“You can’t save a person who doesn’t want to be saved.” — Pearl Cleage, Till You Hear From Me
Tayari Jones doesn’t remember when she started writing. She has always enjoyed crafting stories as a pastime, but Jones, now the author of five novels, including 2018’s award-winning An American Marriage, didn’t consider a career as a writer until she was in college.
“ A writer and teacher asked her, “‘What are you thinking about?’ and I got ready to tell her and she said, ‘Don’t tell me. Write it down,’” Jones says. “With that, she became my first audience. By taking me seriously, she taught me to take myself seriously. Knowing that my teacher wanted to know what I thought changed the way I thought.”
Jones is still in touch with Pearl Cleage, the professor who told her to “write it down.” In fact, in something of a full-circle moment, Cleage joined Jones to co-host the Atlanta book launch for her newest novel, the Memphis-set Kin (Knopf), released in February.
“She is my North Star. I’m a graduate of Spelman College, and she’s a graduate of Spelman College, so I feel a lineage. I have literary grandparents. She is a part of a continuum,” Jones says. “That’s something that comes up in my books in small ways.”
Lineage Lost
photograph by Julie yarborough
The notion of lineage forms the thematic background for Jones’ new novel, which follows two young Black girls, Annie and Vernice, from Honeysuckle, Louisiana.
Both girls grow up without their mothers. Annie’s mother, Hattie Lee, left her daughter to move to Memphis and follow her own path. Or, as Vernice thinks, “Annie’s Mama was doing GodKnowsWhat, out in GodKnowsWhere,” so Annie is raised by her strict grandmother. One tragic night forever altered the course of Vernice’s life when her mother was murdered by her father, who then killed himself, leaving Vernice to be brought up by her Aunt Irene.
Kin begins with the utterance of Vernice’s first word, “mother,” enunciated in full — not “mama,” but “mother.” The scene takes place on vegetable-canning day, amid the humidity of boiling water and the hiss of radio static. Because of the special occasion, the novel at first seems to echo with the hard-won wisdom and wit of Southern women, all gathered to preserve the harvest together. The realization quickly grows, though, that the women who populate the pages of Jones’ newest novel lead lives characterized by loneliness and absence.
Vernice and her “cradle friend,” Annie, share the same hurt; they are both motherless children, and their lives bend around that absence.
In Kin, Mrs. McHenry, a fixture of Atlanta’s high society, tells Vernice that generations of Black mothers tending to the children of white families created a wound. “Our mothers were stolen from us. Somebody should write a book about it,” she says, in something of a mission statement for Jones’ novel.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my foremothers,” Jones says when I ask her to speak more on the idea of a lineage — and its notable absence in her new novel. “My grandmothers, one of them worked as a domestic, and I know the name of the family she worked for. She worked for a family called the McGuinesses. I know the McGuinesses’ children’s names. They have no idea who I am. They figured so prominently in our imagination, but we’re nobody to them. What is it like to care for children during the day, and how does that affect your own children?
“What does it mean when you’re kind for a living? What does that do to the way you understand your own kindness?”
In Kin, Jones draws out these questions of sacrifices made and privations suffered to sustain a life and a family. What remains for her family after a woman has poured out her store of care for another family’s brood? Whether love or finances or the pleasures and freedoms of an unencumbered individual, what must be sacrificed on the altar of family, stability, and security?
There is no easy, one-size-fits-all answer to such questions, but as Jones guides Vernice and Annie through their lives, the girls make answers of their own.
The Heart of What Remains
As they grow up, Vernice and Annie are well-fed and clean, but they are never doted on. Aunt Irene’s constant refrain is that she doesn’t know how to talk to children, and Annie’s granny thought she was through acting as the sole guardian of a child.
As Vernice and Annie navigate between points both rural and urban, tracing a path between a Mississippi brothel, the Black high society in Atlanta, the Memphis nightclub scene, and stops in between, they find no life is free of sacrifices and no one’s responsibilities or challenges are quite the same. Queer characters populate the novel as well, as Jones hints at the important role community plays in the rearing of children and the determination of life’s paths, as well as the pain and isolation that often accompany lives led outside the strictures of social acceptability.
“Children desire guardians who love and want them. All children do, regardless of the circumstances of a child’s birth,” Jones says, and the genuine love of a parent cannot be faked. “I do think about women’s lives before the advent of reliable contraception. There were all these unplanned children. Babies arrived and someone had to take care of them.”
Ghosts, both real and figurative, are a common motif in Kin, fitting as so much of the novel wrestles with concepts of loss and lineage, of what remains after an absence.
The circumstances of those unplanned babies’ births affects not only them, but the rest of the community as well. People, usually women, have to step up and care for their nieces or grandchildren. In Kin, Aunt Irene’s brief vacation back home becomes an indefinite stay as she takes on the responsibility of rearing her deceased sister’s young daughter. Responsibility, rather than any desire to be a mother, forces her to bid farewell to a job and a beau in Ohio and try to make whatever life she can in small-town Louisiana.
“The idea of pregnancy just looms,” says Jones. “Writing this book I had to really ponder, if you cannot control your fertility, you cannot control your life.”
The question of what families owe to each other is at the center of the novel. Friends and relatives warn Annie that Hattie Lee might not be the kind of mother she wants, that nurturing doesn’t come naturally to all women, but Annie is determined to track down her mother and forge some sort of relationship. Vernice struggles with her own relationships, both to her mentor, of sorts, and with two potential romantic partners, each of them offering a different future.
“Some people just will not accept your help,” Jones says, noting that much of the novel hinges on characters trying to force relationships onto people or holding ideals of what a relationship should be. Vernice and Annie are young, and they cannot fully understand that a healthy, functioning relationship requires the renewed commitment of everyone involved.
Ghosts, both real and figurative, are a common motif in Kin, fitting as so much of the novel wrestles with concepts of loss and lineage, of what remains after an absence. To say that the specter of lost love haunts the pages of Jones’ novel is no understatement, but occasionally the ghosts in Kin are more frightening figments than incorporeal concepts. Different characters hold diverse views on what’s real, on faith and religion, and on what exactly one owes one’s family of origin. In that, the novel is uncannily authentic — and Southern as can be. A rich amalgamation of folk magic, nightmares, remorseful shades, and Sunday service make up the spiritual backdrop of the novel, making Kin as true to the rural Southern experience as any tome on any bookshelf.
“You cannot undo the past,” Jones says. “The question is, ‘How do you play the cards you were dealt? What is the best you can make of your situation?’”
The Great Divide
Kin is, at its core, a novel about relationships and the tension inherent in them as both parties seek to find a balance. Though much of the emotional weight of the novel is centered on the nature of familial and romantic relationships, the urban/rural, North/South divide that has so effectively characterized an as-yet-ongoing tension in United States culture is also expertly examined by the author. The subject of the Urban South is of particular interest to Jones, she admits.
“People characterize the North by its cities and the South for its rural areas, but all states have urban and rural areas,” she says. “I also like the idea of the urban centers of the South as places of migration,” Jones continues. Her father came from a small town in Louisiana and moved to Atlanta, and to Jones, Louisiana feels like the “old country,” a semi-mythic place she’s still influenced by but whose language she doesn’t quite understand.
“The country is so prejudiced against the South that they imagine the Southern person as so eager to leave the South,” Jones explains. Her novel, however, uses as a plot vehicle the quite real cultural pattern of rural-to-urban migration in the South. For Annie and Vernice, the urban centers of Memphis and Atlanta represent new beginnings and expanded opportunities.
So deft is Jones’ touch that she crafts a novel that is as compelling as a plot-driven page-turner as it is a literary examination of mothers and daughters, friendship, and the paths taken and passed by in life.
