Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

Bro, how you doing? You holding on? Man, you know how it goes. One day chicken. Next day bone. —Two old men talking

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.

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.

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.

Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life. Oh Lord. Some evenings I don’t know where the old pains end and the new ones begin. Feels like the older you get the more they run into one long, deep aching.

Listen. Those Tulsa white folks burned my grandmama’s beauty shop to the ground! They burned up the school my mama would have gone to and her daddy’s restaurant. They nearly burned my own mama, who carried a heart-shaped scar on the side of her face till the day they laid her in the ground. Imagine them trying to set a two-year-old child on fire. That’s all my mama was—just two years old and barely running when the fire rained down on her. Her own daddy snatching her up, but not before that piece of wood from her mama’s beauty parlor landed on her cheek and left its memory there all her life. Two years old. Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included. Every last one. That was 1921. History tries to call it a riot, but it was a massacre. Those white men brought in their warplanes and dropped bombs on my mama’s neighborhood. God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story. I must have heard it a hundred times by the time I was school age. I knew. And I made sure Iris knew. And I’m going to make sure Melody knows too, because if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story. If they had burned my mama up, I wouldn’t be here now. But I’ll tell you this much—if I live to be a hundred and ninety-nine years old, I will never go to that state, as God is my Witness, my Savior, my Rock. You will never see Miss Sabe’s foot in the state of Oklahoma.

All over this country people talk about a silver spoon, but truth be told, the spoon is gold. And solid. And stacked high and across. That’s how you have to do if you’re colored, black, Negro, brown . . . Whatever you’re calling yourself that isn’t white.

And when the priest calls your only child into his chambers, rests his hand too high up on her thigh, and tells her about the place in hell that is waiting for her, you return only once more—to damn him. To damn them all. And rise.

And you keep on rising. Cash some of the gold back into money. Put the money into a house someplace far away from everything your child and you and your husband have always known about Brooklyn. You pack and you rise. You sing the songs you remember from your own childhood. Mama may have. Papa may have . . . You remember your parents living, wrap the ancient photos of Lucille’s Hair Heaven and Papa Joe’s Supper Club pulled from the flames . . . and you rise. You rise. You rise.

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.

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 felt red at the bone—like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.

Something about memory. It takes you back to where you were and lets you just be there for a time.