Learning to Listen #13 - Red at the Bone

 This week I read "Red at the bone" by Jacqueline Woodson. This is another fictional book by a black female author as I try to get a sense of Black history and culture through modern art (literature). For many years I was a "classics snob", in that I refused to read anything written after about 1910. I felt the modern market was flooded with so many books I couldn't possibly wade through the coal to find the diamonds. So I stuck with tried and true classics.

But over the past 10 years I have come to value modern literature as a mirror held up to ourselves, to our culture and life and politics and ways of living and thinking. The relationship between artist and audience is a thing of beauty - the artist's responsibility of reflecting truth or leading to virtue something to hold sacred.

"Red at the bone" was published last year, in 2019, making it exactly that. Amid the current existence of social tension Jacqueline Woodson pens a story of social classes, identity, gentrification, status, race, history, desire and ambition. It is a complicated tale of generations tugged and pulled by forces in the world beyond their control while they swim with their own strength in the turbulent waters.

The nuances in this book are marvelous - they indeed open a window into a world beyond my neat and tidy white suburban upbringing, and yet many times I realize I'm not actually on the other side of the window at all; I'm standing beside the characters having the same conversations with my own family. We are different, we are the same. Once again I am reminded that for all the historical insistence of the differences between race, the human race is actually 99.9% genetically identical.

And then there are passages, paragraphs, pages, that puzzle me. I cannot unlock the language, the references, the culture. I let them sit with me, acknowledging they are not a part of who I am. Instead they are what I have been searching for: a dinner dish, a twist of the hair, a bedtime story, a childhood superstition - things so intricately woven into the author's being that they emerge effortlessly in the story. Here, here, here are the truths and here does understanding stretch to the next level.

From the author's words (in her book):

"And you keep on rising. Cash some of the gold back into money. Put the money into a house someplace far away from everything your child and you and your husband have always known about Brooklyn. You pack and you rise. You sing the songs you remember from your own childhood. 'Mama may have. Papa may have...' You remember your parents living, wrap the ancient photos of 'Lucille's Hair Heaven' and 'Papa Joe's Supper Club' pulled from the flames...and you rise. You rise. You rise."

"Some of those white men were part-time friends of people. Separate as Tulsa was, people found ways to live their lives with each other in it. Until it got to be too much and black folks got to have more than white folks felt was right."