Red at the Bone

Iris is Melody’s mother. She is described as beautiful, with high cheekbones and a rigid posture that communicates the pride she carries herself with. She is born to a middle-class family that places plans of a fancy education and an even fancier career on her shoulders. When she becomes pregnant at 15, though, every plan is forever altered.

Iris is driven by her desire from an early age; she enjoys the pleasure sex brings her but actively avoids all forms of emotional intimacy. Though she adores and desires Aubrey, she never loves him in the all-consuming manner that he loves her. This fear of emotional connection ultimately damages her relationship to Melody; despite loving Melody and finding herself profoundly drawn to her child, she is incapable of showing it.

Iris’s defining quality is her ambition. She absorbs information ravenously, setting her sights on receiving a college education and making something more of her life. After she leaves for college, the newfound sense of freedom she finds reveals how little interest she has in domestic life. This realization drives a wedge further between her and Aubrey; she can’t imagine how doing manual labor with no education can be fulfilling for him. Iris’s elitism is engrained in her, and she doesn’t seem aware of it, evinced by her disgust at Aubrey only ever eating margarine instead of butter.

Woodson does offer some facets of a coming-of-age tale through Iris, though it does indeed happen in her own time. Having a child so young empowers Iris to see what she wants more clearly, and unfortunately, she realizes what she does not want too late. However, Iris is not a vilified portrait of a flighty mother; she is a young woman who misunderstood the ramifications of her decision and who honors and protects herself by taking back her life. But Iris’s relationship to motherhood is complex and forever adapting. Though Woodson shows readers her fear and resentment early on, the opening chapters show that Iris’s love for Melody does exist. The mother and daughter simply, tragically, have too much dark history between them and continue to misunderstand each other.

Furthermore, through allowing Iris to discover her queer identity, Woodson showcases the myriad experiences of sexual identity and desire, as well as the multitude images a mother can take on. Ultimately, Iris’s narrative is not meant to punitive, but demonstrative. Through her tale of suffering and joy and resiliency, Woodson highlights the unforeseen effects each choice can have, and how class, education, ambition, and parenting leave permanent psychological imprints. 

Aubrey is Melody’s father. He met Iris in high school, and the two quickly fall for one another, conceiving Melody only a few months into their relationship when Aubrey is 16. He grows up in near poverty, his highly educated mother working part-time jobs and living off of food stamps. He detects that his mother has had a hard life, having grown up in the system and sometimes turning to sex work to make ends meet.

He has deep brown skin, often causing sideways glances from passersby when he would walk with his White-passing mother. As a child, he would often ask about the father he never knew and reach out to strange men, wondering if they could be his father. Finally, his mother reveals that Aubrey’s father was a talented musician she had loved. Unfortunately, he was addicted to heroin and overdosed when Aubrey was a baby.

Aubrey grows up full of self-doubt and, when he meets Iris and begins to understand the severity of his economic disadvantage, shame. The austere contrast between Iris’s comfortable middle-class world and Aubrey’s constant existence in survival mode creates a dialogue on the class disparities at work in America. Although education is often tied to high social and economic status, Aubrey’s mother is proof that the circular system of poverty can be inescapable whether higher education is accessible or not. Furthermore, Aubrey’s disinterest in college contributes to Woodson’s study of the intersections of class and education. Iris’s ambition is defined by typical pathways of success because they worked for her parents, but Aubrey, having seen that his mother’s degrees did not save her, seeks a life of meaning by caring for his daughter. Aubrey takes on a position as a mail clerk in New York, where he works until he dies on September 11, 2001, during the attack on the Twin Towers. 

Aubrey’s identity is wholly wrapped up in his relationship to others. His strong connection to his mother informs his character, and he derives his sense of self through his new family after her death: “this was who he was supposed to be […] Melody’s father. Iris’s friend” (31). He and Iris struggle to maintain their connection because she cannot relate to his acceptance that being a good father and co-parent is enough to want out of life.

Aubrey’s relationship to parenting is represented by his hands: “His big open hands. Where were they supposed to go when all they wanted was to reach out for this child, hug her, hide her from the world?” (22). Hands are often associated with manual work; class can be marked simply by how soft or callous an individual’s hands may be. With Aubrey, Woodson reclaims the symbolism of hands, positioning them as tools for holding—for protecting. The novel posits holding as having many levels of significance, but with Aubrey, it relates to his life’s purpose: being Melody’s father. With Aubrey, Woodson adopts the archetype of the caregiver—the selfless to a fault protector—and subverts expectations of the typical teen pregnancy story arc by making the father the tragic hero of the tale.

Sabe, Iris’s mother and Melody’s grandmother, was born and raised in Chicago. Her mother’s family, though, was originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Sabe’s grandmother’s shop was burned down during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre while Sabe’s toddler mother was inside. Luckily, the family was able to rescue the child, but, having lost everything and facing devasting fury, they leave Tulsa behind forever.

Sabe’s connection to this event is something she carries with her all her life, referring to it as “the goneness” (85), the embedded memory of having everything taken from you. This inherited memory, her family’s generational trauma, is shown to also give Sabe a deep knowing. Po’Boy describes seeing this in her the moment he meets her: “She had a spark in her eyes—a spark of something solid and deep” (96). This suggests that Sabe’s recognition of her cultural ties, which ground her in who she is and what she wants, characterizes her physically.

Sabe has a clear idea of the lifestyle she desires. Class status is extremely important to her, having come from Black Wall Street and seeing how all of her family’s hard work stolen from them without repercussion. She believes that receiving an education and buying a home are material marks of her ability to overcome adversity.

This is also the root of her attachment to tradition; Sabe interprets that her position as a wealthy, respected Black woman is contingent upon her family’s ability to subscribe to the conventions of their class. So, when Iris becomes pregnant at only 15, Sabe sees it as the ruin of all of her hard work, knowing the world will be especially hard for a Black teen mother.