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

Would the tragic comedy of memory ever stop replaying?

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.

First gen. You? First what? You the first in your tribe to go to college? Iris shook her head. It was a question about class. She knew that now. It was the what-are-you question. The where and what and who do you come from.

We’ve scrimped and saved and spent to get what should have been ours outright and always. What should’ve been everything my own grandma paid for. Lucille’s

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.

This place feels like from a long time ago. It feels like it’s in the past tense.

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. Five years to the day now that Aubrey died. Him like a son to me by then.

This book, like our lives, doesn’t start at the beginning.