Red at the Bone

Sabe advises that those who want to survive put their money everywhere: sewn into coat pockets, placed under floorboards, or stuffed inside old shoes. The bank will not always be open, or they could decide that they don’t have your money anymore at any moment.

Sabe’s family lived through the Tulsa Massacre. Her grandmother’s beauty shop was burned to the ground, and her mother, at only 2 years old, barely made it out alive. White men tried to kill every Black person in town, and Sabe would spend her life making sure everyone she knew heard the story; “if a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story” (81). After the massacre, Sabe’s family left for Chicago. The trauma followed. Now, Sabe knows that paper money can burn, so it’s better to keep coins or even blocks of gold. And she always lets the family know where the money is so that, when she passes, they can find their inheritance beneath the foundation of the house.

As a child, Sabe’s mother would remind her that she must hold onto what’s hers. Sabe takes that to heart, keeping her mother’s Spelman College sweater and her father’s stethoscope like how her family and the Black and Brown folk she knows hold onto their gold blocks.