Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel, ‘Red at the Bone,’ is an epic in miniature

The beauty of this work is in its velvety shifts from the past to the present. Woodson, an acclaimed author of young adult literature, shows that to understand the soul of a woman, we must understand the heart of the girl she once was. Melody is deeply conflicted about her mother, who left her with […]

The beauty of this work is in its velvety shifts from the past to the present. Woodson, an acclaimed author of young adult literature, shows that to understand the soul of a woman, we must understand the heart of the girl she once was. Melody is deeply conflicted about her mother, who left her with her father and maternal grandparents.

Tayari Jones reviews the Another Brooklyn author’s latest work.

‘Red at the Bone’ (Riverhead), by Jacqueline Woodson, is as moody, spare, and intense as a Picasso line drawing. In just under 200 pages, the National Book Award winner (for her 2014 memoir-in-verse, ‘Brown Girl Dreaming’) confronts the indelible marks of youthful indiscretions and the way we explain our adolescence to our adult self in lovely, granular mise-en-scènes. Sometimes these memories act as lessons, other times as hindrances, providing a road map to the core of who we are. In this case, when teenagers Aubrey, son of a single mom, and Iris, from a well-to-do family, come together with the passion and carelessness of young love-a relationship that produces a daughter, Melody-both families swallow their disappointment and resolve to make do. As the novel’s epigraph says, “One day chicken. Next day bone.”

The novel opens in 2001 as Melody makes her entry into polite society. The bespoke white gown she wears was intended for her mother’s coming-out party 16 years prior, but it wouldn’t zip over her pregnant body. There is no such thing as a do-over, but this day is probably as close as anyone can get. Twirling in crinoline and lace while an orchestra plays Prince, Melody muses, “As we dance…I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter-I am a narrative…Remembered.”

The beauty of this work is in its velvety shifts from the past to the present. Woodson, an acclaimed author of young adult literature, shows that to understand the soul of a woman, we must understand the heart of the girl she once was. Melody is deeply conflicted about her mother, who left her with her father and maternal grandparents, Sabe and Po’Boy Simmons, so she could study at Oberlin and not be thwarted by a baby’s demands. It’s among the novel’s many ironies that Sabe helps raise the granddaughter whose existence initially caused her such shame.

This poignant tale of choices and their aftermath, history and its legacy, will resonate with mothers and daughters. There is pain on these pages, but hope glimmers between the lines. If trauma is a cursed heirloom handed down through the decades, maybe love is the cure passed upward from the young to the old, a bright promise that gleams like a hidden bar of gold.

 

Source: The Oprah Magazine