below his eyes. Aubrey moved closer, leaned his back against the rail. He’d glanced up at the man as he slowly walked his fingers closer, finally feeling the soft skin moving over the knuckles. Maybe his mother appeared then. He remembered her calling his name, apologizing to the man, snatching at his hand. Most of the rest of that memory is gone now. But soon after that—through the ebb and flow of his mother’s words, in the click click of his nails being bitten down to the skin—he met his father.

  He’d come to Santa Cruz with a jazz band, him on the trumpet. I think the whole university was in love with him.

  As a man, he found the story cliché as hell, but as a child . . .

  As a child so damn hungry for the meat it filled his belly with . . .

  I was a senior by then, would be graduating in a month, and something about his mouth around that horn and his eyes on me. The way he saw me.

  He remembered her looking out at the water. Remembered the two of them sitting in the damp sand, his head against her arm. Warm rain coming down. Flashes of memory like lightning. Flash. Darkness. Flash. Darkness.

  I lost him for a while, though. After we’d spent that week together, he had to be somewhere on the East Coast and I blended into the revolution for a while.

  He remembered her sweet laughter. How that day, there was such a sadness behind it that he stopped biting and looked up at her, startled.

  Then we met up again at Berkeley. I’d decided I needed a graduate degree and he was still on the road with that horn. So of course, there we were together again, you know.

  He’d nodded even though he didn’t know.

  By then, though, he was high more than he wasn’t and I’d never been one for any kind of drugs or drinking, which made me a bit of an outcast.

  She got quiet, wrapped her arm around him, and pulled him closer.

  Heroin happened to him. Heroin made your daddy king of every party we went to.

  For years and years afterward, Aubrey would remember that line, her voice moving over the word hair-on and him imagining the man that was his father pulling on a wig and making people laugh.

  His father died before Aubrey was walking.

  He had a place in Philadelphia somewhere. I’d call and call and call and no one answered. Few months later, I was doing some research and decided to see what I could find out about him. Came across a small obit on microfiche. He’d been dead nearly a year by then. Overdose. The end. Felt like movie credits going up a screen. Felt like a heavy curtain come down over me.

  For a long time after that, they sat there, the rain falling over them, small waves lapping in, and every so often his mother’s heavy sigh.

  Her deeply tanned skin and dark gray eyes made people look at her, then look at him. She’d always kept her hair cut short, but that year it had grown into loose curls with so much gray and blond moving through it. They didn’t match, the two of them. When he held his arm against hers and asked why, she laughed and said, The black ancestors beat the crap out of the white ones and said, Let this baby on through.

  She said she’d chosen Santa Cruz because when she walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white. It worked fine for me.

  With Melody, the ancestors had done a different dance, painted his child deep brown, then drew on all of Iris’s features. He didn’t understand genetics no matter how many times Iris tried to explain DNA. He didn’t understand why everything didn’t just blend into some new something instead of picking and choosing like it did. He wasn’t smart like that. This, he knew.

  Now out on the floor, Melody and Malcolm were being joined by their friends, other babies turned into teenagers becoming a crush of butt-length braids and perfectly shaped fades, long painted nails lacing into lotioned teen-boy hands. He shook out his shoulders, realized his own hands were sweating. Most of the grown-ups were tapping their feet, some even moving in to dance beside the young people. He caught a glimpse of Malcolm’s hand brushing over Melody’s butt and something turned over inside of him. A new fear like a dragging bruise moving in his stomach. Were they fucking already? Not Melody. No. She would have talked to him. She would have given him something, dropped a few coins of info into his pocket. Yeah. His girl would talk to him before she did anything.

  Wouldn’t she?

  He would give his own life to see Melody able to stay this young, to see her live her teenage life—all the years. He wanted to pull her to him now. Say, Hold on to yourself, Melody. Don’t get lost. He wanted to say again what he’d said to her so many times before. You’re loved, baby, you’re loved.

  Iris had come closer. He could smell her—cigarettes, patchouli oil, and cocoa butter. All those years ago, she’d come home from college smelling this way. Had come back different, further away from him and Melody, who at seven called her grandmother Great Mama and Iris, when Melody finally spoke to her again, Iris. She had left him and come back so far away, he found himself wondering if she’d ever truly loved him. But before he felt sure enough to ask her, she left again. Always leaving again. Still.

  Still.

  No one talked about this. His boys hadn’t— The way it feels the first time you’re inside a girl. Your own skin stretching back and holding you hostage just that far on the outside of pain.

  He reached for her hand, biting his lip against the hurt of Iris not taking it into her own. After a moment, she wrapped her fingers inside of his, rested her head on his shoulder. Maybe this was right. Maybe this was who he was supposed to be right now. Melody’s father. Iris’s friend.

  Now in the kitchen, he could see the caterers moving food out to the backyard. Bowls of red rice and beans, platters of BBQ chicken, a mountain of potato salad on a bright blue plate, miniature veggie, beef and chicken patties, pyramids of cornbread squares. Even a whole fish covered with peppers and onions.

  He had spent his childhood on a diet of Reagan’s cheese and Taystee Bread with the occasional roast beef boiled to chewing gum. His mother didn’t care much about cooking, and on a good evening—payday or when her income tax return came in—the two of them sat at the table, peeling back foil-covered TV dinners, talking softly through mouthfuls of Salisbury steak and scorched mashed potatoes.

  They had always been soft-spoken. Because they had always been afraid. Brooklyn was a new world they didn’t quite yet understand—the angry Italian boys slamming into their shopping carts as they made their way to the A&P on Wyckoff Avenue. The elevated M train above their heads as they rushed to the check-cashing place on the corner of Gates and Myrtle. The thick women watching them from windowsills, their elbows propped onto dingy pillows, eyes slowly moving up the block, then down again. Nosy as they want to be, his mother said more than once. He never told her how they asked about his father. Was there one? Where was he? And even once, Dark as you are, you sure you your mama’s baby? He did
n’t tell the women that he’d been born into a midwife’s palms alone as breath itself—that in this new place, he felt himself becoming dust.

  Once, a long time ago, he was a boy in yellowing T-shirts and sagging underwear. He was too skinny, his knees curling out from his ashy legs, his ankles and cheekbones sharp. 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 (Go ask Thelma and tell her I’ll give it back to her when I get my check on Friday), 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 of pieces of bread, even though he had eaten his fill of mayonnaise sandwiches. Some Saturdays, he woke to Spam fried to golden beside scrambled eggs and a chunk of fresh Italian bread from the bakery in Ridgewood where he and his friends snuck to some nights, reaching beneath the half-closed grate to steal warm loaves off the cooling rack. He wondered, as his hand reached into the bakery’s darkness and clasped the bread, why the grate was left half-opened. Was there a science to the cooling? Or was this some small act of kindness from the Italian bakers—a gift to hungry brown children sneaking up to Ridgewood in the middle of the night.

  He longed for Twinkies, Charleston Chews, peanuts—either Spanish or boiled, their softened shells echoing a South he vaguely remembered. His mouth watered for hot dogs slit down the middle and fried to curling, pancakes with salted margarine and Aunt Jemima syrup—his list went on.

  Before he was a man who shaved and laughed with his head thrown back, he was a hungry boy, dipping his fingers into cans of Vienna sausage, licking at the juice that dripped down his wrist. The sink counter he leaned against dug into his spine. The linoleum covering it peeled up beneath a plastic dish drainer. Too often, drowned roaches floated in the pooled water beneath it. But once, a cardinal alighted on the kitchen windowsill and he found himself squinting long after it had flown away again, trying hard to hold on to its beauty.