Red at the Bone

As the novel follows multiple generations of one family, parenthood and the impacts of parenting styles becomes a very present theme. Woodson presents contrasts between mother-daughter relationships, father-daughter relationships, and mother-son relationships. Each respective relationship demonstrates the effects parenting styles have on the child and how parenthood itself transforms the parent. The former is shown with Iris and Melody’s strained relationship, and the latter most present in Po’Boy’s ability to embrace the unpredictability of parenthood.

Tense mother-daughter relationships seems to run in Melody’s family—Sabe and Iris conflicted even before Iris’s pregnancy, as Iris expressed a desire of freedom form Sabe’s control. This need to assert control over her own life is what leads Iris to keep her baby; her passionate fight to have Melody proves to be less about her desire for motherhood and more about wanting something of her own. This also conveys how little Iris understands about her decision: “what I didn’t know was that on the other side of pregnancy there was Motherhood” (12). Motherhood, denoted by its capitalization, is a profoundly foreign concept to Iris. Rather than being the rational step that succeeds pregnancy, it’s an abstract role she cannot associate with herself. Sabe describes this as Iris not being “at all maternal” (55), but it actually emphasizes how unprepared she was for parenthood, subscribing to Woodson’s study of decisions being made by those under duress.

Iris’s approach to motherhood is unusual. She struggles immediately to establish a spiritual connection with Melody, so she resorts to parenting only physically, even nursing Melody until she is 3 to alleviate her guilt. The “sickening permanence” of motherhood is what defines Iris’s relationship to Melody (134). Iris understands the gravity of her decision after it is too late to undo it, but her desperation to flee allows a momentary escape. By leaving, though, Iris scars Melody forever. Melody recalls: “Even when I was a baby, my memory of her is being only halfway there” (11). Melody’s ability to discern her mother’s disinterest in motherhood widens the rift between them.

Woodson also posits that parents are as much a part of the child’s identity as the child is of theirs. This is demonstrated most clearly by Aubrey’s relationship to his mother: “Mothers were golden. One step outside the Mother Line and there was a fight” (70). Aubrey and Cathy Marie are shown to be extremely close, perhaps because they spent years trying to survive together. But their relationship serves a greater purpose in the novel by facilitating an examination in the difference between mother-daughter relationships and mother-son relationships. The former is portrayed as complicated, tainted by histories of traumas founded in unmet expectations; the latter is less intricate, based solely on love. Despite also becoming a teen parent, Aubrey is not shown facing the same rage and disappointment from his mother as Iris receives from her parents. This demonstrates the difference in gendered expectations, highlighting how women’s sexuality is policed more highly than men’s. Ultimately, Woodson undermines the gendered narrative conventions of parenthood with Iris and Aubrey; it is the mother who abandons the family to pursue her dreams while the father raises the child. 

Another important theme within the text is the role generational trauma and ancestral legacies plays in each character’s life. The effects of generational trauma are represented through Sabe’s bloodline, beginning with her grandmother, passing from her mother to her, and Sabe passing the trauma down to Iris and Melody.

Sabe’s trauma originated from the Tulsa Race Massacre; though she did not witness it, the horrific memory of the event is passed down as folklore. Sabe’s mother, who barely survived the burning down of Sabe’s grandmother’s beauty shop, was marked by a “heart-shaped scar on the side of her face” (80). This scar symbolizes the deep psychological imprint the event leaves on her descendants, and its heart shape implies that the trauma lives on through her bloodline. Iris’s inability to remember where the scar is represents how she’s separated herself from her ancestral ties through her disinterest in acknowledging her inherited identity. Iris actively rejects her mother’s history and ignores her own connection to it; she sees it as part of her mother’s identity, not her own.

Generational trauma is shown in the novel to manifest in many ways. With Sabe, the fear that everything can be taken away causes her to distrust banks and hide gold beneath her floorboards. For Iris, it appears much later in life when Aubrey dies. That day, she understands what it feels like to have something taken away from her because of hate, and the pain awakens the imbedded memory of Tulsa. This trauma is articulated by Sabe as “goneness” (85). Sabe describes this as something she has always carried with her, something she sees in the posture of her granddaughter.

Woodson, with this theme, is speculating on the types of inheritances that can exist. With the blocks of gold and Iris’s family’s generational wealth, readers are given examples of material inheritance. But the overwhelming undercurrent of the text is that the characters have inherited the experiences, the stories, the memory of their ancestors. In this way, the characters have inherited legacies—legacies of pain, legacies of resiliency, legacies from ancestors they cannot even name. Indeed, each generation is shown to inherit the trauma of the previous, but there is also inherited power. This power is represented by Melody, who, during her ceremony, feels a spiritual connection to lost family members and ancient ancestors.

Woodson, therefore, demonstrates that healing can be found from the very source of the trauma: the ancestral line. Melody is presented as the unifying entity in the family because her existence is the continuation of their legacy. This is conveyed through the many modes of storytelling that keep the legacies of the family alive: “if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story” (81). By living to hear and share the stories of her family, Melody honors her ancestral legacy.

Woodson’s portrait of family is severely complex, and she offers no definitive solutions. Rather, her painfully honest exploration of the spiritual stamp each generation undertakes communicates the burdens placed on individual members of the family, and, ultimately, how difficult it is to unlearn what might be genetically programmed into us.