Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

Author:Jacqueline Woodson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

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Truth was you’d never met somebody lonelier than I was that year. I’d left my mama back in Brooklyn to go to a school I’d never seen in a city I’d never been to. It was my aunt Ella in North Carolina who wrote a letter to the president—Dr. Benjamin Mays—asking if he’d let me come to Morehouse. Dr. Mays wrote her back too, and next I knew, I was hugging my mama goodbye and boarding the Greyhound. I’d never given college much thought before Aunt Ella sent that letter. Some mornings I just have to close my eyes and thank God for the way He moves in His mysterious ways, cuz now, here we all are.

Thought I’d find work back home after college, but then that job came through. Much as I could, I called my mama, expensive as that was. Some days I just sat at my desk eating ham sandwiches and staring down at pages and pages full of numbers. Or I’d get off from work, put on my running shoes, and go over to the Morehouse track and just run quarter mile after quarter mile until all the air was gone from me and I stood there, hands on my knees, breath coming hard, my throat and stomach burning, the burning taking the place of the missing.

I’m staring back at more than thirty years gone by and lift my head to see Sabe standing in front of me, holding a textbook to her chest and smiling. I see the light blue skirt she’s wearing and the white blouse. I see my Sabe’s pretty black hair pulled back.

And then I hear her voice again. Soft-spoken. Some South in it. Some steel too.

Who are you running from, Mr. Jesse Owens?

How do you know I’m not running towards something. Or someone?

Some people don’t believe that you can meet a person and know that’s the person for you for the rest of your life. I’m not going to try to argue with them on that. I know what I know. I stood there grinning at the sound of her voice and my own answering it. We were married that following July 1967. At the house she’d grown up in in Chicago. On the most perfect day God ever gave to the world.

If Sabe had had her way, we would have stayed in Chicago with her people. As it was, we stayed on for a year until our first child was born. That was Benjamin. We named him for Sabe’s daddy, who’d passed just before we got engaged. We don’t talk much about any of that time. Benjamin’s heart just didn’t do what it needed to do and we got him baptized just in time to bury him. Prettiest baby you’d ever want to see. For the few weeks he was with us, he’d open his eyes and look right at you—like an old soul. Like it was somebody from the past trying to tell you something.

After Benjamin died,

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