Motherless girls take divergent paths in ‘Kin’ by Atlanta author Tayari Jones

When Atlanta author Tayari Jones set out to write her new book, “Kin,” she was contracted to write a contemporary novel about gentrification in Atlanta.

“For whatever reason, the novel just wasn’t happening,” said Jones, author of “An American Marriage,” winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019. “It kind of felt like I was in an arranged marriage. It made sense, but it just didn’t have that mysterious thing that happens when a writer and a subject really connect.”

Instead, Jones wrote an historical novel set in the 1950s and ‘60s about lifelong friends Annie and Vernice, two motherless girls born in small-town Louisiana who take different paths in life to fill the void left behind by the absence of a mother’s love.

“I just started writing on a piece of paper with a pencil, doing what I call a word doodle to see where a story takes me, and that’s when I met Annie and Vernice,” said Jones, who teaches English and creative writing at Emory and Cornell universities. “I assumed they were the parents of who would become my main characters, and so I was just waiting for the main characters to appear and they did not. I realized that what I thought was backstory was the story and I had to just follow that.”

And what an engrossing and heartfelt story it is.

Orphaned in infancy, Vernice is raised by her Aunt Irene, an independent, single woman who left Louisiana for Ohio but is forced to return to care for her niece. She raises “Niecy” as a proper lady and, with the help of their community, sends her off to Spelman College in Atlanta, where she’s courted by a lawyer from the influential McHenry family.

Annie is raised by a gruff and inattentive grandmother after Hattie Lee, her “trifling” mother, abandons her. Determined to find Hattie Lee, Annie drops out of high school and runs away to Memphis, Tennessee, where she supports herself as a barmaid and falls in love with a musician.

Despite the distance and their differences, the bond between Annie and Vernice holds tight, strengthened by letters exchanged over the years, until they are fatefully reunited in young adulthood.

An excerpt of a conversation with Jones about “Kin” follows. It was edited for length and clarity.

Q: Our culture places so much importance on romantic love, but as “Kin” beautifully illustrates, the bond women share with their female friends may be equally essential. Can you comment on that?

A: I do believe our friendships are the other love stories in our lives. … What’s so important about friendship is that (it) is a relationship you are constantly choosing to renew. … In your biological family you don’t have the choice to decide that your mother isn’t your mother. You can go no contact with her, but she’s still your mother. With friendship, you’re allowed to break up with friends and you don’t. It’s a relationship you’re choosing to have. I think there’s just so much agency in that. And who you choose as your friends tells us so much about who you are.

Q: Do you have a close-knit group of girlfriends?

A: It was at Spelman that I came to learn the real importance of female friendship. When I was there in ’87 it was the end of the curfew era so you were literally locked in with all these young women, and we formed close relationships that endure to this day. I’ve been out of school 35 years this May, and those relationships are so at the center of my heart.

Q: “Kin” poses the question: Which inflicts more emotional damage, losing a mother through death or losing one through abandonment? How are Annie’s and Vernice’s lives shaped by that question?

A: They both kind of organized their lives around trying to find a mother. Because Vernice knows she’ll never see her mother again, she is able to commit to a mother figure. She is able to commit to Mrs. McHenry as her mother in a way. And Annie, because she has that hope, she wakes ever morning hopeful, but she goes to bed every night disappointed. She could not fully embrace her found family because she’s holding a seat in her heart for her mother.

Q: Being set in the ‘50s and ‘60s, “Kin” explores not only the constant threat of unwanted pregnancy but also unwanted motherhood and the toll that takes on a child — I’m thinking about the women who had to raise Vernice and Annie. Can you talk about that?

A: What I realized in writing this is that when women did not have control of their fertility, really no one in the community had control of their lives because all these children arrived and needed to be looked after. You could end up with a child regardless of what decisions you had made in your own life. So, of course people would be resentful about having to rear a child when you had nothing to do with that child being here. And the children, it’s not their fault. They just want to be loved, but the kind of love that they crave is not available to them.