When Shame Strikes: Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Red at the Bone is about a family that grows in directions it never intended to. It’s about a black family whose generations of upward mobility were supposed to quash the old trauma of the 1920s. That’s the thing about families: they can seem to be stable, static, and whole, but the truth is, they are as dynamic as the people in them, and as the history swirling around them.
I saw Woodson give a reading a few weeks back, in the midst of lockdown, via the Free Library of Philadelphia’s virtual series. She selected a chapter in the perspective of a character named Sabe. Sabe’s mother was two years old during the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. “Those white folks tried to kill every living brown body in all of Greenwood, my own mama included,” Sabe recounts. “God rest her soul, but if she was alive, she’d tell anyone listening the story. I must have heard it a hundred times by the time I was school age. I knew. And I made sure Iris knew. And I’m going to make sure Melody knows too, because if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story.”
Red at the Bone understands that families tend to remember themselves in this fashion. Every family has its stories, the ones that get told over and over. Like Sabe’s mother’s story, it might not even be a complete memory. But it’s a historical memory. Like those who were children when JFK or MLK was assassinated. Like those who were young on 9/11. These traumatic flashpoints become individual’s stories, but they are also family stories, and American stories. These stories become powerful: they are foundations of people’s political identities; they are justifications for war.
Woodson is interested in what happens when the flashpoint story -- the personal or collective trauma -- is not remembered by the official national narrative. That national story, of course, is often told incompletely, shaped into a narrative of revolution, transformation, and global supremacy. The story of American immigration, for instance, often leaves out some of the country’s most beleaguered migrants: its Southern African-Americans, who journeyed under duress to escape the Jim Crow South during much of the early 20th century.
What do you do with your history when it isn’t accepted as part of the official American mythology? As Woodson commented after her virtual reading, the Tulsa race massacre has not been taught in schools. When it rarely makes it into textbooks, it is described as a “riot.” (Thanks to HBO’s 2019 series Watchmen, Tulsa’s bloody history of racism has recently become more mainstream.) The truth is, when a riot becomes a massacre, everything changes. It’s important to keep up with these changes -- discern fact from myth. And as we learn more, we must return to our family mythologies and determine whether the stories hold up.
In my family, our mythology is rooted in the Great Depression. Since my forebears, Italians, arrived only a decade or two before, the Depression was really the first American flashpoint to which they attach our little story.
We all look for ways, I think, to be proud of our ancestors: to cast some light on them that makes them taller, broader, more dignified than their corpses in the ground would have us believe they were.
Sabe’s story of her mama in Tulsa resembles my grandmother’s stories from the Depression in one small way: they are both stories of triumph over adversity. Here’s how we made it. Here’s how they did it. We all look for ways, I think, to be proud of our ancestors: to cast some light on them that makes them taller, broader, more dignified than their corpses in the ground would have us believe they were. Maybe this pride is an antidote to the present’s shame and regret: all of its indignities.
Regarding the Depression, my grandmother told one particular story many times. In fact, I recorded her telling it one afternoon over tuna salad in Stratford, Connecticut, in 2012. For a long time after, listening and relistening to her voice in that recording -- sometimes you can hear the tuna in her mouth -- I tried to discern her tone. I’ve decided that what I’m hearing is pride -- but it’s a pride that can only be detected if you read irony in her neutrality -- a tonelessness that makes space for my incredulity, like the dead-pan of a stand-up comedian.
It’s a story about her father, Pasquale. He was a coal miner providing for his growing family in rural northeastern Pennsylvania in the time of the Depression. In addition to FDR's Democratic party, the labor unions were an American institution that recognized my great-grandfather as a man; they made him legible in the American landscape. Thus, he pledged his allegiance to them. And so one day, a day of strikes at the mines, my grandmother tells of her mother receiving a phone call: “Your husband is in jail.” Apparently, as tensions rose in the picket lines, Pasquale had raised his metal lunch box and hit a strikebreaker -- a “scab” -- over the head. He hit the scab, my grandmother explained. And he spent the night in jail.
The thing about a story is that it changes. A riot becomes a massacre. For me, this story changes all the time. You could say my great-grandfather’s story is about masculinity -- use of violent means to assert dominance -- or about class -- justified use of violence to protect one’s job. It almost sounds like the right to bear arms, if you put it in those American terms. Maybe it’s a story of revolution: of righteous protest.
What I didn’t understand, though, until I saw Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series at the MoMa last winter, is that in addition to being about gender and class, Pasquale’s story about the scab is likely a story about race, too. I should’ve known; how can an American story not be about race?
Scabs were people, too -- labor history is pocked with the false enemy of the scab, a cover story for the boss. What Lawrence depicts in his series is that scabs were often black people. They were often black migrants from the South.
The caption under number 50 in the series reads as follows: “Race riots were numerous. White workers were hostile toward the migrant who had been hired to break strikes.”
If we think of the story of Pasquale’s violent outburst as a moment of misdirected rage — of shame turned into fists and bludgeons — then we can draw a line from Jamestown 1676, to Tulsa 1921, to Carbondale, Pennsylvania, 1933. In Bacon’s Rebellion, in colonial Jamestown, whites and blacks banded together to confront the colonial administration. After that, fearing further revolts, Virginia elites codified what we might now call institutional anti-black racism. They eliminated manumission, made it legal to kill a person of African descent, and more. And along with disenfranchisement of black people, these laws empowered white indentured servants, making the pathway to a freedom fee -- the pathway to citizenship, you could say -- smoother, more of a guarantee. It was a placating measure, making lower-class whites more likely to collude with those in power. Less likely to turn their fists upward; more likely to punch down.
Flash forward to Tulsa 1921. Eighteen hours, eight hundred injured, possibly up to three hundred black people dead, their businesses and homes -- “Black Wall Street,” as the Greenwood district was known -- turned to ash.
According to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum: “In recent years there has been ongoing discussion about what to call the event that happened in 1921. Historically, it has been called the Tulsa Race Riot. Some say it was given that name at the time for insurance purposes. Designating it a riot prevented insurance companies from having to pay benefits to the people of Greenwood whose homes and businesses were destroyed.” Then, the website offers definitions of the terms “riot” and “massacre” and asks, “What do YOU think?”
The Race Riot Commission, which determined the historical factualness of the 1921 events, published their report in 2001, asserting, “These are not myths, not rumors, not speculations, not questioned. They are the historical record.” Even if I did have a record of the day Pasquale beat a scab at the picket line in Carbondale, I would need a lot more than just an archive to understand my family’s story. What do I think? I think I have to tell my family’s story with all of the facts. But I also have to be sure to choose the right tone. My grandmother tells that story with a grave sense of the absurdity of it: he went to jail! But I will tell it with a different gravity, and a much, much different context: that becoming white and middle-class didn’t just involve righteous protest. That becoming an insider to the American mythology required beating an outsider with a lunch pail. Different cops, a different day, and it could’ve been a massacre.
Sabe’s mother survived Tulsa 1921. Her descendants went to college, got good jobs, and bought homes. Indeed, this is an anomalous story for black folks in the twentieth century, and you might think that this makes Sabe righteously proud to tell of her family’s rise. But as Woodson’s chapters reveal other points of view, we see the way Sabe’s story about Tulsa is both truthful, and incomplete: a cover, a justification, a mask for her shame. Sabe’s version of her family is threatened when it faces the other, archetypal African-American narrative of the twentieth century: one of poverty and struggle.
On the other hand, triumphant upward mobility is a more common narrative and reality of being Italian-American in this same period — even for those we might consider undeserving of such a social climb. Malcolm Gladwell published an essay in the New Yorker in 2014 called “The Crooked Ladder,” comparing the upward mobility of Italian mobsters’ descendants, as compared to the cycles of poverty and incarceration among black gang members. Gladwell compares two histories of crime, one of Italians in the 1960s and one of African Americans in the 2000s. What the comparison reveals, of course, is not a change in the severity of their crimes but rather of law enforcement’s approach. “In a previous generation,” he points out, “this dispute would not have ended up in the legal system.” The deeper story, of course, is the story of institutional anti-black racism. My ancestors may not have been the cops in 1933 when Pasquale hit the scab -- they would be one generation later -- but those white cops certainly seemed to think that one night in jail was sufficient punishment for Pasquale’s violent assault. Would that have been so if he were black?
Woodson’s novel is about, in a way, how Sabe’s mother’s trauma lives on in her family: morphs, many times over, until it finds itself half a century old and flowing through Sabe’s fists. Does trauma dignify us? We’d like to believe it does. But that often means we are setting ourselves up to tell any version of the story that makes trauma into triumph. Anyone can do that. I don’t think Sabe or my grandmother are lying. I just think they tell the story that they need in order to feel strong. But I want to pass on a story that makes me feel honest, too. Red at the Bone reminds me that when I, a white person, stand before Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series, it is my job to find my ancestors in that series, see them up in arms, and know where that led.
Sources:
Bacon’s Rebellion: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p274.html
Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/
Jacob Lawrence at MoMA: https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/
Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/crooked-ladder
