AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In the new novel "Kin," two girls, Annie and Vernice, are cradle friends. The book opens with Vernice as a toddler speaking her first word.
TAYARI JONES: (Reading) Mother, I said, softly at first. As I raised my voice to a bellow, every heart in the house contracted, vulnerable as a scalded tomato, gripped into a tiny, greedy fist. Annie's granny said she heard wonder in my voice like I gazed into the eyes of an angel. Aunt Irene said she understood it as a command, her dead sister telling her that I was hers for life. Only Mrs. Olamay (ph), the midwife, attended to me. Scooping me into her stout arms, she cooed, I hear you, baby. Annie, who had been in the kitchen yapping away, toddled up to Ms. Olamay, arms raised to be held as well. We were both crowded onto her lap. I kept saying my new word over and over, but Annie was quiet for once, sucking my thumb as though it were her own.
RASCOE: The two girls have both lost their mothers. Annie's ran off and Vernice's mom was killed by her dad in an act of domestic violence. The story follows the girls as their paths in life diverge, and they discover the complexities of their sisterhood, all the while navigating being Black women in the Jim Crow South. "Kin" is the latest novel from Tayari Jones, the acclaimed author of "An American Marriage." She joins us now. Welcome.
JONES: Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: You know, when you look at both of these girls, they have this mother-shaped hole in their lives, right? But each of them kind of deal with it in a different way.
JONES: Well, Vernice knows she will never see her mother again, you know, not on this side, as they say. She can actually seek a replacement mother. She can seek someone to fill that space in her life, where Annie, imagine that she's sitting at a dinner table and she's saving a seat, and no one else can sit in that seat. She would feel like she's cheating on her mother to allow someone else to take that space. Other people, found family, can absolutely meet your emotional needs, but you have to be willing to let them.
RASCOE: But they do have maternal figures in their lives. Niecy is raised by her Aunt Irene. Annie is raised by her granny, but both of the women in their lives wouldn't really mother them.
JONES: One of the things I was thinking about as I was writing this is how many - like, before the 1960 - late 1960s, when, you know, when the birth control pill was widely available, before Roe v. Wade, there were so many unplanned children in the community. And someone else is called up to do this job. And to be called to mother when that was not, you know, what you had planned to do, it's a lot to ask for that person to have that full emotional attachment, particularly, like, Niecy's aunt who raised her was what the young people these days would call child-free.
RASCOE: Got you. Yeah.
JONES: She enjoyed not having children, living a life in the promised land of Dayton, Ohio, and she comes home for her mother's funeral and ends up raising a child. And then there's a sense that the child doesn't feel properly mothered, and I felt like, well, I could see how that could happen. Black women are either stereotyped as terrible mothers or just bottomlessly maternal. And so I was really interrogating, what does it mean to mother by choice, and what does it mean to mother not by choice?
RASCOE: One of the lines in the book that will stick with me is when Aunt Irene tells Niecy, don't ever let no man kill you. And then that resonates in Niecy's journey later on because someone says to her about a man, he won't kill you. I mean, it's a very simple phrase, but it kind of rung down in my spirit when I read it.
JONES: I mean, Niecy's life, like they said, she was touched by blood and not the blood of the lamb. She was there, you know, when her father shot her mother. And this is the act that starts her life's journey. And her aunt, you know, she doesn't want to see her go down the same road that her mother went. And when her future mother-in-law says, my dear, my son will not kill you, and she feels a relief because that is a shadow, a quiet shadow that's been over her life. And I think it's a shadow that hovers over women's lives in general. Like every time you're out at night, and someone says, let me walk you home, what they're saying is, let me walk you home so that no one tries to harm you. Like, it's just in the water of womanhood, I think.
RASCOE: And these two grow up in this small fictional town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Can you describe Honeysuckle for us and how growing up in that particular town shapes the girls?
JONES: I based Honeysuckle on the town that my grandmama lived in when I was a little girl. You know, I grew up in Atlanta, but in the summertime, we would go down to visit my grandmother in a small Louisiana town called Oakdale. And I remember things like my grandmother always took her mail at a post office box because Black people were not allowed to have their mail delivered to their door. So when I was growing up, even in the '70s, you know, we would have to walk about a mile to the post office to get the mail. And I just remember how the long legacy of segregation intersected with people's everyday lives.
RASCOE: So Niecy leaves Honeysuckle, and she goes to Spelman, your alma mater. And so many of the traditions that are talked about in the book still are going on - the wearing of white, the going to the chapel, which I would imagine were a part of your own experiences at Spelman.
JONES: Well, I had to think about Spelman and our traditions with kind of new eyes. People tend to look at the graduates of these HBCUs and see them as professionals and leaders of industry, miniaturized as a college student. But so many people were transformed by their experiences. Like in the '40s and '50s, young women came to Spelman College and worked as maids in white women's kitchens to make the money to pay their tuition. And I think this part of our history has been lost. Atlanta is known as the Black Mecca because of its thriving Black middle class. But these six historically Black colleges and universities, they did not merely serve the middle class. They created that middle class.
RASCOE: This is your first historical novel, and I read that you did a lot of research, including interviewing your own college adviser at Spelman, who's now almost 100. Tell us about her.
JONES: She is a wonderful woman. She's 97. She's got great humor. She told me today that I look too old. She says, why do you look so mature?
RASCOE: (Laughter).
JONES: I said, ma'am, I am mature. I said, and you're 100. How are you going to tell somebody they look mature?
RASCOE: (Laughter).
JONES: And she said, I might be almost 100, but I don't look like it. You know, she graduated from Spelman in the early 1950s. And she was telling me about all the jobs that the young women had and even how she herself came to Spelman with all the money her family had put together for her, you know, and it was contained in a stocking. And she's a 97-year-old Black woman with a Ph.D. in Shakespeare and telling me I look old.
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: I'm sure she doesn't look it. I'm sure she doesn't look any bit of 97. This is your first book since "An American Marriage" in 2018. How did it feel making this book?
JONES: No, "Kin" is not the book that I was contracted to write. I had this what I thought was just a great idea to write about gentrification in the modern South, and it just wasn't coming together. You know how, like, sometimes you know someone who plays in a band, like, a jazz band, and they will say, oh, the band was swinging tonight, or they'll be disappointed and say the band wasn't swinging? This novel that I was trying to write, it wasn't swinging. Finally, after a couple - three years, I just started writing on a piece of paper with a pencil, and I just wrote whatever came to mind. And that's when I met Annie and Niecy. And so here I am writing this novel 'cause I said, oh my goodness, these people seem to be living in the 1950s. So certainly, they must be the parents of my real characters because I do believe myself to contain multitudes, but I do not believe myself to contain a historical novel. After a hundred and some pages, I had to accept that what I thought was backstory was the story.
RASCOE: And then it all came together like this.
JONES: It all came together. I just felt like this project was blessed because for me to jump into this not knowing what I was writing about or why, I had to tap into something that kind of was older than myself. I felt like I was being communicated with by something, someone unseen. And I had to not fear it and just kind of lean into it and have faith.
RASCOE: That's beautiful. And you were swinging.
JONES: Apparently.
RASCOE: I could tell as I was reading it, you were swinging.
JONES: (Laughter) Well, I will take that. Thank you so much.
RASCOE: (Laughter) That's Tayari Jones. Her novel "Kin" is out now. Thank you for being with us.
JONES: Thank you for having me. This was fun.
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