Red at the Bone

by Jacqueline Woodson

No one ever said it to me. That’s why I’m saying it to you. We can talk about this. By the time I was four months pregnant, what I didn’t know was that on the other side of pregnancy there was Motherhood.

Before she was his mama, she was a girl in Oakland, growing up in the system. For a long time, Aubrey hadn’t understood what the system was but knew, by the way his mother’s eyes darkened every time she spoke of it, that it wasn’t something he ever wanted to be a part of. Fuck around, she’d said, and your behind’s gonna end up in the system. Later on, he understood it had something to do with the ashy violent boys who came after him in school yards. Something to do with the sad-looking girls who walked through the halls holding their notebooks up over their chests. He knew the system was the white woman on the beach when he was seven years old who asked his mother why he wasn’t in school on a weekday and the grocery store dude who side-eyed him, then asked his mother if she had any other foster children.

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.

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.