A Tale of Two Orphans

Tayari Jones begins her superb new novel Kin with the harrowing start to life for two girls born in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in the 1940s. Vernice is six months old when her parents die in a burst of violence. Annie is just days old when her mother abandons her. She never learns who her father is.

Each child finds a home with relatives — an aunt for one, a grandmother for the other — who accept the responsibility without providing much affection. The “cradle friends” find the unconditional family love they crave, the kinship they need, in each other. Vernice and Annie tell their intertwining stories in alternate chapters, as they grow up side by side and then as their paths diverge, taking them to strikingly different places before they circle back to each other. Vernice goes to Spelman College and a life among the genteel daughters of the Black professional and business classes of Atlanta. Annie finds work in a Memphis “hole-in-the-wall” bar, while living with a musician who is also a denizen of the nightlife.

Jones’ previous novel, An American Marriage, a critically acclaimed bestseller that was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite novels of 2018, investigated how families work while also confronting the larger issue of racism embedded in the American justice system. Because Kin, the author’s fifth novel, is set in the South of the mid-20th century, Vernice and Annie are not just facing the usual trials of growing up. Their personal journeys are strewn with love affairs, heartbreaks, setbacks, small triumphs, and in Annie’s case, an obsession with finding her mother. But as young, Black women of their era, their literal journeys are laced with terrors common to their race and gender. As Vernice remarks about the tragedy that defines her infancy: “This was Louisiana in 1941. We were colored. Something was always wrong.”

Once they get on the road to their separate destinations, every place they stop is a potential journey’s end, and Jones imagines the anxiety of their travels. Black travelers packed food for themselves and to share with others, and they staked out safe places for restroom breaks and overnights if traveling by car. By bus, they sought stations with waiting rooms they could use. In one heart-stopping scene, Jones describes a child suddenly seized by the need for a bathroom when her father’s bus is late: “Everyone in the waiting area was gripped with panic. Even the men. We did not want this baby to spoil her clothes.”

Annie takes a car ride with three friends to get from Louisiana to Memphis, where she’s been told her mother lives. After a breakdown, the travelers are stuck for weeks at a whorehouse in rural Mississippi, where they have to wash sheets and do repairs to earn money for car repairs.

Vernice, accepted at the elite, historically Black women’s college Spelman (the author’s alma mater), initially tries to make the trip to Atlanta by bus but must give up that plan when she is terrorized by a driver after taking the wrong seat.

Jones, who teaches English and creative writing at Emory University, has a gift for placing a reader in a specific time and place with her glorious grasp on details. The descriptions of a magnificent Atlanta movie house, a Memphis dive bar at Christmas, a bourgeois living room, or a spartan rooming house flow quietly along in the background, providing unobtrusive ballast to this dynamic, emotional, beautifully constructed tale.

The voices of Annie and Vernice are as fluid as their friendship. When Annie writes that her boyfriend left her, Vernice thinks: “If I ever found myself in his company, I was going to tell him about himself,” though she acknowledges that could only happen “if he and Annie were pulling covers again.” After finishing the letter, she says, “I was soft-set like a Jell-O salad.” 

It’s a sensation readers of Kin may experience.