Novelist Tayari Jones was in her first year at Spelman College when she found her way into a creative writing class that typically wasn't open to first-year students. Jones really wanted to enroll — but she needed a signature from her adviser.
"I had seen my adviser's signature, and it wasn't much of a signature, it was more of a squiggle. ... And I thought it over, and I just wanted it so bad, and I may have squiggled," she admits.
The class was taught by writer Pearl Cleage. Jones says she remembers Cleage asking her, "What are you thinking about these days?" Jones started to answer, but instead Cleage told her to start writing.
"And with that, she became my first audience," Jones says. "She took me seriously and so I took myself seriously and that is when I feel like I became a writer."
Jones emerged into the national spotlight with her 2018 novel, An American Marriage, which became one of Oprah's book club picks. Her latest novel, Kin, is also an Oprah pick. Set in 1950s Louisiana and Atlanta, Kin tells the story of two young women who grow up next door to each other without their mothers. Their shared loss binds them, but their lives take them in different directions, one to Spelman and Atlanta's Black elite, and the other on a journey to find the mother who abandoned her.
Jones says that Kin isn't the book she set out to write; her contract was for a modern novel about gentrification in the New South. But that story wasn't coming together.
"I finally just pulled out a piece of paper and just decided to write with the pencil like I did when I was a child and just write to kind of entertain and comfort myself," she says. "And I met Annie and Vernice [the main characters of Kin]."
Interview highlights
On fighting the narrative of female "frenemies"
I think that women are very disadvantaged by this narrative that they "don't get along." … My mother and a friend of hers pulled this really complex Jedi mind trick on me, and I ended up at Spelman. I didn't want to go to a women's college because I felt like, "I don't know if I want to be with all these girls," because that's what people said. But it was a transformative experience for me to be, in some ways, literally cloistered with all these young women around my age because we had a curfew and we would be locked in the dormitory. And I learned what it meant to really appreciate other women.
On tapping into grief over the death of a friend
I lost a good friend quite suddenly to something mysterious and I miss her. Her name is Aisha. I miss her so much. I miss Aisha every day. And so I can feel that sense of longing that Annie and Niecy have when they're far away from each other. ... You have things you want to say, and you cannot. And so I think I was kind of tapping into that, into my own feelings of grief, I guess. There's no other word for it. It's just grief and friendship. When you're friends with someone, your name will not be listed in any obituary, but it breaks your heart to lose your friend.
On her first novel, Leaving Atlanta, which offered a child's perspective on the Atlanta child murders
Before I wrote Leaving Atlanta, I couldn't find anything written about the experience from the point of view of those of us who were children. There's [James] Baldwin's famous The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Toni Cade Bambara's book [Those Bones Are Not My Child], but they're all about the way adults who had participated in the civil rights movement only to have the children be murdered. Because people, adults see children as symbolic, not as real people. Like, you know how people say "the children are the future?" So I think Baldwin and Bambara, they saw it as someone preying upon our future. …
I would say the Black children do not understand themselves to be the future, they are just who they are. But when I started looking back as an adult, looking back on the murders, I started understanding myself as a symbolic creature, understanding the moment. Think about it: I'm 10 years old. I'm not saying, "Wow, we're just 20 years post-civil rights or 15 years post-civil rights." That would never occur to me. But now I can understand myself in that context, understand Atlanta as a symbolic space. Like, wow these children are being murdered just blocks from where Martin Luther King grew up, what does that mean? So I think as you get older, you can start assigning meaning where when you're young, you only have feeling.
On Ebonics and the flexibility of language
Whenever people create new words, it's because the existing words aren't getting the job done. That's why people create brand new words. It's just that when poor people, Black people create new words it's considered bad English, but other people create words all the time as well. Corporate America has created so many words, and it's fine because I think they have respect. But people create new language. They take the language we have and they bend it. I think that it's one of my favorite things about Black people, it's the way that we take this language of English that has been kind of imposed upon us and bend it to suit our needs. Like, nobody can turn a phrase like a Black person.
On growing up with civil rights activist parents
I grew up with an expectation that whatever one chose to do with her life, it needed to be in the service of race work. I knew that mommy had participated in the sit-ins when she was just a teenager, and daddy had been expelled. Daddy went through so much to go to college, and he put it all on the line and was punished for it. And also, I grew up in Atlanta, where we all live in the shadow of Martin Luther King. I remember when I was a kid, I had a teacher who used to look at us, like let's say you did something trifling, like didn't do your homework or didn't properly groom yourself. She would just look at you with sadness — more in sadness than in anger — and say to you, "That is not what Dr. King died for." So you constantly knew that Dr. King had died for you and here you are, you can't even put on lotion.
Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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