A CONVERSATION WITH TAYARI JONES
by LESLIE-ANN MURRAY
Tayari Jones is the author of five novels, including An American Marriage. Published in 2018, An American Marriage was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
I still remember the day when Tayari Jones and Jayne Anne Phillips called me regarding admission to the Rutgers Newark MFA program. I was living in my parents’ basement, baking a frozen pizza from Trader Joe’s, and feeling hopeless and dejected after a slew of MFA programs had rejected my application, a week before this phone call. On the phone, Tayari was giddy, and every section of my body was elated by her joy. I did not scream or jump for joy as folks would in the movies, but, like a character in a quiet novel, I was filled with immense pleasure and punctuated our conversation with constant thanks. For the last fifteen years, I have been a fan, a student, a mentee, and a friend of Tayari Jones, and I continue to be inspired by her tenacity, her humor, and her depth. Her writing is like a caramel cake—it’s layered, buttery, and so sweet and tasty that you forget about your diet. And like a true southerner, she has a metaphor for everything. It was a pleasure talking to Tayari Jones via Zoom about her latest novel, Kin.
Leslie-Ann Murray: I’m calling Kin your departure novel. It’s set in a time period you have never written about—the 1950s. It’s your most southern work to date, and you explore topics that you’ve never written about publicly—queer love, abortion, and wayward women.
Tayari Jones: This book is the most southern of all the books I’ve written. I got back home, ate one plate of barbecue, some candied yams, and a caramel cake, and all of a sudden, I got Southerner. But this isn’t the book I was contracted to write. I was writing a novel about modern-day Atlanta, asking important questions: Can you gentrify your own neighborhood? Can you come back to your hometown and be the gentrifier? I was asking these questions on the page, but for whatever reason, the magic that makes a novel wasn’t noveling. So I took out a notebook, a pencil, and then I let my mind go where it would, and that’s when I met my characters, Vernice and Annie. When I saw that they were living in the 1950s, I said to myself, “clearly, these people must be the parents of my real characters because I’m not a historical novelist.” But after a while, I came to see that what I thought was backstory was the actual story. I had to let go of some control and write the story that apparently wanted to be written.
LAM: These characters are living through a turbulent time period in American history—the Jim Crow South—and yet white people are not part of their imagination or how they show up in the world.
TJ: When you grow up in a racially homogenous environment, you can’t spend a lot of time thinking about people that you don’t see. When I was a little kid growing up in Atlanta, I had a hard time believing that Black people were a racial minority. It’s like when your teacher shows you the globe and says, “The Earth is 80 percent water.” But in your mind, you say, “How the hell are we standing here? Where’s this water?” It feels like a natural point of view not to think about whiteness because in Atlanta, it was not a daily oppressive thing, and you didn’t have to be brave and bold not to think about whiteness.
LAM: In the novel, we see how racism alters public spaces and our bodies within those spaces. This is clearly articulated when Annie is in the segregated waiting room at the bus station. She is sitting next to a little girl who wants to use the bathroom, but the segregated section doesn’t have any toilets, so her mother has to take her in the back, where she has to urinate in the dirt.
TJ: Before the child has to go to the bathroom, they’ve been told that the white people’s waiting room is not that nice, and they’re not missing anything, and they can forget that they’ve been put in this segregated space. But then, when the little girl has to go, and there’s no place for her, everyone in that room is ashamed.
LAM: It makes me think that racism is a ghost that will continue to haunt the way we see ourselves, and ourselves in the world.
TJ: You know what? I wouldn’t even use a metaphor of a ghost. It’s almost like a bad smell. It’s an odor, the odor of racism, because you’ll be living your life, and all of a sudden you’re like, “What’s that smell?” Someone else is like, “Yes, I smell it too. I think that smells like racism.” With racism, you smell it again and again.
LAM: In the novel, Vernice accidentally takes a stand against segregation when she gets on a bus to Atlanta, and she is unfortunately kicked off. Then we have this scene that takes place in the segregated bus station waiting room. It seems that you are having a larger conversation around public transportation and segregation.
TJ: I’ll tell you where I got this whole public transportation obsession from: the book Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who went to Spelman College in the ’40s. She was one of the first women to finish Howard Law School. She worked for a Black law firm where all they did was represent people who refused to give up their seats on public transportation. In the book, she said that Black people of different ages, class positions, and genders were resisting segregation all the time by refusing to give up their seats on the bus. These lawyers worked in the post office in the daytime and lawyered at night, and they just chipped away at the government’s legal case for segregation. Then Thurgood Marshall came and whoosh—knocked down the legal case with Brown v. Board of Education.
LAM: Everyone in this novel is interacting with violence in its physical or emotional form. Vernice’s father kills her mother and then himself. Annie’s mother abandons her at six months, and she spends her lifetime attempting to close this wound. Yet, when I finished reading this book, I thought about the beautiful language and the power of friendships. How did you juxtapose the violence and the harshness with beauty?
TJ: You have to be true to the voice, and if you are true to the voice of your characters, they will tell you what to prioritize. You have to set aside your own ego and vanity because there’s the impulse to focus on your own voice. I think women in general live against the backdrop of violence. Let’s say you went to a party, you enjoyed yourself, and someone said, “Well, let me walk you home. You shouldn’t walk alone.” You would not process your experience at the party as being the backdrop of violence, but the fact that you could not walk alone suggests something sinister is lurking. That’s kind of how the violence functions in this story—the characters are not fixated on it because it’s kind of in the water. The racial violence is in the water, the gendered violence is in the water, and the characters navigate around it as best they can. But again, it occasionally rears its head in a way that cannot be ignored, but people still have pleasure.
LAM: I’d like to add that another backdrop in this novel is upward mobility and climbing the social ladder. Both Vernice and Annie are from working-class backgrounds, with just a smidgen of class difference between them. Their difference boils down to ambition. Vernice’s aunt expects her to attend college and level up socially, while Annie’s grandmother only expects her not to be a burden.
TJ: Annie’s grandmother is exhausted from raising children, so she doesn’t have the same feeling as, “Oh, I want this education for you.” As Annie says, “My grandmother just wants to make sure that I can take care of myself and not have to lie on my back to do it.” This is her tipping point. It’s important to note that the Black colleges, particularly in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, created the Black middle class. They created a new trajectory for generations of people, and I really wanted to capture that. My beloved Spelman College, which people often think of as a debutante factory, but so many of the women who went there in the ’40s and ’50s worked full-time as maids to pay for their education. The woman to whom I dedicated my book arrived at Spelman College with all the money her community had given her in a spare stocking. She’s ninety-seven.
LAM: With class jumping, there are certain rules and protocols one must follow to maintain the mystique. Vernice is guaranteed a good life by marrying into a wealthy family, and while some of the class rigidity might seem oppressive, she wants that. It seems as if she has to deny parts of her history and herself for social mobility.
TJ: I mean, whenever you join anything new, there are always rules. And if you don’t have rules, do you have a culture? Because that’s what a culture is—rules. How you feel about these rules really depends on your background, but everyone follows some rules and protocols. Nicey doesn’t want the trappings of respectability. You know what she wants? Her mama. Her relationship with Mrs. McHenry fills that gap. That’s why her husband says, “Sometimes I feel like this whole marriage was a backroom deal between you and my mother.” Because they’re serving a purpose for each other. They’re giving each other what they need.
LAM: My favorite friend, Welile, always tells me, “Friends are our greatest love story.” The core of this novel lies in the power and beauty of friendships, particularly those between black women, who provided unconditional love without asking for anything in return.
TJ: We always say, “You don’t get to choose your family.” Those people are the ones you got, and there’s nothing you can do about that. We have to figure out how to live within these predefined relationships. With friendship, you have to constantly renew and say, “Yes, I want to continue with this relationship,” so there’s so much more agency in friendship. People sometimes ask me, “Are Annie and Niecy friends because they both lost their mothers?” And I say, “That’s how their friendship began, but that is not the measure of their connection.” They choose to be vulnerable and transparent with each other over and over. They can’t imagine life without each other, and when they are forced into this new space, they have to learn how to reveal their full selves to another person. Because if no one knows your full self, then you are the loneliest person in the world.
LAM: Speaking about revealing your full selves, it was so refreshing to see gay characters just exist without an explanation or ridicule, especially in this time period.
TJ: We act as if certain issues were invented in the ’80s. Gay people got invented in the ’80s, abortion got invented in the ’70s. All these issues have been around since people were people. Of course, the ways that we talk about them are different, and the ways people are treated in their status and society have changed. But the fact of it, the history of it, the lineage of it, it’s always been there. Just statistically speaking, there needed to be queer people in this book.
You know what people don’t ask me about?
LAM: What?
TJ: About Franklin’s disability and the reasons why I included this characteristic within the story.
LAM: Really, let’s talk more about this.
TJ: When I was growing up, a man who lived a few houses down on the right-hand side was a polio survivor, and he was my father’s friend. Even though he was on crutches, he courted women, and nobody ever looked at him as any less than any of the dads on the street. I wanted to capture this. I had polio on the brain since they’re trying to roll back vaccines. I had abortion on the brain because they’re trying to roll back reproductive health. I had all of these queer characters on the brain because of all their rights that are being taken away.
LAM: Tayari, it has been so wonderful to speak with you. I wish you were still living in New York City; my new apartment is a few blocks from your former apartment on Park Place, and whenever I pass that apartment, I think of you. New York misses you.
TJ: I feel like New Yorkers are born, not made, and I always felt like a Georgia Peach up there. I’m glad to be back home. Next time you come to Atlanta, you can come stay with me.
LAM: I would love that.
TJ: I’ll cook for you.
