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[AUDIO LOGO] OLUFEMI TAIWO: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to your house, our house, Africana Studies and Research Center. My name is Femi Taiwo, and for this moment I happen to be the current chair of the center. And I'm always overjoyed when we call on you, I just say yes to coming to hanging out with us again. May you never find a reason not to come hang out with us. May we never do things that will make you not want to come and hang out with us. So please keep it going.
I'm glad to have you here. And in a moment, I'll hand you over to my colleague Professor Riché Richardson. My job is just to welcome you and welcome our special guest, [? Versatile ?] Jones, whom I'm yet to meet and I'm meeting now.
[LAUGHTER]
And definitely, I hope-- I [? clearly ?] have no hope. I'm sure whatever happens here going forward this afternoon will reward the time that you have chosen to expend on us. Welcome. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
RICHE RICHARDSON: I want to start just with a prelude and show a brief video for us this afternoon and as we all welcome Professor Tayari Jones to Cornell.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Dear young students, I'm writing to you because I care about you. I've not met you, but we're connected with the sense that you and your generation are the future of my community, my country, and my world. I believe that young people like you and elders like me must learn from each other. There's an African proverb that says, "The young can go fast. The old ones know the way."
Over the course of my life, I've learned many lessons. I want to share three of them with you as you continue on your life's journey. A good education is not only important if you want to make a good living, it's also a key to living a good life. A quality education will prepare you for whatever profession you wish to follow. And because your generation will change jobs and professions several times in the course of your life, a good education will prepare you to make those changes.
A quality education is also important if you want to live a good life. That is how you will not only learn about your own history and culture, you will learn about the history and culture of people who are different from you. Early in my life, I also learned the importance of being of service to others. I was taught that doing for others is just the rent you gotta pay for your room on Earth. That lesson was reinforced as I watched how my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, the members of my church, individuals in my community looked after each other. Whether I'm engaging in a simple act of kindness or an ongoing service activity, what I am doing for others, it comes back to me tenfold in the form of a mighty good thing.
The third lesson I have learned is the importance of courage. Dr. Maya Angelou, one of the great writers of our time and a civil rights leader, once said this, "Courage is the most important of all of the virtues because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently." It takes courage to speak up when you witness someone being attacked because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability, or any other identity. It takes courage to do what you know is the right thing to do when others are urging you to follow them in doing what is clearly not the right thing to do. It takes courage to do everyday acts, like saying I'm sorry when you've offended someone or to forgive when someone has offended you and asked for forgiveness.
It takes courage to be your authentic self rather than doing what others are doing when if you do it is a violation of who you are. It can take courage to refuse to give up after you have repeatedly failed at doing something, something that's important. There's a Japanese saying that reminds me of this. It says, "Down six, up seven." If you have not done so already, I will bet you you will fall madly in love with learning. May you always be of service to others, and may you always have the courage to do what you know is the right thing to do. [? On ?] Jonetta bench [INAUDIBLE].
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
RICHE RICHARDSON: Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogoho:no. The Gayogoho:no are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an Alliance of Six Sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America.
We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogoho:no dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogoho:no people, past and present, to these lands and waters. This land acknowledgment has been reviewed and approved by the traditional Gayogoho:no leadership.
I want to thank everyone for coming out today from across campus and the larger community, as well as other places. I applaud [? Cyndi ?] Grecco, Bob [? Weiss, ?] and the AD White Professor-at-Large program in general, and thank faculty, staff, and students who are here today for attending various events this week as well in some cases.
I also want to thank our administrative staff, Treva Levine, [AUDIO OUT] and Hannah Langtry, who started out with us today, for their work in helping to coordinate this event along with the cosponsors. It is so much my delight and honor to introduce the award-winning New York Times best selling novelist Tayari Jones' keynote talk today as an AD White Professor-at-Large, whom I am delighted to help give a heartfelt welcome to the campus as the faculty cohost for this visit alongside Ishion Hutchinson.
According to the program, Cornell's first president AD White had noted that Cornell's location was remote from great cities and centers of thought and action and to cause our community to become disconnected and "provincial" in spirit. So he proposed a system of nonresident professors. At the university's 100th anniversary, which was founded in 1865, the AD White Professor-at-Large program was formally established to bring the world's greatest scientists, artists, and scholars to campus.
The goal of this program is to bring accomplished and distinguished individuals to Cornell to advance the intellectual and creative life of the campus and community, but Cornell, through interactions with students, staff, faculty, and members of the broader local community in a manner that transcends traditional boundaries of academic disciplines.
AD White Professors-at-Large are appointed for six-year terms and, during that period, engage in 2 to 3 immersive campus visits. There are currently 19 AD White Professors-at-Large spanning the arts, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences. Current appointees include Nobel laureates, MacArthur awardees, Pulitzer prize winners, Grammy awardees, Emmy award winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, et cetera.
Prior AD White Professors-at-Large include John Cleese, Jane Goodall, Wynton Marsalis, Barbara McClintock, Toni Morrison, and many other remarkable individuals. You can find the full list on the website at the AD White Professor-at-Large program.
This week, the Tayari tracker, hashtag, the hashtag that documented and followed her events in national and global contexts in the months after the publication of her award-winning novel, An American Marriage gained new meaning and came to mind while witnessing and hearing about the extraordinary impact she has made through her encounters with faculty, students, and staff engaged in so many dynamic dialogues. Already, her impact has been quite profound. It's like we need our own Tayari tracker here right at Cornell.
On Tuesday, after she visited my first-year writing seminar, The African-American Short Story, one of the students wrote me this note. Dear Professor Richardson, I hope you are doing well. I wanted to let you know I really enjoyed class today, and I found the conversation with Tayari Jones to be very insightful and inspiring. Please pass on my gratitude and thanks to her. Thank you.
Tayari's special and deeply engaging way of telling stories, teaching, dialoguing, and connecting with people also came to mind last night at Statler as we walked into the dining room, where a table of about 10 students were seated toward the back, whom we greeted. In the dim light, she asked, Isn't that one of your students, the second from the right?
Indeed, the same student had stayed a few minutes after class the day before to ask more questions and for a photo with her, asked for a photo with her. The testimonies about Tayari's impact that I have heard this week have all attested to how phenomenal and brilliant she is as a teacher, writer, literary critic and cultural theorist, and analyst.
Just like my students, I first met the person whom I introduced to them as Professor Jones during my freshman year at Spelman College when she was a junior, serving as the editor of this literary magazine, then entitled Focus, to which I submitted two poems for consideration that year, and then as a campus reporter on the staff of the Spelman Spotlight newspaper for which she worked as one of the editors. In the latter context, she helped assign my stories and edit them. Her seriousness and passion about her writing were evident even then. I admired her deeply and learned a lot from her example and peer mentoring.
Then, as now, she is among my dearest and most cherished Spelman sisters. And over the years I have truly treasured our friendship within the special Spelman sisterhood. The image of the continents on planet Earth with Spelman's campus map at the heart of it, the holiday greeting cards sent out to all Spelman students and alumni during my sophomore year and Tayari's senior beautifully illustrated that Spelman is global and that the women of Spelman and the sisterhood can be found everywhere in the world and are ever on a mission to help make it better.
This was a time when the continuing commitment of our campus to service under the leadership of our beloved sister president Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole had garnered recognition by President George HW Bush as one of the nation's 1,000 points of light. In addition to being a Spelman sister and dear friend, I am now delighted, excited, and honored to call you a colleague here at Cornell and to see you sharing and shining so brightly in your own special light here on campus.
And to help welcome Tayari to my home department, The Africana Studies and Research Center, like its other friends, Toni Morrison, John Bracey, Dorothy Cotton, Gloria Joseph, Jackie Melton Scott, and so many others, we are delighted and extend a warm welcome to you to The Africana Studies and Research Center today and hope that you continue to feel and find a home here during your tenure in this capacity and continuing forward.
The vision of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison helped us challenge conventional canonical notions that center whiteness and to increasingly recognize the relevance and representativeness of Black experience for thinking about human experiences in national and global contexts. We too are America, it suggests, to echo the words of Langston Hughes' famous poem.
This is the premise from which novelist Tayari Jones writes and works among a new generation of writers positioned at its vanguard, while also importantly helping to reshape Southern literature, which is exciting to see to me, as a Black Southern woman, artist, and scholar within the field of Southern studies, a field that Professor Jones's innovative fiction is also energizing. This is an area to which her keynote today speaks what we answer to, a Southern daughter's reflection.
Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage, which was a 2018 Oprah's Book Club selection and won the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, The New York Times, and Callaloo.
A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a United States Artist Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute, Bunting Fellowship, and the 2021 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fiction.
Silver Sparrow was named a number one Indie Next Pick by booksellers in 2011, and the NEA added it to its Big Read Library of Classics in 2016. Professor Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She joined the faculty of Emory University's creative writing program in fall 2018. Please join me in welcoming Tayari Jones to speak to us today.
[APPLAUSE]
TAYARI JONES: While he's situating, I will say [? that ?] I'm [? loud. ?] I will say thank you, Riché, for that beautiful introduction. And thank you for all these years of sisterhood and for your contribution [? in ?] this vital work that you are doing, this vital work that we are all doing. One thing, being here all week at Cornell, has really shown me how important this intellectual labor, how important it is and how, even though so many of us are from different fields, that we're all working together toward finding a truth because that's one of the things that everyone is freaking out about AI because the idea is that we will not be able to agree upon what is reality.
And I feel like the kind of work that we're doing at our universities-- and when I say we, I mean us specifically. I understand that other people at other universities that are doing things that are not toward this goal. But I feel like the work that we're doing is the work that will save us.
As this is my first visit as an AD White Professor, I wanted to take this keynote address as an opportunity to introduce myself to you and to express my gratitude. So who am I? Well, in the 33 years since I graduated from Spelman College, I have lived in the following places, Iowa City, Houston, Athens, Georgia, Tempe, Arizona, Johnson City, Tennessee, Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, Washington DC, Jersey City, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Las Vegas.
This nomadic life was all in service to my desire to write novels. I bounced from institution to institution, opportunity to opportunity, all because each afforded me the means and time to concentrate on art. And while I don't regret these choices, I don't know that I would exactly recommend this path to anyone that would come behind me. But this is the road that I've taken, and it is one less travel that in turn required a lot of traveling.
And because of all the miles that I have put on my personal odometer, you would think that I would stutter or at least pause when someone asks me that simple icebreaker question, where are you from? Atlanta. I answer without hesitation. When the question is posed when I'm outside of the peach state, this one word is sufficient. But when I'm in my hometown, this is merely the first line of inquiry. It goes something like this. See if I can do this.
Where are you from? Atlanta. Oh, what part? Southwest. Where at? Cascade. But what high school? Benjamin Mays. Oh, you're a [? grave ?] baby? Yes, but I was technically born in Hughes Spalding. Oh, you're fancy then. Did you go to Spelman? Class of 1991. Ha, I knew it. I could tell as soon as you walked in the door.
[LAUGHTER]
I find great comfort in being so easily identified after so many wandering years. It is ironic that my writing took me so far from home, but it was my memories and longing for that very same home in which I discovered my voice and my subject matter. And ultimately, it was my writing that brought me back where I belonged.
My first novel, Leaving Atlanta, is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Atlanta child murders. When I was a child in Atlanta, in the 1970s and early '80s, there was a serial killer that killed about 29 Black children. And we say about. People disagree on how many children were killed. People disagree because records at that time were not well kept about the lives of Black children. And then there was this thing where some children were considered to be officially murdered on the list, and others, I don't know, unofficially murdered? Two of the children were students at my elementary school.
After the murders, after someone was arrested and the murders seemed to have stopped, as a group, Atlanta decided to stop talking about this. I was not curious as to why the larger American society did not talk about these murdered children. We all know the answer to that question. But I was very curious as to why those of us who experienced it had decided to behave as though it had not happened.
I knew that I wanted to write about this subject when I was a student in college. I used to babysit a little boy, and I would tutor him in math, me. I tutored someone in math. So you know how small he was.
[LAUGHTER]
And I went to the corner to pick him up where he was to get off the school bus. And I looked for him, and I could not find him. And this provoked such a panic in me, I ran back to campus. And I was telling everyone that I couldn't find him and begging people to help me look. And most people said something along the lines of, you know, he'll be fine. He's probably just at Popeye's getting some chicken or something. And I understood that this [INAUDIBLE]. And everyone who helped me look for him was someone else who had grown up in Atlanta.
At the time, I thought it was that kind of hometown kinship thing you do in college. We're all home girls together, and so they're going to help me. But I should say when I found him, he was at Popeyes eating chicken, just as all rational people suspected. I realized it was because we had grown up together in Atlanta, and we had this trigger, this memory. And I thought, someone should write about this. But at that time in my life I didn't know that someone was me.
Flash forward to when I was in Graduate School studying creative writing. I was starting to write a coming-of-age story. And what I know of coming of age involves a backdrop of these murders. But I wasn't sure if I was going to write about it. I don't know. I kind of [? waited, ?] didn't quite feel up to it, or it felt like it was a job for someone else, someone more skilled, someone more something in the way that we can often think of ourselves as young people, not quite ready.
I was at a reception, and I mentioned to someone that I had grown up during this time of these murders. And the person said, oh, my goodness, she said, I bet you didn't even have a childhood. And it really rubbed me the wrong way because to tell someone that they didn't have a childhood is telling them they lack humanity. Childhood is a human experience. And regardless of what may have happened in the city of Atlanta during my childhood, it did not mean that I was not a child. I had been a child, and I had a childhood.
And so I decided that I would be the one to write about growing up in Atlanta during the child murders. I did not want to write about the murders. I was not interested in the whodunit. I did not want this to be a story about the state. I feel that when you write things as a police procedural or something it becomes about the state. And I wanted it to be about the community and about those of us who grew up at that time. What was it to come of age in the wake of these murders?
And so I thought that, by way of a little introduction of what I do and how I do it, I would read a short bit from that book. So I'm going to read to you from the section of-- from the point of view of a young girl. Her given name is Octavia, but her mama calls her Sweetpea. She does not live in the housing projects in Atlanta. She's very particular about that. She loves to say, I don't live in the projects. She says, we live across the street from the projects. And for her, this distinction makes all the difference.
And she is at home watching television. I like to say, for when there are younger people in the audience, that when we were growing up, you got the news at 6 o'clock and 11 o'clock. There was no way in between to find out what happened. And so we would watch the news at this time to see if any more children had vanished. And this is a moment when Sweetpea is watching television. Her mother works at a factory, and so she's home alone at night. And her mother locks her in.
"Before she leaves, mama comes into the room and puts an extra quilt on my bed. She does that no matter what time of year it is. I always make little sleepy sounds when she kisses my forehead, but as soon as the lock clicks, my eyes pop back open. I stay in the bed a while longer to make sure she's good and gone. I used to have my feet on the floor as soon as the door shut, but one time she came back to get her sweater. It took some fancy dancing to get out of that one.
The first thing I do when I get out of bed is put on my shoes. I get nervous, and I like to be ready to run if I have to. I never had to, but it's good to be ready. And the next thing I do is get my door key from my nightstand. I threaded a shoestring through the hole so I can put it around my neck. I've only had this key for about two years. Mama used to just lock the door and shut me in the house, and the door would stay closed till she came back. But three little kids who stay in the projects across the street, they got burned to death while their mama was at work. So after that, we rode the bus to Kmart and got a key made just for me.
Once I got everything I need, I head to the living room to watch TV. It was a regular night. I was wrapped up like a mummy in my quilt with the TV turned to the 11 o'clock news. I had watched the 6 o'clock show with mama, but I like to watch it again at 11:00 to make sure that everything is still OK. Channel two is the best channel because they got Monica Kaufmann, a Black lady, giving the report.
As soon as the theme music went off and the camera zoomed in on Monica, I knew that somebody else was dead. Whenever there was bad news, she took a breath before she talked like she was fixing to dive underwater. I held my breath too and waited for her to tell us who it was. Please, God, let it be far from here, I prayed right quick. But I should have known that praying makes things worse because it gets God's attention, like with Job. Right there in the middle of the screen was my friend Rodney.
Monica has this way of talking about everything like it was just a ribbon cutting downtown or something like that. A 12th child has been reported missing in Southwest Atlanta tonight. Police are looking for information regarding the disappearance of Rodney Green, on and on like that. She said almost the same thing when Ja'shonte next door came up missing. It would seem like there should be some different words to talk about two people that were nothing alike. But all Monica had to say about both of them was that they were gone. And then they showed Rodney's mother and father. They both just said how much they wanted him back, just like Miss Viola had said back in October.
And even I was almost the same. I was on this same couch in my same pajamas staring at this same TV like I had never seen one before. But last time, my mama was with me. We knew Ja'shonte was missing because his mama had been all over the neighborhood looking for him she Knocked on our door twice you see Ja'shonte? she said. I had the door locked because my mama wasn't home. No, ma'am, I hollered. She came back again, and I said, no. Mama came home before Miss Viola came back again.
Miss Viola had on a Black skirt and yellow and green top, thick stockings the color of white ladies stretched up her legs and tied off at the knee. She sat down at our rickety table while mama fixed her a cup of Black coffee. When was the last time you seen him, mama asked her? When he went off for school this morning. Mama looked at the clock. It was 9 o'clock at night. She'd only been looking for him since 8:00. I said quiet as I could so I wouldn't get sent to my room, you gonna call the police now? You think I should?
Yeah, mama said, they can help you look. But I got some hot checks at Big Star, some other places around town. Her voice faded out. Sometimes the police pick people up for stuff like that. Viola, mama said, this ain't no time to be worried about no bad checks. This is your baby. You're right, Miss Viola said, pushing up on the table to get up. Wait a second, mama put another cup in front of her, you better get another cup of coffee in you before you go talking to the police.
Now, why does she need to have coffee before she talked to the police? I don't know. She done look to me like she was finna fall asleep. But maybe coffee makes you brave. Granny says that it puts hair on your chest, and mama doesn't let me touch it because she believes it'll stunt my growth. So when they put Ja'shonte on the 11 o'clock news, I was ready. But this Rodney thing caught me by surprise like a cheap trick, like when Leon put vinegar in my thermos at school. And I took a big gulp, set my whole head on fire. I coughed so hard, the vinegar came out my nose. And all the kids laughed at me. When I saw Rodney's school picture on the screen with the task force number blinking under it, my crying came hard and sudden like a coughing fit. Then they put a big clock on the screen. It's 11:15. Do you know where your children are?
Mama knew where I was, and I knew that she was at the Sunbeam factory making bread and imitation Twinkies. But knowing don't mean nothing if you can't be there. And anyway, by the time a mama can figure out that she don't know where her child is, it's all over with anyway."
So I wrote that novel. I was still in my 20s when I wrote it, and I felt like girlhood was still close to the surface of my memory. And I felt like it was a part of my life that I had not seen in a book yet. And I think it was generational. I grew up in Southwest Atlanta. When I say I went to segregated schools, it makes it sound tragic in a world in which it was not tragic. I went to all-- I guess it's probably better to say I went to all Black schools, where we had-- I like to say those old-school negro school teachers that were very concerned with your penmanship and your elocution. You will not do any violence to any verbs--
[LAUGHTER]
--in the presence of these ladies. But I had not seen my coming of age represented just because we hadn't gotten old enough yet, right? I think that a lot of times when you think about writing the story that hasn't been written, it implies in there that your own reading has somehow been-- you've had deprivation, probably racial. But that wasn't the case for me. It was just generationally the story had not been told.
The title of the novel, Leaving Atlanta, was not only a quiet reference to my own life but also a reference to how the child murders shook the promise and fantasy of Atlanta as the city too busy to hate. Sweetpea, my heroine, ends her story by moving to Orangeburg, South Carolina to live with her father, whom she barely knows. But Atlanta was not a safe place, and her father, a professor, promised to provide her with an education. And as the greyhound bus pulls away, she muses, I'll be missing my mama for the rest of my life.
And when I wrote that line, it was my own homesickness talking. But it was also the beginning of my understanding of Atlanta as an idea, not just a real place. The great migration in which thousands of African-Americans fled south in pursuit of jobs and other opportunities up north is the subject of a wealth of scholarly inquiry. And while the trunk of a Black family tree may root in the soil of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, there are fruit-bearing branches as far north as Minnesota, as far west as Los Angeles.
But not as much is said about migration within the South. Atlanta's HBCUs-- Atlanta has four HBCUs, five, us, Morehouse, Clark, Morris Brown, ITC, Morehouse School-- we got more. We got six Black-- we have six HBCUs in Atlanta. And so Atlanta is known as being a hub of a Black middle class, but it's also created a Black middle class. And so many people from small towns in Georgia, Alabama, whatever, they came to Atlanta for their future. I think that the idea of the South as a place of opportunity is under spoken about because the narrative is that you left the south to go north. North is where the jobs are. But a lot of people stayed south, and they came to Atlanta.
My own daddy came to Atlanta after his older brother Clifton-- Uncle Clifton came to Atlanta, sent for daddy, who sent for Uncle Frank, who sent for Uncle Carl, much in the same migration patterns that people see with people traveling from country to country. My family traveled from the country to Atlanta. And the thrill was Atlanta had Black everything, Black mayor, Black schoolboard president, Black police chief, Black every-- my daddy always said that, Black everything. And we had a Black mayor. Maynard Jackson was elected 50 years ago this year.
And so, for a person like me, the child of two PhDs, both of whom were the first in their families to attend college, Atlanta was also the site of a generational divide. And much of the gulf between the generations was just likely a matter of changing society than the location. But in my mind, these were conflated. My daddy, like I said, was from the country, where they fought against segregation. My mama participated in the sit-in movement when she was just 14 years old. And they did all of this so their kids could have more. And Atlanta was the more. Atlanta was this gleaming city on a hill.
But all of our lives we knew that our parents had secrets they didn't tell us about. I think the reason they didn't talk about the child murders is that we were in the habit of not talking about that stuff. How can you move forward if the past, if this ugly past that you've worked so hard to escape is on the tip of the tongue? But I always felt like, just that my parents had a memory just behind like when they met me, that they would never share. And this is something that I try to encapsulate in the writing that I did, that part of being a southern person is getting your parents to tell you the truth.
I haven't been that successful, that said, just for the record. If they don't want to tell you, they cannot tell you. But I'm going to read a section from Silver Sparrow in which in a beauty parlor a secret is revealed. And it's a story that you may know, that you may not have ever thought about. This chapter is called Love and Happiness.
"On October 18, 1974, when a really pissed off Black woman flung a pot of hot grits on Al Green, her hair was freshly pressed and curled by none other than my mother. As a result of our little brush with negro history, nobody made Al Green jokes in our house or even in The Pink Fox--" that's her mother's salon-- "where you can imagine a lot of women fantasize about taking revenge on a lying man.
I think the women like this story, not just because of the drama of it, but because grits were the weapon of choice. The boiling cereal reminded them of being stuck in a hot kitchen, poor, and barefoot in the days before they had ever heard of waffles or hollandaise sauce. This girl, whatever her name was, took the entire state of Mississippi and used it to kick somebody's ass. All you had to say was Al Grit, Al Green, and grits in the same conversation, and the titter of laughing started. But my mother cut it off with a quiet that's not funny. You couldn't hear it in her voice, but if you looked at her face, the way she closed her eyes and tucked her head down like she was in prayer, you knew that she was serious.
The woman who did it was named Mary. The Atlanta Journal said her family name was Sanford, while Jet magazine called her Woodson. She told my mother she was visiting Atlanta for a few days in order to attend an AME Usher board convention. Even before she noticed Mary's cross pendant, simple, the jury equivalent of two sticks tied together, mama knew that the woman was saved. Even after what happened next, mama says she never doubted that Mary had come to Jesus. The truly saved don't have to go around talking about it. They just have this quietness about them, like they know exactly where they're going.
Mary walked in on a Tuesday evening, opening the door at 7:30 after mama had finished her last customer of the night. As a matter of fact, mama was untying her apron and switching the gas off under the irons when Mary crossed the threshold looking like a kindergarten teacher at the end of a long day. She wore a pink pantsuit, stylish, but the top stitching on the pockets gave away that it was homemade. Mama said she'll never forget that face, smooth as a brown egg, no lines or crinkles, like she had never laughed or cried in her entire life.
And this was not a good night for a late customer. My mama wasn't all that steady on her feet, and this was her first full week of work after her gallbladder operation. These days, they can do the whole thing with lasers and make just a little hole in your belly button. But in 1974, the doctors had to cut you open straight down the middle, gut you like a fish. Mama was laid up for two weeks. And during that time, Grandma Bunny came to see about her.
When Mary came into the shop, Grandma Bunny was only two days gone back home. To make matters worse, I had come down with a cold and a touch of fever. In the corner of the shop, I dozed fitfully on a pallet, coughing and whimpering in my sleep. Besides, it was time for mama to change the bandage on her wound. Do you take walk-ins? Mary asked. I know you're likely closing up, but maybe you can find it in your heart to help me.
Although it was only a couple of weeks until October, something put my mother in the mind of Christmas. Maybe it was just as simple as the name Mary, but mama felt that God would want her to take this stranger in. I'm not well, but I might could help you, my mother said, depending on what it is you need. I'll tip you good, Mary said, sitting in a chair like my mother had already said yes. She pulled half a dozen bobby pins out of her scrawny bun and unwrapped a red rubber band that came back clotted with hair. Thank you, she said, and god bless you.
Mama got Mary into the shampoo bowl, and half her hair lay down straight and docile under the faucet. That's what happens when you've been getting hard presses for more than 20 years. Some of the kink just gets lost. Can I talk to you? Mary asked my mother. Of course, mama said, nobody in here but us. I'm leaving my husband, she said. We're not equally yoked. Mary, like my mother, had married young. Mama didn't say anything one way or another. She just combed through Mary's half nappy hair, sectioning it off and platting it up to dry.
The bible says that your mate got to be your equal. Y'all have to both love the lord in the same way. Mary's voice was calm and steady. It was warm for October, so mama had the door propped to let in the breeze. She could smell burning leaves. You have children? She asked. Mary said she had three, but they would be all right with their father. The lord, she said, had called her to another man. They were going to minister together. This new man was going to take some working on, some praying over, but the Lord was inside him. She could feel it burning through his skin. This boyfriend, Mary said, was chosen.
You ever touched the hand of a preacher that is truly righteous, that has the healing in his hands? You know how it's like he empties out your body and just fills you up with spirit? Mama nodded her head because she had met a preacher like that years ago when she was just a girl. This was after the baby boy had died and she was wandering around looking for somewhere to go. The preacher that touched my mother was a child, a little girl, Black as a cast iron skillet, with a nurse's cap pinned on her short hair. My mother was walking by struggling with the basket of laundry when this girl preacher grabbed her by the arm. Mama felt herself hollowed out and filled with light.
This little girl preacher held a white leather bible in her dark hand. Will you pray with me? Mama said she didn't have time; although, she was still warm for the child's touch. Are white people's dirty drawers more important than your soul, sister? Come to me, said the little girl. Come to me. Get on your knees. Mamma looked over her shoulder. They were standing in front of the colored high school where Raleigh and James were in class. Mamma could imagine the Home Ec teacher looking out the window and seeing her kneeling in the street with this pickaninny preacher and the basket of laundry beside her. I can't, mama said. I can't. The little girl said, that's pride. Give me your hand, sister. Your vanity is your burden. Lay it down. Let me touch your soul.
My mama extended her hand, greedy for another dose of that touch. The child squeezed her fingers and said, you don't have to get on your knees. God can touch your heart while you're on your own two feet. Mama says her legs just gave out under her, and she was on her knees in the road. And that little girl stroked mama's face and talked to Jesus while my mother sobbed. Ask the lord to take care of my baby, mama begged the girl. He'll take care of you too, the girl said. And with every caress of her tiny hands my mother felt her spirit mend.
So yes, my mama told Mary, I have been touched by an anointed preacher just one time. This man I got, Mary said, he sings. No matter what he's singing, he's got God in him. People come to hear him and start crying. They think he's crooning about love between a man and a woman, worldly love. But what he's doing is making them feel Jesus. He is a miracle. We are going to build a ministry together.
On my palate, I woke up sweating and confused. I sat up and called for my mother. I called for her with a sound like a frightened question, like it was the middle of the night and I was all alone. I'm here, baby, mama said to me. Lie back down, OK? To Mary she explained, she woke up with a fever this morning, and I've been giving her aspirin. Ginger ale is good too, Mary said. If you have some fresh ginger, grate some of that in the glass. She won't like it, but it'll help.
I called for my mother with a voice full of tears. She sat her hot comb down and walked over to me but didn't bend down to hold me. So I stood up and grabbed her around the legs. Mary, mama said, can you help me? I've been operated on. I can't lift her. Where's your husband? Mary said, walking to me. If she won't let you hold her, don't be hurt, mama said. Sometimes she doesn't cotton to new people. I love children, Mary said. I have three, two girls and a boy. I miss them, but you have to do what the Lord calls you to do. She reached for me, and I released my mother's knees and held out my arms. I was big for my age, but she lifted me easily. She's got a bit of a temperature, Mary said to my mother.
The story is that she held me in her lap like I was little, even though I was nearly five. I just rested my head on her breast, sweating a dark spot into her pink lapel. After mama finished pressing Mary's hair, she smoothed it with a boar bristle brush. Mary's fine hair crackled with static. Ghost strands stood up on their own and danced. It's not just lust when we're together. Mary twisted in a chair and searched my mother's face. Mama said, I know.
Mary didn't want the curls combed out since she was going to have to ride the bus eight hours to Memphis, and she needed her hair to be fresh when she got there. She took mama's address, writing the street number on a folded index card. I'm going to write to you when I get everything set up. You have to come meet him. You need to feel that healing touch again. My man is true, she said. He's true as the word.
When she was done, mama didn't even want to take her money. So Mary tucked the $20 bill in the little pocket of my dress. Mama didn't notice because of all the commotion I caused when Mary tried to leave. She set me down and headed toward the door, and I threw a fit. Don't go, I said, over and over, grabbing for Mary's legs. Mama was so embarrassed that she forgot her condition and bent to pull me away. The pain caught her by surprise, and she staggered a little bit. Mary picked me up and kissed my feverish little face. Jesus loves you, she said, and you too, Laverne. You just have to trust and believe.
Just then, daddy came into the shop with Uncle Raleigh close behind carrying bucket of chicken. What's going on here? He said, reaching for me. He had to pull me because I refused to unhook my arms. Let her go! He yanked so hard that I started to cry. Mama was embarrassed. There's nothing wrong. She was just helping me out because my stitches were hurting. Goodbye, Laverne, Mary said. Don't let this trouble you none. I'll be seeing you again. When the door claps shut behind her, my daddy leaned in to kiss my face but pulled back as a shock hurt his lip." I'm going to skip forward a little bit to a few days later.
"About three weeks later daddy came home early on a Wednesday. He walked in the shop while mama was trying to do three heads at once. Someone was holding me, but this time daddy didn't pay it any mind. Laverne, can I talk to you for a second? He said. Mama wasn't in the middle of anything chemical, so she went outside and sat with daddy on the porch. What is it? Everything OK? Nothing like that, he said. I was just wondering. That woman that came in late last night, that night, the one in the pink. Mary, mama said, Mary was her name. I saw her picture in Jet, daddy said, handing my mother the folded back page. She was the one that threw the hot grits on Al Green. I told you she was crazy. Mama looked at the article, tracing the words, moving her lips as she read what happened in Memphis just one night after Mary left our shop.
What did he do to her? Mama said. What did he do to her? She threw a pot of hot grits on the man while he was getting out the bath tub, and you want to know what he did to her? Oh, Mary, mama said. Black women, daddy said. Y'all, know y'all is crazy if y'all don't get your way. Oh, Mary, mama said again. Oh, girl. This is not a story my mama tells. To her, it's not just gossip. It's something closer to gospel.
One late night, mama was fixing up a girl who was half bald on the left side from snatching at her own head. She opened her mouth to show mama where she clamped her jaw so tight that she busted one of her molars. While mama rubbed magical grow into the bald places until her naked scalp shone like it was wet, she shared the story of Mary. You listening, baby? Mama said. When you love a man that much, it's time for you to let him go."
That story was interesting to me because I had heard about this woman who threw the grits on Al Green. I had always heard about that, but what I didn't know was that, after she threw the grits on Al Green, she took her own life. That's why Al Green found God again. Everyone always said, you know, those grits, it wasn't that. It wasn't the grits. It was her blood that cost him. So he gave up secular music and rejoined the ministry. But this woman has become a punchline in her death, and it reminds me of the women who died at Jonestown, how those were mostly Black women who died at Jonestown. And they're now the ones who quote unquote-- whenever someone says, oh, you drank the Kool-Aid, they are referring to all those dead Black women. And they have become-- they have become a joke.
And so I thought about that too and the way it's like the title of this talk is-- Lucille Clifton said, what they call you is one thing. What you answer to is another. And in terms of writing, it's a lot about self-definition and who you say you are and being able to-- what you answer to-- and when you write a novel, in my view, when you write a novel and you say in the novel, this is who I am. And when you say this is who I am, in many ways, you're saying this is who we are. And your readers answer you. By giving you their time and attention, they answer you. Do they answer what you have written?
In my fourth novel, An American Marriage, I thought a lot about this, how do you say who you are? Are you heard? Leaving At-- not leaving Leaving Atlanta, sorry, An American Marriage is a story of a young couple separated by a wrongful conviction. And Celestial, the wife, has to testify on behalf of her husband. She has to say who he is as she says who he is to me. And in this-- it really made me question the limits of your truth, the limits of your truth. So I'm going to read to you the part when she has to testify to her husband's innocence.
And I will tell you that I wrote this during when George Zimmerman was being tried for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Do you all remember Trayvon had a friend. I don't know if she was his girlfriend, but it seemed like she was. And there was a lot of talk over whether or not she had been a good witness, right, because she did not seem to be a daughter of the middle class. Her appearance did not seem camera-ready. But she was speaking the truth of who her friend was. And it made me wonder, is the truth enough? And under what circumstances is a Black woman believed? So I'm just going to read that little bit. This is Riché's book, and her marginalia is in here.
[LAUGHTER]
I almost want to do a reading and then step to the side and tell you what she wrote in the margin. She wrote stuff like, wow, crazy.
[LAUGHTER]
OMG, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
It pleases me, though. It pleases me because this is what you answer to. I'll take it. OK, this is when she's being called-- she knows her husband is innocent because she was with him at the time.
"What I know now is this. They didn't believe me. 12 people, and not one of them took me at my word. There in the front of the room I explained that Roy couldn't have raped the woman in room 206 because we had been together. I told them about the magic fingers that would work, about the movie that played on the snowy television. The prosecutor asked me what we had been fighting about. Rattled, I looked to Roy and to both our mothers. Banks objected, so I didn't have to answer. But the pause made it appear that I was concealing something rotten at the pit of our very young marriage.
Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him. Maybe I wasn't appealing enough, not dramatic enough, too not from around here. Who knows? Uncle Banks coaching me had said, now is not the time to be articulate. Now is the time to give it up, no filter, all heart, no matter what you're asked. What you want the jury to see, is why you married him.
I tried, but I didn't know how to be anything other than well-spoken in front of strangers. I wish I could have brought a selection of my art, all images of Roy. I would say, this is who he is to me. Isn't he beautiful? Isn't he gentle? But all I had were words, which are light and flimsy as air. As I took my seat, not even the Black lady juror would look at me.
It turns out that I watch too much television. I was expecting a scientist to come and testify about DNA. I was waiting for a pair of handsome detectives to burst in the courtroom at the last minute whispering something urgent. Everyone would see that this was a big mistake, a major misunderstanding. We would all be shaken but appeased. I fully believed that I would leave the courtroom with my husband beside me. Secure in our home, we would tell people how no Black man was really safe in America.
But 12 years is what they gave him. We would be 43 when he was released. Roy understood that 12 years was an eternity because he sobbed right there at the defendant's table. His knees gave way, and he fell into his chair. The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in a way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso, and finally through his lips. When a man wails like that, you know it's all the tears he was never allowed to shed.
As Roy howled, my fingers kept worrying a rough patch of skin beneath my a, souvenir of scar tissue. When they did what I remember is kicking in the door. What everyone else remembers is opening it with a key. After the door was opened, however it was opened, we were both pulled from the bed. They dragged Roy into the parking lot, and I followed lunging for him wearing nothing but a white slip.
Someone pushed me to the ground, and my hit the pavement. My slip rolled up showing everything to everyone. And my tooth sank into the soft skin of my bottom lip. Roy was on the asphalt beside me barely beyond my grasp, speaking words that didn't reach my ears. I don't know how long we lay there parallel, like burial plots, husband, wife. What God has brought together let no man tear asunder."
Writing An American Marriage itself was a kind of testimony for me. And I do believe, on some level, it had an effect on those who heard it. And it allowed me to take my southern truth all over the world. It's published in 27 countries. I have visited child prisoners. They say they're not prisoners. What do they say? They say they're child, like detainees. They have no children in jail. I visited child prisoners in Idaho. They have been there-- these kids have been in this juvenile detention center for years.
And I visited-- I was interviewed on prison radio in London. I played with babies in a women's prison in Dubai. I've been talking about the effects of criminal justice systems on people's lives all over the world. And it has expanded my horizons in ways that I could not have imagined. But the most important thing is that doing this work made it clear to me that it was time to come home. It was time to come back.
Writing about Roy's incarceration caused me to articulate his profound homesickness. And it caused me to reckon with my own. It made me question myself as an artist. I noticed that my characters were spending more and more time indoors. So while I completely understand kind of a southern culture and sensibility, I was losing the landscape. I was becoming-- in Atlanta we changed the names of schools. We changed the names of streets. We change the names of things all the time in Atlanta. And I no longer felt confident that when I say, like for example, Confederate Avenue is now United Avenue. I didn't feel confident that I could say what the names of places were anymore because I had been away so long.
Also, I was living in Brooklyn. I was drinking coffee in the coffee shop. I looked around the coffee shop, and I saw so many major American writers all drinking coffee in the same coffee shop. And if there's a such thing as there's something in the water, if there was something in the water, we were all drinking the same water. And I fear that it's making a sameness about American letters. All of our editors live in Brooklyn. We're all in a very small place that makes for a sameness. And I'm really trying to make the case for everybody going home to-- I didn't want to be a southern writer in exile anymore.
And I think in writing Roy's homesickness, it really drove that clear. I thought that I could be a reverse carpetbagger. Like I traveled all over. And instead of pretending to be from wherever I landed, wherever I landed would make it clear to me that I was not from there. And I thought that I could live and kind of straddle the Mason-Dixon line in a certain way. But lying straddling is what Morrison would call a thin love, which you know she says ain't no love at all.
I want to end with Roy's last letter when he finds out-- I don't know. I just lost my Post-it note. That might not happen-- Roy's last letter when he finds out he's going home. His wife is Celestial, and he calls her Georgia, which I think was my subconscious messing with me about the idea of returning to Georgia. He's been in prison for five years. They've been estranged. He's been gone a long time, but he's coming back.
"Dear Celestial, can I still call you Georgia? This will always be my name for you in my head. So Georgia, this is the letter I have been waiting five years to write, the words I have been practicing. I even scratched it into the paint on the wall beside my bed. Georgia, I am coming home. Your uncle came through. He went over the heads of these local yokels and ran it straight to the feds. Gross prosecutorial misconduct basically means they cheated. The judge vacated the conviction. The local DA didn't care enough to retry. So as they say, in the interest of justice, I will soon be home free.
Banks can explain it to you all in more detail. I've given him permission, but I wanted you to hear it from me, to see it in my own handwriting, that I will be a free man one month from today, in time for Christmas. I know that things have not been right between us for some time now. I was wrong to take you off my visitor's list, and you were wrong not to fight me about it. But this is not a time for blaming each other for what we cannot change. I regret not answering your letters. It has been a year since I have received any word. But how can I expect you to keep writing when you thought I was ignoring you? Did you think I forgot you? I hope I didn't hurt you with my silence, but I was so hurt myself and also ashamed.
Will you hear me when I say that the last five years are behind me and behind us, water under a bridge? I know that we can't start love over, but this is what I do know. You have not divorced me. All I want is for you to tell me why you have chosen to remain my lawfully wedded wife. Even if someone else is occupying your time, you have chosen to keep me as your husband these many years. In my mind, I picture us at our same kitchen table, in our same comfortable house, passing quiet words of truth. Georgia, this is a love letter. Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you." Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
And now I'm happy to take any questions you may have. I am friendly and approachable. Approach me. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Oh, that was lovely. Thank you so much. As I was listening, I noticed that religion and ritual come up is such an almost sensuous way in a lot of your writings, like the original girl that's waiting for her mother to leave the room so that she can go and watch the 11 o'clock news, or even the way that the women are in the hair salon and also the memories that the woman is invoking as well. I'm wondering if you could talk about that.
TAYARI JONES: I am interested, I'm very interested in religion. I'm a southerner that was raised in a home without religion. My parents are both preacher's kids. And my parents are actually now divided on the whole religion question. My mother has completely gotten back into it. But we would go visit my grandparents, who were very religious. And they would religious us up. In the summer, we went to vacation bible school, the whole nine. My grandparents were like, we are not going to jeopardize these children's souls because their parents have lost their minds.
And so it made me self-aware about religion because I felt like Christianity was something we did in the summertime. And I was always very drawn to it. I was very drawn to the scripture and all the rituals around it. And I feel that I express it more in my writing, that it's a space where I get to do that because it feels organic to me. I wrote a piece for The New York Times about when-- you know how when you're a child and you have to say a bible verse. And I would always say Jesus wept because it's the shortest one.
And I just felt like my cousin was looking at me like, you know, they were like, see? You live in Atlanta. Your daddy don't go to church, and you don't even know no bible verses. And so I learned the whole 23rd Psalm, the whole one. Yea, though I walk through the valley of shadow of death, I feel no evil. Thou art with me. I could go all the way. Anointing the head in oil, all of it. And I remember that moment was the first time I had what kind of felt like a religious experience. I felt transported by that. And I often, when I'm writing, I kind of feel that same thing. And I try to get it on the page as best I can. Yes, Mindy.
AUDIENCE: I'm trying to [? figure out ?] how to phrase this question, but although I [INAUDIBLE] before I [INAUDIBLE] I felt like it was introduced to me really by [? that, ?] particularly by the way you approached, for lack of a more elaborate phrase, love. And that [INAUDIBLE] by the time we got to Sweetpea's story, focusing on Sweatpea, I realized that-- I felt like I didn't need [? to ?] be [INAUDIBLE] there was the kind of tidal wave that we can love each other and build [? each other ?] up and had as a whole brilliant survival strategy.
And I just wondered, I also took a long time to read the novel because of what it was about, because I also grew up in that time. But then I was also surprised by both the [? meaning ?] of that love and also the playfulness of the characters [INAUDIBLE] in that novel and how she comes up and [? has ?] these moments that lighten the heaviness. But they're also more like life than they are like-- leading us [INAUDIBLE]. So I wonder if you could say something about what you were trying to do with all those heavy [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] that focuses on love, not just in the novel, but I see it now throughout [INAUDIBLE] the word.
TAYARI JONES: First, thank you for that careful reading. One thing I've always believed is that Black people, we're more than our suffering. And I think everyone has something about their life that someone could decide is a suffering that should define you but doesn't. I think we've all had that experience where you've told someone about something that happened to you. And they can't believe you're walking around. It's just part of life. It isn't life.
The child murders specifically, one thing that came with the child murders is that, as a Black child, we felt very loved during that period. People all over the country were trying to save our lives. I remember when the children from New York sent us their milk money. It was like a large trunk, like a trunk you would think on a pirate ship. And it was filled with dimes and nickels. The children from New York sent all their lunch money. They collected it, and they shipped it to Atlanta to help.
The Black men of Atlanta, there were three different approaches to how they were going to save the children. The mayor, he would sit at a table with a big table full of money, and he was going to give this money to anyone who could solve the murders. So we got to see someone trying to save us with money.
We also saw the Nation of Islam guys were out walking, trying to look intimidating in their bow ties and everything. And kids, we weren't that impressed because we were just like, how can they save you in church shoes? They can't chase somebody.
[LAUGHTER]
And then the third way that people were going to save us were the unemployed men of Atlanta formed an organization they called the Bat Patrol, B-A-T. And they walked through the city with baseball bats. And they would walk around, and they were going to-- they would handle anything they saw. And as children, we could get behind that. We were like, I can see that. The mayor was like, absolutely not. We are trying to be the convention center hub of the south. We are not having unemployed Black men walking around with baseball bats downtown. Absolutely not.
But I remember it as a time being incredibly flattering as a child. And we were also given a lot of the things that children should have. There were all these after school programs. So kids who didn't have any place to go after school now had ballet lessons. I took tap, toe heel, toe heel. We got to do all these things, and that is also what I remember. Lucille Clifton has a [? cause ?] for everything. But what she said, they want me to remember their memories, but I keep remembering mine. I remember.
I also remember the brave mothers, the mothers of the children organized. And they made something that was like-- they were all-- they had like tenants meetings to make more affordable housing. And they had-- it was called the Committee to Stop the Children's Murders. And these women were maligned. They would hold galas to raise money for the investigation, and they would not invite the mothers because they were poor, because they didn't have good grammar, because they didn't look like what Atlanta should be. They came anyway. Yes, they did.
And so I remember that as well. And so that's what I do when I write. I try to remember the whole thing that happened, the whole thing. Yes, ma'am.
AUDIENCE: On the same topic, [INAUDIBLE] that I had not been aware of the [INAUDIBLE]. The only one I knew was [INAUDIBLE]. And so obviously, you were aware of it when you wrote this. What were you interested in doing that [INAUDIBLE]? She [INAUDIBLE] hers was more [INAUDIBLE].
TAYARI JONES: A little conspiracy in there too. She had a little side order conspiracy also in her novel.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
TAYARI JONES: Yes, well actually, her novel came out at the same time as mine almost [? died. ?] I almost-- can you imagine? Here you are, somebody's first-time novelist. You're writing your book on the Atlanta child murders, and then you see in Publishers Weekly that the late, great Toni Cade Bambara's posthumous novel on the Atlanta child murders is coming out edited by none other than Toni Morrison. I was like, I quit. I quit. I just quit. But so my book was done when her book came out. Hers came out maybe six months before mine. But here's one thing that I knew. People think that-- even Baldwin's The Evidence of Things Not Seen.
People think that child murder is something that happens to parents. Like when I would tell people, I grew up in a child murderers. They would say, oh, my God, your poor mother. No one really was thinking about the generational effect of it. And see? The difference between the way children experienced the child murders and adults is that children have no sense of history. Our parents saw this as a continuation of the racial violence they had grown up with. They felt like we thought we had escaped. And now, this racial violence has come back. Because children also are seen as symbolic.
People-- I believe that children are the future. People think children are the future. Children don't think of themselves as the future, right? It's like how Margaret Atwood said, little children don't see one another as cute to each other. They are life sized. And so that's how we felt. We felt that we were living our lives, and we did not understand it as part of a continuum.
And I think, so that way in writing from children's point of view, my story is more in the moment and has more pleasure in it because there is pleasure in childhood. There is still candy to be shoplifted from the local store. There's still these things to be done. And I think in writing the child's point of view, even though ironically we were the targets of the violence, I feel that we were more able to multitask our lives during the violence because we did not have the weight of history. Yes, ma'am.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. My question is maybe another novel without right going to the [INAUDIBLE]. Why did he have to go to prison? Given the social meaning of prison experience [INAUDIBLE] Black [INAUDIBLE]. So what would be an alternative way of writing about the love without that experience?
TAYARI JONES: Roy also was like, why did I have to go to prison? I do think the idea of, in some ways, prison is the boogeyman under the bed, right? There's this sense of he did everything right. He went home to the small town where he's from in like [? prison-- ?] he got away from where he was from. And it seemed like he had put that possibility behind him. And then he goes home for a short visit, and it comes to get him. And he feels like it's almost fated. I do think that had Roy-- people often ask me, had Roy not gone to prison would this marriage have survived? People ask me that a lot.
And my answer is, we don't know. What was taken from them was figuring out if their marriage would survive or not, whether or not they would wreck their own marriage as opposed to having it wrecked. And I think that's really what this took from him, was this agency over the events of their marriage. And I also think about her. She says she grew up feeling like people say, well, when you're Black, you have to be twice as good to get half as much, right? We've all been told that. Well, this is the case for her in the issue of marriage. Just to stay married, all kinds of random people stay married, right?
I'm sure there's random people in this room that are successfully married without any heroic effort. But she would have had to be a superhero to remain married. And that really was one of the issues that I was looking at. But I think if Roy had not gone to prison-- I don't know. You think they would have stayed together? Who's read this book? You think they would have stayed together? Mindy say, no, it was done. Do you think so?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
TAYARI JONES: She says yes. What do you think? Riché, would they have stayed together? I can look at your margin notes and tell you.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, she has things in margin like, that's cold blooded.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes, ma'am.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to swing this back to your opening comments where you talked about how much you've traveled from place to place and your final comments about having to feel like you really need to get back to Atlanta to-- you feel like you were beginning to lose that connection, right? And just it brought to mind the comment that my dissertation advisor had mentioned to me, that sometimes it's important to get away from the place that you are in order to be able to write about it.
And I wondered where you wrote your books and whether you felt that being in different locations, having traveled so much, and since pushed you to think about it, what you wanted to write in a different kind of-- in a way that you might not have if you had stayed in Atlanta and not done this [? traveled ?] [? well? ?]
TAYARI JONES: I do think that being away from home made me realize what Atlanta was. Who was I telling today? I was talking to somebody today that I did not believe that America was a majority white country. Did I tell y'all that? I had heard this. I had heard this. But I felt about white people being the majority in America the way you feel when people tell you the Earth is 80% water. You're like, OK, I've seen a map. I get that. But in your heart, don't you feel like if the Earth was 80% water, how are we sitting here? You believe it, but you don't believe it. And that's how I felt.
And then when I moved to Iowa, it became abundantly clear. And that clarity did inform my writing, that I-- and I don't know if it informed it for the better or not. But it did change my-- I did have a feeling of writing as a form of pushing back in a way that I did not understand writing as pushing back when I was a student at Spelman College. To me, at Spelman College, being a Black woman writer felt like I was going with the tide. And I think that it probably gave a little more edge to what I'm doing when I found out in Iowa. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you so much [INAUDIBLE]. What inspired you to write? When did you know you were a [? historian ?] when you write short stories, I'm just going to turn this over to that [INAUDIBLE].
TAYARI JONES: Well, I always-- I always loved to read and to write as a child. But what I didn't know is that I could be a writer. I didn't know that what I was writing could be important because I think I was telling somebody-- I've talked to so many people since I've been here. So if you already heard this, I'm sorry. But when I was coming up as a child, if you were a girl and you liked to read and write, people thought it was about your character, that you were nice, a nice girl, a nice girl in a library.
No one ever asked me what are you reading? What are you reading? What are you writing? But when I was in college, I met a writer. And she was my teacher. And she said to me once, what are you thinking about these days? And I got ready to tell her, I wanted to say something smart. And she says, no, don't tell me. Write it down. And in that she became my first audience. And I started to feel like what I wrote mattered.
I mostly wrote short stories, not because of any real affinity for the form. But it's really all I thought I had in me. I remember the first time I managed to make a story extend past 10 pages, I felt like, OK, I'm on the way. The first novel I wrote was a dog of a novel. It was-- it-- terrible. But I felt like I wrote it. It's complete. And I know it's not good. I knew it wasn't good. But it was complete.
And I felt like, OK, if I can write a bad novel, I can write another novel. And it could be a little better. And if that was not good enough, I could write another one. It could be a little better. And that's how I came to become a novelist. And I look back on it, and I'm actually very grateful that I did not have more encouragement. I used to be bitter. Oh, bitter is too strong of a word. What's next to bitter? I was bitter, but I was bitter like a negroni. You know just somewhat bitter but still delightful.
[LAUGHTER]
Because I felt like nobody encouraged me. I wasn't encouraged. My parents didn't think I was going to be a writer, and I would fantasize about what my life would have been like if I had had all this encouragement. But I now know that you just need someone to encourage you. Everybody doesn't need to encourage you. And as I told a class, also, I think the way life knocks you around when you're trying to be an artist, you have to be strong enough to peck your way out of your own eggshell, right? You can't expect someone to take a spoon and tap the eggshell and lift off the-- you have to be able to peck your way out of your own eggshell. I don't know what that's going to look like on the video. But--
[LAUGHTER]
So that's what I believe. You got to peck your way out. Yes.
AUDIENCE: I have a nosy question.
TAYARI JONES: Uh-oh, here we go. I want to know what café in Brooklyn you were writing at that all the--
[LAUGHTER]
It's right across from Green Light Bookstore.
AUDIENCE: I'm from California, so I wouldn't know. But I want to know for the [INAUDIBLE].
TAYARI JONES: But you know, now I hear that after the pandemic so many of those cafés have shut down. But in Brooklyn, you can see anybody in the café.
AUDIENCE: Well this is the follow-up then because I want to know what it's like to be in that coffee shop with all of these other writers and know what-- for me, I imagine I'd be like nosy about what is it that their writing. What's going on? Is there a community there? What it feels like to sit in that coffee shop and drink the same coffee because when I, for example, [INAUDIBLE] I'm in the archive doing work, it's hard for me to concentrate on my own work because I walk in, and I'm like, I wonder what everybody else is looking at and what they're writing. I don't know.
TAYARI JONES: I think at first, when you first get to Brooklyn, you're shocked by all the writers. You're like, oh, my goodness, are those the Jonathans? There's you know-- but after a while you get over seeing them, I think. You get used to them. But I think one thing that was odd about living in Brooklyn was that it was exotic if you met someone that had not written a novel. If you meet someone and they say they haven't written a novel, you're like, really? You haven't? That's the person you want to talk to at the party. So you just didn't write it. You just woke up this morning and did what? That is fascinating. No books.
The writers are so oversaturated there in that way. But the challenge of living there is that you constantly compare yourself to other people. You know too much of other people's business. You got to keep your eyes on your own paper. And that's why I broke up with the internet for a while. I broke up with the internet-- because I felt like Instagram is Brooklyn in your phone. And I needed to get away from that and just listen to the voices in my own head and try to write the book that I think needs to be written and not worry about what other people are doing. I think it's an important lesson no matter where you live because comparison is the enemy of, not just your happiness, but of art, I believe. Yes, last question. She had that like wrapping-it-up energy.
OLUFEMI TAIWO: This has just been outstanding, fantastic [INAUDIBLE], such a blessing. I hear you so much on the idea of the psyche of the child as [INAUDIBLE] nine years old. And the isolation of it all, just on a normal [INAUDIBLE] my family, as we were pulling out of the parking lot, there was a long black car, the type that people would refer to as a batmobile, four doors, kind of like that horror film, the [? car. ?] And it was right behind us as we pulled out. And then pulled on down the bypass. And not [? only ?] that, but then when we turned on the interstate, it turned onto the interstate.
And passing the first exit and then the second one. And then it got off at our exit. And all the while I'm taking furtive glances back trying to think, oh, my goodness. Is someone in there going to get me? And then when we got off the interstate, then oh, my nerves just went overboard because they got off too, and then they made the same left turn under the bridge that we made. And then the same right one. I was just a bundle of nerves, like internally. As a child, my family just had a normal conversation all around. And then we went on down the [INAUDIBLE] Road, which runs down beside our street. And we turned onto my street, and then it went on down the [INAUDIBLE] Road.
I had never felt relief before or since like I felt in that moment to see that car pass on. And the melodrama that played out in my mind was very visceral. And I think too of what it meant to watch the news as referred to here and to hear that saying every night, it's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? Yes, that was the motif, the mantra night after night. The question I have is about-- and I [? have done ?] studies too, but when we think of the concept of daughter in American letters, but [? seven ?] letters especially, sometimes it's invoked in a very reactionary way, as in where is this the Daughters of the Confederacy.
And to think about what it means to reclaim the idea of a daughter. And especially as Black women, who grew up in the south, who were born in the south, I think it has a very different meaning. And I would love to hear you maybe speak to what those meanings have become that are very different, and in some ways even insurgent related to the specificity of Black cultural experience.
TAYARI JONES: Well, you think about-- and for me, this is something [INAUDIBLE] have in common, all roads lead back to Morrison. And there's in Tar Baby, when on [INAUDIBLE], you don't know how to be a daughter. And what she means by that is you don't know what it is to serve, like what it is to be-- serve is so strong of a word. But she's saying, you don't know what-- the daughter. You're the one that takes care of your parents. You take care of that older generation. And in that way I think people resist it, and as a daughter, you-- being a native daughter is different than being a native son, right? But in reclaiming it, I like to think of myself as a daughter of the south, as a steward of stories, of what has been passed on.
That is the way that I like to think about it. And even claiming the word south, there-- I used to eat my heart out because I was never invited to any southern literary things. I was only invited to Black things. But I was never invited to anything southern. And I felt like I was fighting my way in. Like when I was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers, I was like, that's right. Like I am a member of this thing. Where all my white colleagues were feeling so pigeonholed regionally. They're like, we're more than southern writers.
And it's very interesting that they were trying to cast it aside, where I was trying to put on that cloak. And I think it's important as southerners that we claim that this is who we are. I think that the famous remarks of OutKast at the Source Awards when he said the South got something to say. That claim, the urban south for Atlanta, or even like, y'all saw Usher at the halftime Super Bowl? He said I brought the world to Atlanta. Or did he say i brought Atlanta to the world? He said, I brought the world to Atlanta, I think. But anyway, yes, and that's an exciting way of claiming Southernness.
But I also want to claim the south for Black women. And I want to claim the south, the urban south as part of the south. People think southern literature is about grandmothers and mules, right? And I've never seen a mule. I wouldn't know a mule if it walked in here, right? I guess I could through process of elimination we could figure out what it is. But what I'm saying is that that rural agrarian experience is not mine, but it is, in fact, southern. I want southern to be a bigger tent. Ooh, I'm tired. We good, y'all? Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Tayari Jones, A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, presents the public keynote talk, “What We Answer To: A Southern Daughter’s REFLECTION ,” on Thursday, March 21, at 5pm, at the Multipurpose Room, Africana Studies and Research Center. This event is part of an A.D. White Professors-at-Large (ADW-PAL) visit and is cosponsored by the Dept. of Literatures in English and Africana Studies and Research Center.
Jones is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University. She is the best-selling author of An American Marriage , which won the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction and was named a 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection. Jones' other novels include Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling , and Silver Sparrow . Named one of TIME's "10 Best Fiction Books of 2018," An American Marriage "illuminates the waves of injustice and heartbreak that unravel families entangled in a flawed judicial system." The New York Times describes An American Marriage as "beautifully written" and "wise and compassionate."
Jones was elected in 2019 to the A.D. White Professor-at-Large program, which was established in 1965 to bring the world’s greatest scientists, artists and scholars to Cornell to advance the intellectual and creative life of the campus and community.
