Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

  There was the war going on, and as I watched so many of my friends get drafted, I thanked God every day for legs that let me run and the way my right eye looked out into the world without seeing it, a cataract at birth going unnoticed for too long. I thanked God for my draft rejection letter and for Sabe walking into that office.

  Does it sound crazy to say I looked at her and saw the world falling into some kind of order that I didn’t even know it was out of? She had a flash in her eyes—a spark of something solid and deep. All these years later, I still don’t know how to talk about what I saw. But it moved from her eyes down around her cheekbones and on over her lips. Even in the bone straight of her back, you could see it. I wanted it with me, that thing she had inside her that I still can’t explain. I wanted it—and Sabe—to always be with me.

  * * *

  —

  Truth was you’d never met somebody lonelier than I was that year. I’d left my mama back in Brooklyn to go to a school I’d never seen in a city I’d never been to. It was my aunt Ella in North Carolina who wrote a letter to the president—Dr. Benjamin Mays—asking if he’d let me come to Morehouse. Dr. Mays wrote her back too, and next I knew, I was hugging my mama goodbye and boarding the Greyhound. I’d never given college much thought before Aunt Ella sent that letter. Some mornings I just have to close my eyes and thank God for the way He moves in His mysterious ways, cuz now, here we all are.

  Thought I’d find work back home after college, but then that job came through. Much as I could, I called my mama, expensive as that was. Some days I just sat at my desk eating ham sandwiches and staring down at pages and pages full of numbers. Or I’d get off from work, put on my running shoes, and go over to the Morehouse track and just run quarter mile after quarter mile until all the air was gone from me and I stood there, hands on my knees, breath coming hard, my throat and stomach burning, the burning taking the place of the missing.

  I’m staring back at more than thirty years gone by and lift my head to see Sabe standing in front of me, holding a textbook to her chest and smiling. I see the light blue skirt she’s wearing and the white blouse. I see my Sabe’s pretty black hair pulled back.

  And then I hear her voice again. Soft-spoken. Some South in it. Some steel too.

  Who are you running from, Mr. Jesse Owens?

  How do you know I’m not running towards something. Or someone?

  Some people don’t believe that you can meet a person and know that’s the person for you for the rest of your life. I’m not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know. I stood there grinning at the sound of her voice and my own answering it. We were married that following July 1967. At the house she’d grown up in in Chicago. On the most perfect day God ever gave to the world.

  If Sabe had had her way, we would have stayed in Chicago with her people. As it was, we stayed on for a year until our first child was born. That was Benjamin. We named him for Sabe’s daddy, who’d passed just before we got engaged. We don’t talk much about any of that time. Benjamin’s heart just didn’t do what it needed to do and we got him baptized just in time to bury him. Prettiest baby you’d ever want to see. For the few weeks he was with us, he’d open his eyes and look right at you—like an old soul. Like it was somebody from the past trying to tell you something.

  After Benjamin died, Sabe was ready for something new and we came here to New York, lived with my mama in the house she’d scrimped and saved and borrowed to buy. I got a job downtown and was able to help out. Sabe started teaching second grade at a Catholic school in the city and we’d meet and eat lunch together at Washington Square Park, watching the hippies and the comedians and the people riding bicycles. Sometimes we’d go to Prospect Park with my mama in the evenings and the three of us would put down a blanket and eat dinner there. Sabe and my mama’d drink tea and I’d have myself a Miller beer. When I remember those times, the sun is always shining and it is warm. But it must have rained. Must have gotten cold. And we must have spent a lot of that time carrying our sadness about Benjamin. Must have spent many nights crying into each other’s shoulders.

  We kept trying and praying for a baby, but it didn’t seem like it was meant to ever happen again. I could see the pain Sabe carried, the way her shoulders dropped down some days and she went quiet.

  I believe deep what they say about the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The week we discovered my mother’s liver had failed her and the doctors told us there wasn’t anything they could do, Sabe realized she hadn’t bled in two months. We spent equal time over the next months crying and laughing. Crying and laughing. My mama died at home with me, Sabe, and baby Iris at her bedside.

  Let me see my grandbaby one more time, she said. And then she closed her eyes.

  9

  The night Iris fell asleep in her dorm room and dreamed of Aubrey’s mom burning, she screamed out in the middle of the night. By then, CathyMarie had been gone for three years, so Iris didn’t understand why the two—fire and CathyMarie—were suddenly haunting her.

  The single bed was hard and foreign even all of these months later. She had doubled two flannel sheets over it, but could still feel the plastic mattress. And why? Were there really still bed wetters in college? And did anyone over ten years old still fit on a single mattress? She’d always slept in a queen-size bed. Hadn’t remembered a time when she wasn’t sprawled diagonally across it, her pillow pressed over her head to keep the light away. Even after Aubrey moved in. Her mother insisted he sleep in the guest room down the hall from hers until the baby came (which made zero sense to anybody and her mother knew that), but he’d tiptoe over to her room in the middle of the night and at eight, nine months pregnant, they found ways to have silent sex, the bed still more than big enough for both of them, belly and all, Aubrey’s grief mixed with passion bringing a new desperation to the way he held her. By dawn, he’d be sound asleep in the guest room again and she’d have returned to her position—taking up the bed corner to corner.

  It was springtime, her freshman year. The last of the snow had finally melted and there was something to the light in Ohio that made her want to never leave. As she stood at the window looking out, she felt even farther away from Brooklyn and everything she’d known. She had expected this feeling to be a stinging in her chest, a heaviness. But it wasn’t. It was a freedom. A letting go. Even this early on she knew she could never be happy at home again. She had outgrown Brooklyn and Aubrey and even Melody. Was that cruel? To be the child’s mother but even at nineteen have this gut sense she’d done all she could for her? She had given her life. Nursed the child all through junior and senior years of high school—running home at lunchtime to stuff food into her own mouth and her boob into the baby’s. Each of them staring at the other in wide-eyed amazement, as though to say, How the hell did you get here? and Are you going to stay? Her own body growing another part—like a third arm or second heart not quite beating in the same rhythm. No—more like it was beating against hers. Like it was knocking at her own to the rhythm of I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.

  She could see some of her dorm mates out on south quad. There was the African girl with the beautifully black skin and even blacker hair that fell in twists around her shoulders.

  No master up in this hair, the girl had said to her in class the first day, pulling her thick hair back into an oversize Afro puff. Iris had not understood what she meant and the girl looked at her the way the Catholic girls had, a deep knowing. Could she see that she was a mother? That back in Brooklyn, she had a whole adult life and Oberlin was just a four-year moment already moving too fast. But then the girl looked at her again, an up-and-down summing up of a look, and for the first time, Iris had felt the master all over her—her not-quite-light skin, her light brown eyes. Even her hair, the way it didn’t spring into tight curls when wet the way Melody’s and Aubrey’s did but hung near straight in places, corkscrewed and frizzed in others.

 
Where are your people from? the girl asked. She was wearing a black T-shirt that had Zambia, Bitch! across it in bright red letters—answering her own question for anyone asking.

  Brooklyn, Iris said. Chicago before that. And a couple of ancestors from Tulsa. Until then, she hadn’t pulled Tulsa out of her pocket. It was a dormant history, her mother’s old-fashioned story resurrected again and again with crazy-sounding talk about hidden money. And on the rare occasion when she’d had a glass or two of wine, her maudlin ancient despairing about—did it even really happen?—a massacre. How many times had her mother brought up the massacres when she was a child? Iris couldn’t even count them. Then, at twelve she had shouted to her mother, That’s your history, not mine! Her mother had gone silent, stunned at first, then a confusion that, to Iris’s surprise, was followed by tears. You’re right, Iris, she said. It’s not yours.

  But here, somehow, Tulsa felt like it could add a depth to her story. It was some foreign part of her set against the cosmopolitan of her New York story.

  When I was a kid, the girl said, I loved that play about Oklahoma. That song that went “Hush you kids my baby’s a-sleeping . . . ,” the girl sang, her lilt nearly gone, replaced by a twang that must have been a part of the play. Iris had never seen it. Had never traveled to Tulsa but knew somewhere deep inside herself that Tulsa was separate from Oklahoma—its own ghost of a place. It had something to do with the stories her mother kept trying to tell her as a child. Something to do with black folks and losing. Fire. Destruction of black futures. The words coming quickly now, playing like a bad jingle in her head. Vague memories of conversations with her mother. Black wealth something-something. The scar on Grandma Melody’s head. Or was it cheek? Shoulder?

  Now, watching the girl dancing out on the green with others, Iris remembered again how she laughed at the song, and the girl, sensing the laughter was directed at her, turned on her heel and walked away. She felt herself smiling again at the lilted twang—My baby’s a-sleeping. Maybe it was in high school that you learned to make friends with other girls. But by the time she was in tenth grade, she was pregnant and dangerous. The Catholic girls had told her as much. My mother says your belly is contagious. Pop. Pop. Pop. One two three. First it’s you and next it’s me. They were fascinated by her. But from a distance, snapping their heads back toward the front of the classroom when she looked up to catch them staring, clustering in the bathroom and hallways to whisper about the hows and whens of her pregnancy. I heard it was two boys at once. And that now she’s got two babies in her belly.

  No, that’s not it at all. I heard it was her own daddy that did it.

  You lie!

  Nope. It’s true.

  I heard there’s another in she house. That she had when she was just eleven years old!

  Impossible. It can’t happen at eleven. Not to anybody.

  Does she look like an anybody? If she got that one in her belly, she could have had another, I’m telling you. You don’t even know how she got that one in there, do you? You don’t know anything.

  But did any of them know anything? She had wanted to jump into the center of their circles, belly and all, and tell them everything. How good it felt. How it smelled. How the sweat on Aubrey’s neck tasted, the pleasure screams in the back of her throat that she had to swallow. She longed to shock the hell out of them with what she knew. Say, Run and tell your mama about that!

  But before she could, the nuns were calling her parents into school.

  It’s not safe for someone in her . . . condition, they were told. Iris feeling small between them. Feeling her mother shrinking even smaller beside her.

  You can arrange for someone from the board of education to work with her at home. She’ll have to repeat this year given—

  She will not repeat a year. It was her mother who finally spoke. She is too smart to repeat a year. And as the nun flicked her gaze across Iris’s belly, her mother took her hand, rose, and pulled her up.

  And even in her shame, she had held tight to her mother’s hand, loving her more than she’d ever loved anyone in the world for pulling her away from the nun’s gaze, for pulling her free.

  There was no board of education. Instead, her mother loaded her up with textbooks and told her to study. But once her parents went off to work, Iris turned the television on, poured herself a second, third, fourth bowl of cereal, and sat watching game shows and soap operas.

  There were pamphlets in the mail. Centers for GEDs, alternative schools for expectant teens, technical programs that promised blue-collar jobs upon completion with “No money down” and “You already qualify for student loans.” With each letter addressed to her, there was a flood of sadness, of failure, of stuckness. In her fifth month, feeling overweight and ugly, she let Aubrey drag her back to his mother.

  She knows, he said again and again. It’s cool.

  I see you and Aubrey wrote that check that your body’s gotta cash now, she said, pointing her chin toward Iris’s belly. The apartment was still dark, but cleaner, fresher smelling. The TV was off and his mother was dressed, her hair up in a braid on the top of her head, small, cat’s-eye glasses around her neck.

  He told me they kicked you out of school.

  Iris nodded. His mother’s voice was husky, years of smoking and maybe other things too. But she had quit, Aubrey said. And maybe those were the smells that weren’t there anymore—cigarettes, ash, butane lighters. Pregnancy had made her sensitive to smell. Even the scent of something sweet baking could send her vomiting.

  And both your parents working during the day now, so you’re sitting around watching TV while Aubrey’s at school. Iris could see now an old prettiness in Aubrey’s mom. Something around the eyes. The way her hairline curved around her broad face. The slight smile—not quite a smirk, something kinder than that—that showed up when she spoke to her. I’m sure the two of you are there fooling around when he’s not.

  Iris didn’t say anything but didn’t drop her gaze either. It was true. The house was big, filled with moving boxes and draped furniture now. Most days, she was alone in it. Her mother had taken another job to stay ahead of the baby and the bills that would soon come with the house they were buying. I’m getting us away from this place and these people. Fast as you can say Jack Rabbit, we’ll be gone.

  Now here was Aubrey’s mother offering her something else—study lessons. And company.

  She wanted to be called CathyMarie and told Iris she would need to meet her at the library on Woodbine and Irving three days a week from eleven until three p.m. but that she should eat before she came and bring snacks to have while there. There was math and science to catch up on. There was Spanish and English—books to read, vocabulary to learn, evidence to cite, themes to analyze, essays to write.

  She spoke slowly, carefully—as though she thought Iris weren’t bright enough to take in what she was saying quickly. In the months that followed, Iris would realize she spoke this way to everyone, but that day, she could feel herself holding back from asking CathyMarie to pick up the pace of her talking. She didn’t. Aubrey stood grinning at his mother as though she were his only light.

  I don’t know why you’re doing this, Iris said. You’re not a teacher.

  But she’s smart, Aubrey said. Ma taught me to read when I was three, remember?

  Yeah—you’ve told me a thousand times.

  All the times tables by the time I was seven, Aubrey said, as though those words hadn’t come out of his mouth before either.

  You’re the one who’s pregnant, CathyMarie said—again in her too-slow, too-deliberate way. But you’re pregnant with Aubrey’s child. My grandchild. It won’t be about you anymore soon. And the last thing I want my grandchild’s mother to be is a high school dropout.

  It’s my baby, Iris said. I’m the one doing all the work. I’m getting fat for it and puking for it and not sleeping because of it.

 
It’s yours now, Aubrey’s mom said. But it won’t always be.

  She smiled. Her smile was Aubrey’s, open and slightly pleading, straight white teeth and Aubrey’s same full lips. I’m not letting you get stuck here. If I could, I’d quit the piece of a part-time job I have and work with you five days a week—this is that important to me. But we’re already breaking off pieces of this damn system with food stamps and Medicaid. I don’t want any more of the half-ass help they call themselves giving us. If I quit my job, I’d have to take more from the government. Shit won’t fly with me.

  Iris nearly laughed then. With her mouth closed and her hair pulled back, his mother was a white lady. But once she started speaking, she was blacker than Aubrey.

  Fuck workfare and this damn government, CathyMarie said more to herself than to Iris. I’m not gonna let you and Aubrey get caught up in their game. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, pressing her pale fingers against them. But damn, am I hella tired, Iris. Hella tired.

  Years later, when she was close to fifty herself and sitting alone in her apartment waiting for the phone to ring—for Melody to call to offer up a lunch date or a walk in Central Park, Iris would remember this day and understand that CathyMarie too was lonely and already dying. That maybe she’d figured out that this was what she had to give—some time with Iris and the not-born baby before she was gone. Leave behind in Iris’s learning some part of herself.

  The following day, they started with English, Iris sitting across from her at the heavy oak table in the near silent library. When CathyMarie lifted her eyes from the textbook and slowly explained adverbial phrases, Iris realized that Aubrey’s mother had been a young woman once who’d probably spent time in bed naked biting at her man’s ear. And months later, when she took Iris’s hand in hers and showed her how to use her fingers to help with the nine times tables—You should have learned this in grade school. You have to know this like you know your own damn name if you want to get through algebra—Iris felt a sudden crushing fear of failing. Something shifted in her brain then, something unlocked as if she were waking up. CathyMarie’s hand pressing her middle finger into her palm and insisting that science and math and reading were as important as her own name was the key to the next thing and the next and the next. Her parents had never preached it this way—it was a given. You will go to school. You will go to college. You will learn. You will get a job. The nuns had always ended with God’s promises for once she died. But she wasn’t dead. And she didn’t plan to be dead for a long time. These numbers and words and facts were about something bigger. About something beyond the baby leaving her belly. They were about living. Iris felt all of this sinking in. And now she saw herself leaving. And now she saw herself gone.