Tayari Jones’s new novel, Kin, is brimming with Black women. It is alive with chosen family and grandmothers and aunts and mothers both absent and present. In the beginning are “cradle friends,” the two motherless girls, Annie and Vernice (called Niecy), who narrate alternating chapters as their lives unspool separately. Even in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, Niecy, whose mother was murdered by her father and who is being raised by a strict aunt, has a headstart on Annie, whose abandonment by her shiftless mother has left an insatiable need in her heart. Step by step, we follow the girls on their diverging paths: Niecy to college in Atlanta, where her education at Spelman introduces her to a cultured class of Black professionals; Annie on a road trip to Memphis that’s interrupted by a formative stay at a brothel and ends with her working at a dive bar. Along the way to a devastating finale when their lives finally reconvene, Jones returns again and again to the theme of kinship: how women lift each other up; how they step into or away from traditional roles; and how they love each other in family, in friendship, in duty, in passion, in absence, or in heartbreak.
Kin is not a book about victims or villains. It’s not a book about racism, though its fabric is woven with the inescapable reality of being Black in the 1950s and the literal and metaphorical haunting by the not-so-distant horrors of slavery. Jones keeps the Civil Rights Movement to the background, an ever-present hum that informs the space these characters inhabit. Nor is Kin a book about low-down, cheating men: two of its most sympathetic characters are Annie’s patient, charming boyfriend, Bobo, and Niecy’s proud, loving husband, Franklin. There are no wicked stepmothers or selfless maternal figures. Even Annie’s “trifling” mother, Hattie Lee, evokes our sympathy. Niecy and Annie themselves are well-shaded, their innate goodness braided with compromise, secrecy, and obsession. Though Niecy rejects what may be a truer, more radical life, Jones isn’t interested in punishing her or portraying her marriage to Franklin as oppressive. And though Annie’s tragic path is shaped by the outside forces of poverty and class, she is also frustratingly incapable of transitioning from a hurt child to a grown woman.
Jones’s vivid language animates characters ranging from Lulabelle, the whorehouse madam, to Mrs. McHenry, Niecy’s generous, snobbish mother-in-law, both maternal figures. There are many permutations of motherhood—grudging, nurturing, life-threatening—but, at its heart, Kin is about friendship. Jones knows that chosen family transcends blood. As Annie says, “Me and Niecy weren’t sisters, and nowhere near twins. I didn’t have what she got nor the other way around. What you have the same isn’t what binds you. Hearts grow strings because of what you know that’s the same, what happened to you that’s the same. And when what you want is the same.” In this generous, lively novel, we bear witness to how these women’s friendship transcends their differences and binds their hearts, so that each knows herself because the other knows her.
