This tale of chosen family and motherhood fizzes and sings

FICTION
Kin
Tayari Jones
Penguin, $34.99

“Blood alone can’t give you kinship.” So says one of the characters in Kin, the fifth novel by American writer Tayari Jones, whose last novel, An American Marriage, won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The question of kinship – the kin you are born to and the kin you create - is central to the deeply moving story of two motherless best friends Vernice (“Niecy”) and Annie (who call themselves “cradle friends”), raised together in Louisiana, whose lives diverge when they turn seventeen.

Set in the dying years of the Jim Crow era of segregation in the American South, Kin has dual themes – the lifelong impact of never knowing your mother, and the power of female friendship. In her first foray into historical fiction, Jones drew on the lives of her parents, both civil rights activists – her mother was a part of sit-ins in Oklahoma when she was fifteen.

The girls are born in the (fictional) town of Honeysuckle. In 1941, when Niecy is six months old, her father shoots her mother dead. Annie’s 16-year-old mother, Hattie Lee abandons her when she is a few days old. Niecy is raised by her Aunt Irene, Annie by her grandmother. Both attend to the girls’ material needs, but not their emotional ones. “While I was tended to, I was never mothered,” Niecy says.

Both girls miss their mothers terribly and this shapes their lives. Niecy is determined to have a family of her own, while Annie is obsessed with finding her mother. At 17, Niecy heads to Spelman College in Atlanta (which Jones herself attended) to become a teacher. Annie runs away to Memphis – where she believes her mother is – with friends Clyde, Babydoll and Clyde’s cousin Bobo. Both encounter misadventure along the way. Niecy is thrown off a segregated bus after mistakenly sitting in the white section. Annie finds herself in a “whorehouse” in Mississippi run by the no-nonsense Lulabelle when Clyde’s car breaks down.

Once Niecy makes it to Spelman, and Annie reaches Memphis, their lives proceed upon different trajectories. Niecy’s is upwards, as she studies literature, sings at glee club and is “cured in the kiln of respectability”. Meanwhile, Annie works in a bar and alienates her friends as she accosts strange women she mistakenly believes are her mother. The two maintain their tight childhood bond through the exchange of intimate letters.

One consequence of being motherless is that both women crave female love and affection; Niecy revels in being a part of the Spelman “sisterhood” and Annie tells Lulabelle, “You gave me the closest to mother-love I ever felt.” It also impacts upon their romantic choices – Annie quickly falls in love with Bobo because “I have never known what it is to be truly cherished.” Niecy, who has been “rehearsing all [her] life” for motherhood, makes a life-changing choice between a passionate, unconventional relationship that will not give her children and one that will – plus wealth and social status as well.

Jones has said that “Much of the novel is about … hope: is hope a virtue or a detriment?” Is Niecy (as her Aunt Irene tells her when she is small) luckier than Annie because she has no hope – she knows her mother is dead? Will Annie’s eternal hope of a reunion - a hope that defines her life - set her up for a lifetime of disappointment, or worse?

The spectre of segregation looms large in the women’s lives – from catching buses, to seeing movies, to the provision of bathrooms. It also – ominously – governs access to healthcare. Almost as significant as race – and connected to it – is class. Niecy learns at Spelman that money talks in the Jim Crow south. Poor African-American students (like her) face expulsion if they break curfew; wealthy students do not. A department store open only to whites will open after hours to African-American women with money.

Jones’s language fizzes and sings – a movie theatre “sprawls the whole block like a rich man’s girlfriend stretched out on a chaise.” She is a fierce admirer of fellow American writer Toni Morrison because “she is not afraid of plot, not afraid of politics and not afraid of language”. The same could be said of Jones herself.

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