Some of my favourite novels start with the childhood of their characters and follow them into adulthood. Kin by Tayari Jones is one of those novels. Kin tells the story of two motherless girls, Vernice and Annie, raised by kin in poor black families in Louisiana. In harsh family conditions, the girls sustain each other through their strong friendship and shared grief.
Vernice and Annie take quite different paths in their lives. Vernice enters a more privileged world when, with the support of her church, she leaves town to go to college. Annie leaves home for Memphis in her teens in search of her mother. The life journeys of both take all kinds of intriguing and entertaining turns. Throughout it all, the girls remain the most important people in each other’s lives.
In alternating chapters, Vernice and Annie tell their stories in their own distinctive voices. In doing so, they bring to life the colourful black talk of America’s south. The language is lively and funny and full of hard-fought wisdom. As well as allowing some satire of the wealthy black families in the story, it provides a rich underlay to this coming-of-age story.
Tayari Jones’s first novel, An American Marriage, told the story of a married couple in America’s south who were separated when the husband was arrested and jailed for a crime he did not commit. Like Kin, it was imbued with the language of the south but its key message was about the racism underlying the justice system. While Jones’s later novel Kin contains its share of light and dark, to me it conveys a different message. It shows how the love found in friendship can be as strong and consequential as the love of kin.
