55 pages • 1 hour read
Jacqueline WoodsonRed at the Bone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Melody’s grandfather, Po’Boy, cries as Melody comes down the stairs. He is overwhelmed with emotion, wondering how the child who used to rest against his chest as he read to her became so grown up. His body aches, and he feels his age more acutely than usual. Above everything else, he describes Melody as the “the best thing that ever happened to [his] life” (46). But he knows she has so much more living to do, that there’s so much she isn’t ready to understand about life yet.
Po’Boy misses many things from time gone by: his son, Benjamin, who died as an infant; Chicago, where Sabe, his wife, is from; and the people he and Sabe were long ago. He knows, though, that if he’d had all that he’d lost, he wouldn’t have Melody now.
He remembers the night he came home to find Sabe curled around a pillow in bed. She never went back to bed once up, so Po’Boy knew something terrible had happened. He’d known deep down what it was; he’d seen Iris with Aubrey and knew they’d been together sexually. He addresses Melody directly in his mind, praying that she never has to hear her daughter beg to keep her baby, never had to doubt the God she’d always believed in.
The day Melody was born, Iris decided to name her after Sabe’s grandmother, who almost died in the Tulsa Massacre. Silently, Po’Boy and Sabe thanked God for the life they’d been “cursing only months before” (51).
Chapter 5 Summary
Iris, at college, opens a letter from her parents. Inside is money and a new picture of Melody. Since she went away to school, Iris feels that her family is haunting her; each week a new letter and picture arrives, a picture of a baby “morphing into a toddler, then a child” (54). Iris could never look at the photos long enough, each of them offering a new revelation. This week, Iris notices that Melody’s loose tooth is finally gone. She wonders if Melody finally let Aubrey yank it out. Then, she wonders if her maternal gene will appear within her later.
An African girl appears by Iris’s side and asks if the child in the picture is Iris’s sister, noticing that the child looks a lot like her. Iris only agrees. The girl introduces herself as Jamison—Jam—and that they have a class together. Iris asks for a cigarette, and when Jam leans in to light Iris, Iris takes in her earthy, familiar smell. Smoking, Iris fights the urge to run her hand across Jam’s soft-looking skin. Jam asks if Iris is the first person in her family to go to college, and Iris knows immediately that Jam is asking about class. The question makes her think of Aubrey, who wouldn’t have been the first in his family to go to college. She wonders how not going to college could be enough for him. Iris had applied only to schools far away. When acceptance letters began coming in, she chose the furthest one.
Jam asks more about Iris’s little sister, complimenting her name. Iris smiles and watches the smoke move around them.
Chapter 6 Summary
As Iris works a toothbrush through her baby hairs to frame her face, they tease each other. It’s 1984 and the teens discuss Orwell, how the world he imagined is so different from their own. That year, Aubrey loses his virginity to Iris. Right before, he tells her repeatedly that he loves her. Instead of answering, she just reaches into his pants. He is afraid at first, frozen by the idea of them being together. Iris has to shout at him to get him moving. Afterwards, Aubrey can’t help feeling that he lost something; like “something had been taken from him and he could never get it back” (68).
An hour afterwards, Aubrey brings Iris to his mother. He’s nervous—“[m]others were golden” (70) and the only person Aubrey has ever loved other than Iris is his mother. When he opens the door, though, his mother is staring blankly at the T.V. in the dark living room. After he calls out to her a few times, and she does not stir, Aubrey notices she is crying. His mother had a hard life, he’d known that just from hearing stories about her childhood in the system. Though he didn’t know what the system was, he knew it couldn’t be good by the way she spoke of it. When he would ask why the system haunted her, she’d reply that she didn’t want to pass that down to him. Iris interrupts Aubrey’s thoughts, whispering that his mother “looks like a white lady” (74). This annoys Aubrey, but he just works harder to catch his mother’s attention. When she turns her attention to them, she takes them in and says: “Fast nights make long days” (74). Iris smiles, but Aubrey protests.
Seeing Iris inside his small, dim house causes Aubrey to feel shame for the first time. He pulls Iris away, saying a quick goodbye to his mother. Before he can leave, his mother offers him a stamp to buy her a Diet Coke and get something for his “new friend” (77).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Chapter 4 offers some crucial insight into Po’Boy, particularly highlighting how his feelings have changed towards Melody over the past 16 years and the guilt he still carries from those early days. Woodson leans on time and age to portray Po’Boy’s sense of legacy in this chapter. Now, closer to the end of his life than the beginning, he can see clearly what truly matters to him, and he yearns for who he once was. The underlying message, then, is that time takes all things, but that’s what makes these small vignettes of these characters’ lives so powerful. Woodson offers readers tiny glimpses into moments of her characters’ lives, and these moments embody a greater sense of who they are and where they come from.
For Po’Boy, he centers his identity as a grandfather, father, and husband. Most importantly, he reveals his greatest source of shame: his initial wish for Melody not to be. This is where the theme of parenting comes into play again; Po’Boy’s love for Iris—and fear for what a teen pregnancy would mean for their lives—blinds him from the possibility of loving her child. This theme also reveals a level of possession parents feel over their children. As Po’Boy looks at a growing Melody, he suggests that the agony he felt over Iris’s pregnancy was actually agony in realizing that Iris was no longer his little girl. Woodson further characterizes Po’Boy through his faith by demonstrating a moment when it was profoundly called into question. The irony is that of the two moments of great grief in Po’Boy’s life, the death of Ben and the pregnancy of Iris, it is the latter that makes him question his God. Finally, the chapter also focuses on the importance of legacy and inheritance through Melody’s naming; the family’s connection to the Tulsa Massacre is the source of their generational trauma, but Melody’s birth works to heal this through the resilience and survival she represents.
In Chapter 5, Woodson builds upon the theme of parenthood by contrasting Iris’s relationship to parenting with that of Po’Boy’s. While Iris is away at college, the physical distance between her and Melody exacerbates their emotional distance. Iris alludes to this as both a freedom and a prison. Though her actions depict wanting to escape her identity as a mother, by avoiding visiting home and actively hiding Melody’s existence, Iris is somewhat obsessed with Melody. Her need to see a new picture of her, to know how she lost her tooth, reveal that though Iris’s maternal instinct might be dormant, she does have an instinct to love her child.
Furthermore, Woodson employs various body parts, particularly teeth, to represent the theme of legacy. In this case, Melody’s tooth represents her connection to her mother. The tooth had been loose for weeks, but Melody wouldn’t let anyone pull it out. Then, suddenly, it’s gone, and Iris must wonder if it fell out on its own or if Aubrey ripped it out at Melody’s request. Teeth have historically been represented in literature as a sign of wisdom, of growing older. In missing it, Iris is depicted as missing Melody’s childhood, one clear source of their tense relationship in the years to come.
The chapter also emphasizes the importance of desire. Previously, the thematic significance had been represented through Melody’s inception, her very existence a representation of uncontrollable, teenage desire. But through Iris’s attraction to Jam, the novel conveys the multiple visages of desire, alluding to the source of Iris’s romantic disinterest in Aubrey.
The last significant consideration of the chapter is its brief touching on the importance of class. When Jam asks if Iris is a first-generation college student, Iris is aware that this question is entirely about class: “where and what and who do you come from” (60). Iris’s own class consciousness is highlighted by how she acknowledges the importance of this question and in her thoughts drifting to Aubrey. By thinking of Aubrey’s disinterest in college, Iris reveals that she associates any class below her own with Aubrey and his class identity with his unwillingness to go to college. This is inherently eliciting, and it ignores the fact that Aubrey’s mother, Cathy Marie, holds an advanced graduate degree but still struggles financially because of various systems in place as well as her own mental illnesses.
Woodson dives more deeply into Cathy Marie and her influence of Aubrey’s character in Chapter 6. First, the chapter reveals the uneven power dynamics in Aubrey and Iris’s relationship. Aside from the class difference, Iris has power over Aubrey through her sexual experience and her vagueness about her feelings for him. As he becomes more emotionally vulnerable, she escalates their physical relationship in response. He craves closeness, and she craves physical intimacy to avoid emotional intimacy. This uneven dynamic is further represented in Aubrey’s emotional turmoil immediately following their first intimate interaction. Woodson reverses societal gendered relationships to virginity; it is Iris who holds the power, it is Iris who takes, and it is Aubrey left feeling “like he had lost something” (68). Although the precious nature of virginity is just a societal concept, it is one that has often been employed to police the sexuality of women. Here, Woodson demonstrates that the intimacy involved in sex can lead either participant, no matter the gender identity, to feel emotionally exposed, particularly when their partner clearly does not feel the same.
Desire is a driving emotion throughout the narrative, but Woodson responds to the presence of unmitigated desire with examples of its lasting consequences. Aubrey’s sensations of doom reveal that he was not yet emotionally ready for the demands of a sexual relationship, resulting in a lifetime of insecurity, especially in his relationship with Iris. This insecurity is exacerbated by the teens’ class division being starkly highlighted as Iris sees Aubrey’s house for the first time. He feels a newfound shame, suggesting that Aubrey never considered how their differences in class would affect their relationship. Furthermore, it foreshadows the future of their relationship; Iris asserting her class superiority in snide comments and judgmental looks, while Aubrey scrambles to separate himself from his beginnings to feel less like an outsider in Iris’s world.
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