This difference is also highlighted by their relationship to food. When Iris asks him to dance, he joke about how she is following a rulebook, and her subsequent annoyed reaction communicates years of microaggressions about their class difference being shared between them. The affair screams elegance and wealth, but it also highlights how out of place Aubrey feels in this world. In hosting it, her family reasserts her class status, further marked by the abundance of luxurious food and the hired orchestra. Ultimately, Red at the Bone, celebrates love, legacy, and the multitudes of Black identity.As the novel opens, the importance of class to the central characters is marked by Melody’s ceremony. Instead, she puts forth characters whose very existences are proclamations, their lives underscoring, responding, and healing the history that precedes them. Woodson is uncompromising in her portrait of generational trauma, class, and sexuality, offering no solution or absolution for her morally ambiguous characters. In the end, only Iris and Melody remain, and they must face the future of their family together. Melody suffers severe psychological trauma from the absence of her mother, furthered by the sudden death of her father months after her 16th birthday, and struggles with achieving a healthy relationship to Iris. Aubrey continues to love Iris over the years, but she grows distant and finds love in Ohio. Her decision to leave permanently scars both Aubrey and Melody. After healing from childbirth, Iris moves to Ohio for college, leaving Aubrey and Melody behind and finding freedom in being away from home. While Aubrey enjoys his role as a father, Iris finds the pressure unrelenting. Iris struggles to maintain a connection to her child. Eventually, they both learn they could never control their daughter. Her and Po’Boy worked extremely hard and sacrificed so much that they initially perceive Iris’s pregnancy as the undoing of their accomplishments.
Sabe, who is born to a family with a direct connection to the Tulsa Massacre, carries the dark heirlooms of trauma into her habits and relationship to her daughter. Melody is the product of teenage pregnancy, her inception binding Iris and Aubrey together despite their stark difference in class. The house is filled with friends and family, and the narrative jumps between Melody, her parents Iris and Aubrey, and her grandparents Sabe and Po’Boy as they offer poetic vignettes from their lives, each contributing to the realization of this moment. It is Melody’s 16th birthday party, and she is participating in her ceremony-a family tradition developed from years of cotillions.
The novel opens 80 years to the day of the Tulsa Massacre, a violent two-day incident, where White people attack Black people, inside the Brooklyn Brownstone home of Melody’s grandparents.
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