It is Woodson’s third-ever novel for adults and the second within the last three years - a book that highlights her potential to have as big an impact on adult literature as she’s had on younger readers. 11, 2001, it moves back and forth through time, tracing the history and legacy of both sides of its central character’s family. Beginning in New York in the months before Sept. Woodson has woven both threads into her latest book, “Red at the Bone,” published this month. She had also been jotting down notes about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 - two days of violence in which a mob of white Oklahomans attacked and burned what was then one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, killing as many as 300 people. The process made her interested in writing a new story, about the precariousness of generational wealth, especially for black families. “At the end,” Woodson says, “I was like, ‘You know, this was my mother’s dream.’ This was the whole Great Migration, for her to come from the South to Brooklyn, to eventually buy a home and to get her kids launched.” So Woodson took a loan against her own townhouse and began renovating her mother’s home for rental. That one would become a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.
But there was also an impressionistic adult novel, “Another Brooklyn,” in which a woman, unable to confront her mother’s death, recalls her childhood in the Bushwick of the 1970s, when the area was undergoing white flight instead of the more recent outflux of black and Latinx residents.
One was “Brown Girl Dreaming,” a memoir in verse that would win the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Woodson is a prolific author of books for children and young adults, and at the time, she was at work on a few different projects. But the more she visited the building - traveling across the borough from the Park Slope townhouse she shares with her partner and their two children - the more she felt herself wanting to hold on to her childhood home, one of the first places she lived in Brooklyn after moving from Greenville, S.C., at 7.
“My siblings and I are like, ‘Let’s just short-sell it let’s just dump it,’ ” Woodson says. But Woodson did not find herself dealing with a readily lucrative asset: Because of predatory lending that targeted black homeowners, she says, her mother died owing $300,000, and the house was in foreclosure. Their mother bought a three-story townhouse in the Bushwick neighborhood decades earlier, for only $30,000, and by the time she died, a development boom was spilling over from neighboring Williamsburg, driving up values and driving out residents. When Jacqueline Woodson’s mother died, late in the summer of 2009, the writer and her siblings had to sort out what to do with the Brooklyn building where they spent much of their childhoods.
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