55 pages • 1 hour read
Jacqueline WoodsonRed at the Bone
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Aubrey knew his mother was sick the first time she fell. They had been walking along the beaches together for years. She’d never once fallen before. She hit her face hard against the wooden planks but jumped up to quickly assure him she was fine. It was only the beginning of spring then, Aubrey thought later, wondering if they should have walked on the sand to make the fall softer—or to prevent it altogether. Cathy Marie is adamant that she is fine, then asks Aubrey to just slow down a bit and take her to the water.
Chapter 14 Summary
Melody remembers Iris packing for Oberlin, even though she was only 3 at the time. She is in her dad’s arms, feeling the pounding of his heart against her. Every now and then, Iris kisses them both on their cheeks. Melody remembers this as the happiest she’d ever seen her mother. In that moment, Melody doesn’t understand that she isn’t going with Iris and keeps asking where they’re all going. Now, in the present, the memory is confused. Melody only sees her mother’s back as she drags a suitcase; she feels the tears on her cheek, her father holding onto her.
Chapter 15 Summary
Aubrey is 15 the first time he meets Slip Rock, a drug dealer. He saw him driving in his Mercedes, and the memory stands out because it was the first time he’d seen a car like that. Ten years later, Aubrey holds Melody’s hand as he hears about Slip Rock’s murder. Listening to the gory details, Aubrey tightens his grip on Melody, recalling how badly he wanted to get in the game with Slip Rock the first time he’d met him. His music had been blasting loud enough to bring kids in from all over the block, but Aubrey had hung back. A baby was already growing inside Iris by then, and Aubrey’s world was imploding. He was well aware that crack was killing but also knew it had bought Slip Rock’s car, gun, and the nice apartment above his mother’s. Aubrey knew he only needed to say the word and he’d be in with Slip Rock, but something always kept him back.
Ten years passed quickly. Now, Melody asks if this is the park where Aubrey kissed Iris for the first time, interrupting his thoughts. Iris is now living on the Upper West Side in an extra apartment that a friend’s parents had. The concept is so strange to Aubrey, but Iris’s frustration with his questions kept him from asking more. Melody spent Saturdays with Iris, sometimes Sundays if things were well between them. But usually, Aubrey wakes early Sunday mornings to a call from his daughter, asking him to pick her up. As Aubrey looks around the park, memories from his youth resurfacing, Melody points out that the area is poor, unlike where they live. Aubrey remembers the dark apartment he grew up in and the black stains on the linoleum floor. He still has asthma from the dust of his home and working in mailrooms.
Melody says that the park feels like it’s from a long time ago, “like it’s in the past tense” (158). Aubrey agrees.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Along with parenthood, the novel examines individual characters’ relationships to their mothers. Aubrey, in comparison to Iris and Melody, has the strongest relationship with his mother, despite the level of secrecy she undertakes to protect him. Losing his mother is profoundly painful for him, particularly because her life, as he describes, was tragically tough. Chapter 13 reveals a great deal about their dynamic. Cathy Marie always moved through life with a sure-footed, determined grace while Aubrey stumbled and grappled with self-doubt. This emphasizes how much Aubrey looked up to his mother as he literally follows her footsteps, “his own small feet sinking into the spaces she’d created” (140). Ultimately, the chapter is one of many that showcases the author’s considerations of morality and legacy. Losing a parent, especially at an age as young as Aubrey’s, is a defining experience, one which instills an awareness of the brevity of life and the significance of maintaining the memory of loved ones so they might live on.
Chapter 14 demonstrates the way early childhood memories are foundational to human experiences and relationships. In Melody’s case, this brief recollection is the most formative component of her respective relationships to her parents. The distance that exists between Melody and Iris can be attributed to the moment of Iris packing to leave: Melody crying out to her mother while Iris gleefully packs to escape. Even if Melody cannot articulate the effects of this yet, her interactions with her mother are clearly tainted with a sense of rejection. On the other hand, the safety and security Melody finds in her father can similarly be attributed to this moment. There is a clear divide between her two parents: one turns their back on Melody’s cries, and the other holds on to her and comforts her. The language Woodson uses at the end of this chapter is intentional: “My daddy’s sides taking the blows of my kicking feet. His hands holding tight to me. My daddy. Holding on” (145). Here, Aubrey is taking on the pain Iris causes and protecting her from feeling the effects of that pain.
Additionally significant is the focus on the act of holding; the novel explores the many modes in which a person can hold—protecting themselves, their property, or someone they love; taking on the burden of something; or carrying something in order to pass it on. In this moment, Aubrey is both attempting to protect Melody and take on the burden of her pain. By holding her, he is aligning himself as her primary caregiver.
One of the text’s major focuses is that each individual’s choices can have long-lasting, sometimes unforeseeable, consequences. In Chapter 15, Woodson takes an alternative approach to this by creating a contrast between Slip Rock and Aubrey’s lives. The men are established as existing between two poles: one caught up in the world of money, drugs, and violence, the other having barely avoided that lifestyle. By emphasizing that Aubrey had been close on many occasions to reaching out to Slip, the novel demonstrates how differently Aubrey’s life could have turned out. Slip’s story is also an allusion to the gentrification plaguing Black and Brown communities in urban neighborhoods.
Melody shrewdly touches upon this, even at her young age, at the end of the chapter when she points out that the park they’re in is poor, unlike where she lives. This reveals the stark contrast between Melody’s reality—which is emblematic of Iris’s—and that in which her father grew up, suggesting a level of class consciousness budding in Melody that she can’t quite recognize. Her comment articulates how recognizable the effects of gentrification can be. It transforms neighborhoods’ physical landscape of by altering their economic landscape, ultimately resulting in the rise of living costs and displacement for original residents, who end up feeling disempowered in their own communities. When Melody comments that this neighborhood feels like it is in the “past tense” (158), she is both recognizing that it is a part of her father’s past and a neighborhood that has been left behind while its surrounding counterparts move on.
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By Jacqueline Woodson
