Red at the Bone: In conversation With Jacqueline Woodson
Award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson talked about her new novel, Red at the Bone, in conversation with her long-time friend Tayari Jones as part of Woodson’s book tour for her most recent New York Times bestseller.
The event, held in the intimate environment of Scadshow’s stage II, focused on Woodson’s inspiration for writing Red at the Bone, her latest adult fiction novel.
The novel tells the story of two families separated by status but united by race, and how an unplanned pregnancy changes them. Less of an interview, the conversation between the authors revolved around the themes of class and black wealth, which are the center focus of Red at the Bone.
The idea for the book came to Woodson when thinking about the Tulsa Race Massacre, a racial violence incident that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 in the upscale black neighborhood of Greenwood. Looking at this and other instances of black wealth being destroyed got Woodson thinking about generational wealth vs. income, which inspired the themes in Red at the Bone.
Woodson read two excerpts; one in the voice of the unexpected child, at the beginning of the book; and another in the voice of her father, the day he found out he was to be a dad.
Woodson said she wanted to challenge the conventions and stereotypes of the teenage black mother that has a baby and sees her life stall and the black father who is not present. In Red at the Bone she reverses those roles sending the mother to Oberlin college and leaving the father to care for the child.
The title Red at the Bone refers to the red meat at the tip of a bone of cooked chicken. The author associates it to being exposed and raw, but also unfinished. “When you talk about being red at the bone […] is all of us being the state of developing, of coming to doneness. For everyone in this book, they’re somewhere in the middle of being complete,” said Woodson.
Keeping with the themes of class and black wealth, the authors talked about the stratification that occurs in black institutions. Atlanta-native Jones pointed out that these institutions, namely Spellman, Morehouse and Oberlin colleges, were predominant in black lives but not a subject one often finds in literature.
“That’s partly the reason that they’re there, because they don’t figure in literature, and they’re so important in [black] community” Woodson said. In order to portray the stratified families in the book, Woodson needed to mention those organizations, which she called “complicated but necessary.”
Woodson, best known for her young adult literature, won the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature with her book Brown Girl Dreaming. After Another Brooklyn, Red at the Bone is only her second adult fiction book. When asked what the difference between writing for young readers or adults, the author compares switching between voices as changing the channels in her brain. “When I’m writing for young people, is from a young adult perspective […] most books my publisher targets at adults, they’re told from an adult perspective looking back.”
Yet Woodson doesn’t think books are meant to be separated in categories. “All books are for all people. Whoever comes to them and gets something from them, that is whose hands they belong in,” she said. She echoed this notion in a recent TED Talk titled “What reading slowly taught me about writing.” Woodson recognized that stories wanted to be savored, and that the reader should recognize the author’s narrative as an invitation to join the world they painstakingly created and to meet the characters that inhabited it.
“I’m impressed […] with the consistent quality of your work,” Jones said of Woodson. Including picture books, Young Adult novels and literary fiction, Woodson has published around 30 books. When Jones mentioned that Red at the Bone might be Woodson’s best work yet, the four-time Newbery Honor winner laughed bashfully.
