Chapter 1: What themes does Tayari Jones explore in her novel 'Kin'?
I'm Beth Golay and this is Marginalia. Tayari Jones' 2018 novel, An American Marriage, was an Oprah's Book Club pick and won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Now, eight years later, Jones' latest novel is on all of the most anticipated book lists. And, once again, it's an Oprah's Book Club pick.
Titled Kin, it follows two friends, Annie and Niecy, who consider themselves more sisters than friends. The two come of age in rural Louisiana in the 1950s. As they embark on separate and very different adventures, their bond continuously pulls them together. I recently spoke with Tayari Jones about their kinship and about how this is not the book she intended to write. Here's our conversation.
Your novel, Ken, revolves around two girls who call themselves cradle friends, Annie and Vernice, who goes by Niecy. Can you set up the book for us? What should we know about Niecy and Annie? Well, Niecy and Annie are two motherless girls. That's what brought them together as friends. They're reared in a small town in Louisiana during the Jim Crow period in the South.
And they seem to the casual observer to be very different. One is a little more refined than the other. One is a little thinner than the other. But they are the same in their hearts because they have this shared experience of having never known their mothers. I kept focusing on talk about the two of them being motherless, and I noted a line.
We were also fatherless, but this didn't bite the same way. Vernice's first word when she finally spoke was mother, and Annie searched her entire life for meaning behind her mother's abandonment. So how did being motherless together define the girls?
It's interesting that their motherlessness is what they have in common, but the circumstances of their motherlessness is so different because Nisi's mother was killed in an act of domestic violence when Nisi was just an infant. So she has never known her mother and she knows she never will. So she is kind of I won't say made peace, but understands that that hole in her heart is with her forever.
Whereas Annie's mother abandoned her. Her mother is out there somewhere. They say her mother is God knows where. And so she wakes up every morning, hopeful that she will meet her mother and goes to bed every night disappointed. I think motherlessness is such a primal wound in that, you know, like, as I believe it's Annie who says, it's so painful that in slavery they made a song about it.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child and that this nurturing, this place of origin, your mother is the indisputable place of origin. You know how they say mama's baby, papa's maybe. And so they are without what they believe is an understanding of who they are. I do try to interrogate how significant is biology? Can found family take the place of biological family?
I want to talk about family in a moment, but there were a couple of other instances of motherlessness that fascinated me. I mean, one was there was a case, Franklin, who was an attorney. He's Bernice's husband. He was working on and he he received a letter from the child of a victim and it read, we are motherless and naked like peas without a pod.
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Chapter 2: How do the characters Annie and Niecy reflect their upbringing?
And flight attendants have to be friendly for a living to strangers. And I think about what that means for the women, particularly African-American women, you know, in the 50s and before, where you had to perform this mother role and you had to perform this mother role for your charges.
So convincingly that a big part of the mythology of the South is that the black woman who reared these white children did so out of love, not as though money wasn't a part of it. Like it's a big part to say, Oh, she was like my mother. She was a member of my family. And I always say to people, she was a member of your family, but were you a member of hers?
And so when she comes home, she's been mothering all day with children. She cannot chastise with children. She cannot tell to shut up, put that down, stop it. And what does that do to people's real relationships? It almost makes it where your family is kind of a busman's holiday because I want to talk about found family because the girls were motherless.
And some of the people who did provide guidance to the girls, Aunt Irene, Lula Bell, Mr. Daniel, Miss Jemison, Miss Olamay. I don't remember about Mr. Daniel, but I think the rest of them, none of them had their own children. What could they provide that a mother couldn't? Well, you know, I think they could provide guidance. They could provide what a mother could or couldn't do.
I think that these childless adults interact with the children as individuals and not in a symbolic space. So therefore they offer their personalities, their wisdom. They can feel free to be quirkier and more eccentric because the children to whom they're talking are not their legacy per se. So they're a lot looser and they're the type of people who have opted not to have children.
So they're already kind of outlaws. And every kid, like I know when I was growing up, there was a family across the street. These people were fascinating and they were kind of outlaws. And I would go over their house and I love to talk to them because they were not restrained by the respectability that is inherent in the role of mother. Talk to me about the title.
It encourages the reader to consider what makes a family, but I guess I'm always curious about how the final title is chosen. Was this the working title all along? This was not the working story, actually. This is not the book that I had been contracted to write. I was supposed to be writing a modern novel about gentrification in the urban South.
And I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I felt like I was working with a hammer, a nail, saw, like I felt like I was really working, but it didn't have that magic that comes when creativity is ignited. It was like with my hammer and nails, it's like I was making noise when I should have been making music.
And finally, I just gave up on this project and this contract, and I just took out paper and a pencil. I mean, not even a pen, a pencil that I had to sharpen with the sharpener. And I just started writing. And that's how I met Annie and Vernice. And when I saw that they were living in the 40s and 50s, I said to myself, well, clearly these must be the parents of my real characters.
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Chapter 3: What does motherlessness signify for the characters in 'Kin'?
I have to full disclosure, Barbara Ann Posey Jones is my mama. And so my mother participated in a sit-in movement for two years in Oklahoma, two years. Those kids went to the drugstore counter and sat there every day in the summer for two years and on weekends during the school year. And they just sat there and they just wore those people down. Amazing.
So I think that the girls, Annie and Vernice, they would you know, who would not admire resistance? Who does not admire defiance? Now, I will say, though, what is interesting, I learned from reading a wonderful book called A Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who is a graduate of Spelman College.
That W. Johnson Rowntree was an attorney and her law firm, all they did was represent black people who defied segregation in public transportation in the 40s, in the 50s. You know, all these people before and after Rosa Parks that.
Just sitting down and refusing to get up was an act of resistance that was practiced all over the country by the young, by the old, by men, by women, by affluent people, by poor people. It was just such a common sense way to say enough. You just mentioned this author, and I saw online that you attended Spelman College, and that's where Vernice goes. How did your experience inspire hers?
Listen, I have to tell you, people who go to Spelman College, we do more than attend Spelman College. It's like we matriculate at Spelman College. It's a small liberal arts college for Black women in Atlanta. I graduated in a class of just over 300 people. So it's a very intimate experience. And the mentorship is so meaningful that one receives.
It was at Spelman College that I realized I could become a writer because I met a writer and she was my teacher. And she said to me, what are you thinking about these days? And when I got ready to tell her, she said, don't tell me, write it down. And in that, she became my first audience. And taking me seriously, I took myself seriously. And she too was an alumna of Spelman College.
So it gave us a sense of lineage, a sense of collectivity and And I really wanted to capture that. But what I learned in my research is what isn't known as the working class history of Spelman College. Spelman College has a reputation for being kind of like where people send their debutante daughters.
And while there were debutantes there, so many of these women traveled from little towns in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, I met a woman 97 years old when she came to Spelman College. Every dime her family, her church, her community could come up with to send her to school fit in a sock. And she took that sock to Atlanta, gave it to the president of Spelman College.
And Mrs. Reed poured the money out the sock, returned the sock because the child needed her sock. and said, you should live in a dormitory. She had never heard that word. And now this woman, 97 years old, holds a PhD in Shakespeare. Isn't that amazing? I dedicated the book to her.
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Chapter 4: How does Tayari Jones describe the concept of found family?
And it is an optimistic... you know, anti-fascist, anarchists, close as they can get to utopia in New York. And it's got all these different chapters from all these different points of view told in different styles, you know, basically all as though they're interviews with people who are participating in this project to bring forth something positive out of something very negative.
So again, I guess you can tell what's in the back of my mind a lot deeper. That's right. Anything else on your stack? Yeah, I'll give you one more if we've got time for that. This is a reprint from originally, I believe, the 40s by Muriel Rukeyser. Now, she was a mid-century poet. That's how I knew her. And that only vaguely. Honestly, I'm sure I read...
you know, a line or two of hers in an anthology at some point. And I was like, okay, I know who Muriel Rukeyser is. And this book showed up one day. It's called Willard Gibbs. The whole is simpler than its parts. Lovely kind of mid-century look to the cover of it. And I was like, what is this? Who's Willard Gibbs? And it's prose. It's a full book. And I was like, Muriel Rukeyser wrote prose.
And then I realized she wrote a biography. That's odd. And she wrote a biography of Willard Gibbs. I've never heard of him. Why would you write a biography of somebody so obscure? Yeah. And then I read it and was blown away. Willard Gibbs was a late 19th century, very early 20th century scientist at Princeton.
And Einstein of all people at one point called him the greatest American mind, which again, never heard of him. And there are people who reference him as being on sort of a Mount Rushmore of great Americans of his age with like Herman Melville and Mark Twain. So for some people for a time, That's how important he was.
He lived a quiet life as a professor and researcher, and I barely left Princeton as far as I can tell. But he achieved amazing things in the fields of chemistry and physics. Basically, his work, I guess you would say, predicted quantum physics, hugely important, hugely influential scientific figure. And for Rukeyser,
Because his life was so circumscribed, the book is not so much about, you know, where he went and what he did exactly. It's about his work and his life, but it's more about the America of its time and the ambitions that it had and the good that it tried to do. And, you know, she's a poet. She writes beautifully, almost ecstatically. So I just found it amazing. And I'm like, who knew?
Let's bring back Willard Gibbs. You have given us a lot of books to think about, and you can find all of James's recommendations at kmuw.org. James Crossley of Leviathan Bookstore, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. Marginalia was produced at KMUW Wichita and is part of the NPR Network.
Our editors and producers for this week's show are Haley Krausen and Luann Stevens. Torrin Anderson composed our theme music. This is Marginalia. I'm Beth Golay. Maybe you already know about naked short selling. Maybe you've personally shorted stocks yourself. But do you know about the time short sellers ruined the Super Bowl, basically?
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