Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

  Two hours into it all, Melody said her feet hurt. Of course both Aubrey and Po’Boy told her it was okay to take off her shoes. Then it seemed every teenager on that floor was doing some cha-cha dance barefoot. They were done with the cakewalk and the Lindy and the waltz they’d been made to do. They’d gone from being proper to just . . . just dancing how they dance nowadays.

  But before they started all that, those children were so beautiful on the floor.

  Look at how the sun hits it now. All that gold on the yellowing pine and me here at the window—an old lady remembering.

  Ike he foun’ a cheer an’ asked huh: “Won’t you set down?” wif a smile.

  An’ she answe’d up a-bowin’, “Oh, I reckon ’taint wuth while.”

  Dat was jes’ fu’ style, I reckon, ’cause she sot down jes’ de same . . .

  Oh, how the grown folks clapped when I finished my oration. My mama and daddy sitting right up front. So proud. So proud. Tickles me to look back and see Mama there, her beautiful hands clasped below her chin. Such a joy in her eyes. And beneath that joy, such a sadness. I remember looking up from my curtsy to see those near tears in her eyes. And then her quick shaking her head as though to say, I’m okay. As if to say, Don’t make a fuss about this or I’ll tan your behind.

  Lord, I’m tired.

  So many people I’m sitting here missing today. Lord, tell me what You left me here for. I feel like I’ve been alive so long, so long. Time for You to take me too.

  I spend my days looking for signs. Today it’s the light dancing across the floor. It’s the squirrel with a piece of bread in his mouth scuttling up a tree. It’s the cardinal on the windowsill. It’s the bright blue car being driven by a blue-black man. It’s Melody coming in from school saying, Grandma, you’ve been sitting all day like that? Girl, let me at least take you out for an ice-cream cone. And it’s us on a park bench in the early evening. Sitting and licking. Sitting and licking.

  From his place in Heaven, Po’Boy tells me to hold on. To just keep going a little while longer. Until Melody and Iris can figure each other out.

  I’m old, but I’m trying. Hoping when I get to the gates, God will look down at His book and say, You did good, Sabe. Come on home now. Come on home.

  19

  I remember pushing through into the light. Into Iris’s fear. Into the warmth of my grandmother’s gaze. I remember hands on me. So many. And something warm being wrapped tight around me. I remember the pressure of something being cut from me, something from my face being lifted away, grease getting rubbed into my eyes.

  A bit of the caul, my grandmother would tell me years and years later. Over your forehead and left eye. I swear that nurse snatched it off and kept it.

  And I remember when they finally placed me at her breast, how I latched on so tight and hard, there was fear in her eyes. How absolutely hungry I was once. For her. For her. For her.

  20

  After Jamison left, I really did think I was going to die standing. No one had taught me this—how to get out of bed and keep moving. And for the few days afterward, each time I tried to, I stumbled, dizziness coming for me like a wave. The smell of her still so much a part of me that it hurt to inhale. No one had taught me how to eat. How to swallow. So I lay there—day moving into night into day, while in the halls, I could hear students doing what they needed to do. I lay there listening to laughter. To people calling each other by name. I lay there and heard showers being taken. Heard flip-flops moving through the hallways. Heard, Yo, what’s up with you? And, Hey, Byron, you take that test yet? Hit a brother up with some answers, man. Heard, Ooooh, I heard something about you last night, girl! Heard, What? What’d you hear? Who’s lying on me now? Heard, We need to start a chapter of DST here. How they gonna not have any black Greeks. Heard, Check it, followed by ciphers late into the night.

  Slowly, Jamison’s scent became my own funk. When I finally climbed out of bed, it wasn’t so much to live. It was to wash and eat, to call home and hear a voice. To hear someone on the other end of that line who loved me.

  Hey, Mom, it’s Iris.

  Hey, baby. How’re you doing? Me and Po’Boy were just talking about you. Then the phone rings and here you are.

  Can I speak to Melody, Mom?

  When I saw Jam a few days later, she was lying outside on the green, her locks spread out around her head. There was a girl I didn’t know sitting cross-legged beside her. The two of them were laughing, the girl’s hand moving in small circles over Jam’s belly. I stood there, watching them, until Jam lifted her head, looked over at me, and smiled.

  Hey, Jam.

  Hey, yourself. It’s been a minute.

  Yeah.

  We good?

  Yeah, I said. We’re good.

  If Aubrey had ever asked me, I would have told him there were so many before him. The first was a boy from my childhood when I was thirteen. He was pale as dust, with a perfect Afro and lashes that went on forever. I thought we were in love and we did it the first time up in his bedroom while his mother watched television one floor below. In our silence, as I gripped the pillow to keep from crying out in pain, I heard from below, The survey says . . . ! Again and again. Followed by applause. But me and the boy weren’t dating. We had never called what we were doing anything. So a week later, when I saw him walking with his arm around a pretty Puerto Rican girl, I crept upstairs to my room, faked the flu, and stayed in bed for days and days. Other boys followed and I learned quickly not to love them, to love the feeling of them inside me, the taste of their mouths, the way they held me. But nothing more.

  That way, we were good. That way, I was good.

  Cool. I bailed on that class, Jam said. That’s why you haven’t seen me. It was bullshit. But we’ll see each other around.

  She lay back down and went back to talking quietly with the girl. It was near the end of the school year. I had bought Aubrey a gray Oberlin T-shirt and a tiny one for Melody that said Future Yeowoman. Both were folded in the bag forgotten in my hand until I dropped it and heard the soft thud of it hitting the ground.

  21

  In the early morning, Melody and Iris sit in the big house alone, Iris in her mother’s rocking chair, Melody at her feet on the floor. At the end of it all, Sabe talked about fire and gold. Fire and gold.

  There had been a wake. A funeral. Prayers at the grave. Dirt sprinkled over Sabe’s coffin. Ashes to ashes and we’ll see you in the by-and-by as they lowered her down to join Aubrey and Po’Boy.

  Then a repast.

  The packing up of clothes and washcloths and winter coats. Sabe’s shoes placed neatly in boxes for Goodwill. Her one wig that she wore to Easter service. Her kid leather gloves in black and blue and dark green. Pearl and gold chains to Melody. Her wedding band now on Iris’s finger. Diamond bracelet they had both watched Po’Boy latch around her wrist the few times they went to the theater. Always for August Wilson plays. Once, a long time ago, to see a church production of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Sabe returning in tears. That woman can really tell our story, she said. Then poured a small shot of brandy, threw her head back to drink it, and slowly climbed the stairs to bed.

  It was early August now.

  You ready? Iris asks.

  Yeah, Melody says. I was born ready.

  There had been a lifetime, a family, a new baby, a home. There had been so many after Jamison, after the first boy, after Aubrey. Oh Aubrey, Iris thinks now. Oh Aubrey. I am so sorry.

  There had been the one night, only weeks after she and Aubrey first slept together, when she rounded the corner of Knickerbocker and saw him pressed against a girl she didn’t know. His hands inside the girl’s T-shirt, cupping her breasts in the darkness. When he cried, she forgave him. That was a long, long time ago. Oh Aubrey. I am so damn sorry, she thinks again. If only we had known.

  Fire and gold and Au
brey to ash. The signs they’d posted for weeks and weeks. Have you seen this man? So many signs. So many people blown into history. But maybe he had survived. Maybe when the first plane hit . . . Oh Aubrey.

  That morning, when Iris saw the smoke, she turned on the radio and listened. Then screamed and screamed as she ran—sixty blocks from her apartment on the Upper West Side, down Broadway, her throat burning, her heart feeling like it would stop. But it didn’t stop. She ran until she couldn’t see. Ran until smoke and dust and ash covered her. Until the police stopped her from getting any closer—and then she collapsed—at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Broadway, she collapsed. And all around her people were screaming and running and collapsing. Some deep and buried DNA ballooned into a memory of her mother’s stories of Tulsa. She had felt this. And Sabe felt it. And she knew that as her child watched on the television in her classroom, she too felt the embers of Tulsa burning.

  The rain is coming down harder, rivering along the sidewalk and dripping from the For Sale sign attached to a pole by the stairs. Save for the rocking chair and the boxes marked Fragile that Iris will be taking back to her apartment uptown, the house is nearly empty. Melody’s suitcases, bedding, and poster of Prince are already in the car. The drive to Oberlin is just under eight hours.

  Now Iris looks toward the window and remembers her mother getting out of a cab with a bag that seemed to be weighted down with bricks. Remembers her own pregnant fifteen-year-old self watching from her bedroom window, remembers the late-in-the-night hammering, her mother calling out to Po’Boy to make sure everything’s sealed real good.

  Then let’s do this, Iris says now. She feels hollow. Untethered. She had thought freedom would feel different than this.

  She walks over to the stairs, presses the crowbar beneath the bottom footbed, and waits for her daughter to swing the hammer. When she looks over at Melody, she sees for the first in a long time herself in the girl. In the way she lifts her head. In the way she is now leaning toward her, like a runner at the starting line. Ready.

  Even if there’s nothing there, Iris says, you know we’ll be okay, right?

  I’ve always been okay, Iris. Melody lifts the hammer. Lets the blows rain down. She doesn’t have a whole lot of time for this. Malcolm is heading off to Stanford and there’s a goodbye party for him in the city that evening. Outside, her friends are waiting. She lifts the hammer and again lets it fall.

  And then it’s there, amid the splintering pine and plaster dust. There beneath the sadness in her mother’s eyes. There beneath the sound of her friends blowing the car horn and calling her name. In the empty house with everyone but the two of them gone now, there it is. Gleaming.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to:

  The Living:

  Juliet & Toshi & Jana & Melanie & Sarah & Jynne & Claire & Deb & Dean & Donald & Nancy & Kathleen & Linda & Jane & The Family Dinner Crew & Odella & Hope & Roman & Cass & Tayari & Janice & Marley & Gayle & Maria & Kwame & Jason & Chris.

  The Ancestors:

  Georgiana & Mary Ann & Robert & Kay & Odell & Alvin & Anne & Gunnar & Robin & David & Veronica & Hope & Grace.

  The Future:

  All the young people who are all the past & all the promise & all the gleaming.

  Let the circle be unbroken.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jacqueline Woodson is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books, including the 2016 New York Times–bestselling National Book Award finalist for adult fiction, Another Brooklyn. Among her many accolades, Woodson is a four-time National Book Award finalist, a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a two-time NAACP Image Award Winner, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her New York Times–bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, received the National Book Award in 2014. Woodson is also the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and the recipient of the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. In 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in New York.

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