Fresh Air - Best Of: Delroy Lindo / Tayari Jones on ‘Kin’

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

Delroy Lindo stars as Delta Slim, a gifted and haunted blues musician, in ‘Sinners.’ It's a performance that has earned Lindo his first Academy Award nomination. He wants to win, but he says he won't let it define him either way. “I have never taken my marbles and gone home as a result of whatever disappointments, the vicissitudes of the industry.”Also, we hear from novelist Tayari Jones. Her new book ‘Kin’ is a story of two motherless girls in 1950s Louisiana who became each other’s chosen family. The idea for the book came from her own experience of losing a friend. “When you're friends with someone, you know your name will not be listed in any obituary. But it breaks your heart to lose your friends,” she tells Tonya Mosley. To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From W. H.Y.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Delroy Lindo. He stars as Delta Slim and Sinners, as a haunted blues musician. It's a performance that has earned Lindo his first Academy Award nomination. He says he wants the award, but he also won't let it define him. I have never taken my marbles and gone home as a result of whatever disappointments that this isitudes of the industry. And I want to believe, and I want to claim that I will not do that now. I will continue working. Also, we hear from novelist to Yari Jones. Her new book, Kin, is a story of two motherless girls in 1950s, Louisiana,

who become each other's chosen family. The idea for the book came from her own experience of losing a friend. When you're friends with someone, you know, your name will not be listed in any obituary, but it breaks your heart to lose your friend. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. My first guest today is Delray Lindo, an actor whose presence has shaped film and theater for more than 50 years. From West Indian Archie and Spike Lee's Malcolm X to the charming and cruel drug kingpin and clockers to a father guarding an unspeakable secret in the cider house rules. For me, Delroy's characters often feel lived in and complicated and hard to shake. In Ryan Cougler's latest film Sinners, Delroy Lindo plays Delta Slim, a heart-drinking, deeply knowing blues harmonica player in 1930s Mississippi. Blues, it wasn't forced on us like that religion. We brought this with us from home. It's magic what we do.

It's sacred. Delroy Lindo is nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his. his role as Delta Slim, his first Oscar nomination in a 50-year career. Sinners leads all films this year with 16 nominations. Lindo trained at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and made his name in the theater, Broadway, Yale Rep, and the Kennedy Center, performing August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry before Spike Lee brought him to film audiences. Over the decades, he's moved between stage film and television, from Get Shorty and Ransom,

to his turn as the razor-sharp attorney in the good fight. In 2020, he reunited with Spike Lee for Defive Floods, playing a traumatized Vietnam vet, returning to the jungle to recover buried gold and the remains of a fallen soldier. Doerre Lindo, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I want to set up sinners for those who have not seen it

and to remind those who have seen the film. So Sinners is this haunting Southern epic set in 1932, Mississippi. and twin brothers Stack and Smoke, both played by Michael B. Jordan, and they return home from Chicago to open a juke joint, only to find that their plans are overtaken by this supernatural evil as vampires. And who do, and there's buried trauma, and it all converges into this single horror-filled night. And I want to play the scene where we first meet your character, Delta Slim.

In this scene, Stack approaches you at a train station, where you're busking and tries to convince you to play at the juke joints opening night. And you're hesitant at first until Michael, S. Stack, wins you over. And Stack speaks first. I'll give you $20 to come play at our juke tonight. Yeah, I wish I could. I'm going to be messing this tonight. Simmons I am there every Saturday night.

They ain't paying you $20 a night. I know that. You ain't paying no $20 a night. You paying $20 maybe. two night. Tomorrow night, a week after that? Nah. I've been to messiness every side night for the last 10 years. Messia's going to be there another 10 years after that, at least. I play and I get as much corn liquor as I can't drink. Sending like me, I can't ask for more than that. That's my guest today, Delroy Lindo, as Delta Slim and sinners. You know, there's kind of a ryeness to your character.

There's a little bit of humor there. You know, he knows exactly. what he's worth and he kind of is not going to settle for what he feels like could be a flash in the pan, you know. I read that in the first draft of the film, as it was written, your character kind of begins and ends there. And you kind of told the director, Ryan Coogler, like, he needs to be built out more. He's rich and I want to see him more in the film. Is that true? So, no, it wasn't that that my character began and ended with that first scene. what it was was that the introduction was so dynamic that what happened in the second half of the screenplay,

I was not as present. I was there, but I was not as present. And since Ryan had introduced the character, my character, Delta, Delta Slim, so dynamically I spoke with Ryan and I said, how can we enhance my presence in the second act of the film? And Ryan understood that, and he assured me that we would work on enhancing my presence in the second act. And he did. Talk to me a little bit about your preparation for this man, because there is a knowing.

There's a scene that I love so much. It's where you and Stack, Michael B. Jordan and a preacher boy, are driving through. In the car. You're in the car. You know exactly the one I'm talking about. You're driving through the cotton fields. Yeah. And you start to talk about a lynching.

Yeah. And there's so much in that that feels so real. There's a knowing in you. You're starting to tell the story, and then you just break out in humming. And that reminded me so much of my grandfather and hearing him sometimes he'd talk, and then he'd just start humming. And I want to know where that comes from, from you, that knowing, you know, that you brought to that character.

First of all, thank you for what you just said about your grandfather, because various people have mentioned to me that that scene and my presence reminds them of an uncle or their grandfather, somebody that they knew from their families. And that is a huge compliment, but more importantly than being a compliment, it's an affirmation for the work. To answer your question, it started my preparation. for this started with Ryan sending me two books, blues people by Amiri Baraka, who was DeRoy Jones when he wrote the book, and Deep Blues by Robert Palmer. And I read those books.

That was my intro into the world of sinners. And in reading those books and then referencing those books throughout production, I was given an entree into the lifestyles of these musicians. there's a certain kind of itinerant quality that they moved around a lot. The constant for them is their music. So that there is this deep-seated connection to the music

and because they are following where the music takes them, that then becomes an intrinsic part of their lifestyles. That particular scene, though, where you're talking about the lynching and then you just go into humming. It also signifies something else for me. Like sometimes when there are no words for some things. There are no words.

And when there are no words, that's where the blues comes in. There's where the music. That's exactly where the music comes from. And yet another affirmation for me, Tanya, in terms of how people have received this work it's incredibly affirming that audiences, many audiences, have made the connection between the pain of what I was experiencing

and the birth of the music. And I certainly was not thinking about that in the moment. Was it scripted? No. The humming, the harrowing, no, it was not scripted. It happened organically on probably the... six or seventh take and what is

so beautiful about that moment and its retention in the film it was born of a company of people all working together and what I mean by that is we had a very specific distance

to get the same we had a finite amount of real estate to get the scene in we started at point A and by the time we got to point B or point Z, I had to have finished the monologue. It was a three-page monologue. Within a certain amount of time. Within a certain amount of time. And then we had to turn the car around, turn all the equipment around, and go in the opposite direction and do it again. And then turn around and come back

and go in the opposite direction and do it again. On probably the sixth take, and I'm forever indebted to Mike playing stack, Mike didn't stop the car. We got to what was supposed to, what was supposed to supposed to be the endpoint, and he veered off into the underbrush and kept going. Ryan kept the cameras rolling, and as a result of that, it gave the scene more time to breathe and for us extra time, more time to be in that moment. If you're just joining us, my guest is Delroy Lindo, nominated for his first Academy Award for his role as blues musician. Delta Slim and Ryan Cougler's Sinners.

We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. So while you and Michael B. Jordan were on stage presenting an award for the BFTAs, which is basically the UK's version of the Oscars, very high honors, a man in the audience named John Davidson shouted a racial slur. And Davidson has Tourette's syndrome, and has said the outburst was involuntary, and he's apologized. And you have made some comments about it,

and I want to hear what you have to say about it. The only thing that I've said is that at the NWACP Awards, Ryan and I were presenting an award. And right before we went on stage, I said to Ryan that I wanted to just say something. He didn't know what I was going. I said, let me just, before we start reading the teleprompter, I have something I want to just say.

And what I said to the audience were, But words to the effect that Mike and I, sinners, appreciate all the love and the support that we have received as a result of what happened at BAFTA. And the fact that I could stand there in a room predominantly of our people. Of black people because it's at the NAACP Awards. The NWACP Awards. Yeah. I could stand there and feel safe, feel loved, feel supported, and just simply. affirm the love and the support that they have given us. And I just wanted to officially, formally

say thank you to our people and to all of the people who have supported us as a result of that incident. And then the second thing, I was at the after-party, the Bafters, and I don't know what I was thinking, but a gentleman came up to me at the after party and said, he introduced himself and said, oh, I'm with Vanity Fair. Now, I should have told me, this is a journalist right here. He said, I'm with Vanity Fair. It didn't occur to me. This is a journalist.

But what I said to him was, look, it would have been nice if somebody from BAFTA had spoken to Mike and I. Yeah. And that's all I said. And that's all I am going to say. Oh, I'm sorry. There was one other thing that I said. I'm sorry. I said it was an example of something that could have been, that started out negatively becoming a positive from the standpoint of the love and support that we had received. And I received a text, a biblical text that I want to just share with you. And the verse of the day is, my wife sends. verses affirmations to various people. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 1221, a negative turned into a positive, which essentially is what I didn't quote that Bible passage. I told her that when she sent me this, God, I wish I'd have said that. Do you remember the first time someone called you the N-word? I don't, but I do remember the first time I was othered because of the color of my skin. And interestingly, I'm writing a memoir right now. Plug, plug, plug, plug that will be out in 2027. And I referenced this incident in the book.

I do remember very, very clearly what happened. and my utter confusion. How old were you? Five. Oh. So I was born in England, and my mom was a nurse. I'm Jamaican.

My mom went to England as part of a movement of Caribbean peoples from the Caribbean to England, and they became known as the wind rush generation as a result of the boat. called the Empire Windrush that transported approximately 300 mostly Jamaican men

from the Caribbean to England in June of 1948. My mom arrived into England in 1951. I was born very soon thereafter and because my mom was

studying to be a nurse they would not allow her to have an infant child with her on campus. So as a result of that, I was sent to live with a white family in a white working class area of London. And this wasn't just daycare or babysitting. No, no, I lived with them. I live with them. Very loving family, by the way, I was loved.

I was cared for. But as a result of living with this family in this all-white neighborhood, I went to an all-white elementary or primary school. And I was literally the only black child in an all-white school. So one afternoon, after school, I was playing with one of my playmates. I thought he was one of my, I thought he was a playmate. And we had exchanged garments. I was wearing, like, his sweater.

I had it tied around my neck, and he was wearing my sweater or my jacket tied around his neck. And we were pretending to be superheroes, right? And we were on this patch of grass, and we had our hands out, like Superman. We were flying. And having great fun.

And at a certain point in our game, a car pulls up. And this kid that I was playing with goes over to the car and has a very short conversation with whomever was in the car which I now know was his parent, his father. He comes back

and he tears he throws my garment that he had been wearing around his neck. He throws it at me and grabs what I'm wearing, his garment that I'm wearing around my neck and grabs it from me. He throws my garment at me, grabs my garment from me and says,

I can't play with you. And that was the end of the game. That was the end of the game. But you know, the thing about that story and the fact that you were so young, five years old, you couldn't have known like the full weight of that. It took you time. But it's a story that is stuck with you because you knew that that was a signal of something. Well, it was a signal of my undesirability, right? So the answer to your question was not necessarily specific to being called the N-word,

but it was very specific to being racially othered. These are imprints. Big time. How's the writing for the memoir going? Because, you know, I'm so fascinated. I'm deeply obsessed with memoir, and I love reading them. But one of the things that I know about it is that it breaks you, wide open. You're able to see parts of yourself that you, through the process, how has that

process been for you? And how do you hold these stories? Because you said it's going to open your book, for instance. That means that that was an imprint that has carried you throughout your life, you know? Yep. It's been healing, actually. I'm not denying that it has opened me up. I've been compelled to scrutinize myself. And I'm using that word very advisedly scrutinized. It's a scrutiny. It's an examination of oneself. But in my case, because a very, very, very significant part of what I'm writing has to do with reexamining my relationship with my mom.

And so my mom is a protagonist in my memoir. I am examining history. I'm examining culture. I'm looking at certain passages of history through the lens of the windrush experience. You went to get a master's degree, right? And study this.

I did. This was that, and that wasn't that long ago, right? No, 2014. I got a master's from. from NYU in 2014. I came to formal education late. I got my undergrad degree in 2004 from San Francisco State University,

and I got my master's from NYU in 2014. So... But you wanted to delve deep into your mother's experience in the wind rush. I had to. I had to. I had to. Because my mom deserved it. And not only is my mom deserving,

all by extension, all the people of the Windrush generation are deserving. Because stories about Windrush are not part of global cultural lexicon commensurate with its impact. The people of Windrush changed the definition. of what it means to be British. There are all these black and brown people theretofore members of what used to be called the British Commonwealth. And they were invited by the British government

to come to England, the United Kingdom, to help rebuild the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the destruction of World War II. My mom was part of that movement. Yeah, yeah. They helped rebuild construction, construction industry, transportation industry, critically the health industry, the NHS, the National Health Service.

My mom was a nurse. And when I was going into, the reason that I went into NYU was because my original intention was to write a screenplay. about my mom. Oh. I wanted to write a screenplay

about my mom because I looked around and I thought, huh, where are the feature films that have as protagonist a Caribbean female, a black female?

Where are they? Now, there may be some out there, and I've seen one, not directed by a black person, but I wanted to address that. I wanted to correct that in what I see as being an imbalance. What's your mom's name? My mom's name is Anna Cynthia Moncrief.

Sometimes she would go by Luna Moncrief, and that's a whole other story. But my answer to your question, why? do I need to do this, is because my answer is my mom deserves a story about her. Yeah. And my editor said to me last week, I'm pretty certain it was in the aftermath of what happened of Bafters and the various stories had surfaced on the internet. Essentially, people just giving me love. And my editor sent me a text and she said,

your mom would be so proud. And I know she's proud. I know she is. Doe Rilindo, this has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

God bless you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Delroy Lindo is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Delta Slim and Sinners. Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrique reimagined the 1519 meeting of Spanish explorer Arnaud Cortez with Aztec ruler Magtizuma in his 2024 novel You Dreamed of Empires. Enrique's latest novel, called Now I Surrender,

also reimagines an infamous clash of cultures. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has this review. Before the captivity narrative about a Mexican woman abducted by the Apache in the mid-1800, before the storyline about Geronimo's surrender, before the torrent of details about the life and peoples on the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the U.S., there's this first sentence. In the beginning, things appear. Writing is a defiant gesture we've long since gotten used to,

where there was nothing, somebody put something, and now everybody sees it. For example, the prairie. That's the opening of Alvaro Enrique's new novel called Now I Surrender. The words are spoken by Enrique himself. He appears throughout the novel as a writer traveling on a road trip through the southwest with his family. They're visiting sites that tell the story of the Apache fight for survival.

That Prospero-like opening gives readers fair warning. about how defiantly challenging, occasionally overblown, and at times magical, this epic novel is going to be. In the self-conscious, hallucinatory tradition of historical novelists like E.L. Doctoro and Don DeLillo, Enrique keeps intrusively reminding us that this overpacked tale of the past is something he's constructing, as much as resurrecting. And like his predecessors, Enrique subscribes to a paranoid reading of history. As a character in Libra, Delillo's novel about the Kennedy assassination, says, This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.

There's so much that official history hasn't told us about how the West was won, that Enrique here works furiously to fill in some of the silences. The novel's most engrossing, if brutal, storyline follows a young Mexican woman named Camila. We first see her running into the prairie after an Apache raid wipes out everyone else living on her elderly husband's ranch. To give you a sense of how immediate and visual Enrique's writing can be, here's the moment. moment when the Apache catch up with Camila. She didn't look back, but she clearly heard a group of horses breaking away from the herd of running cattle and swerving toward her. When the dust, raised by the pounding of the horse's hooves, began to sting her eyes, she threw herself on the ground and

curled into a ball, hoping to be trampled to death. Then she was yanked up by her braids, her neck wrenched, her legs kicking, her brown underskirts of flower in the wind. Camila's abduction spurs a second narrative featuring a rag-tag search party assembled under a lieutenant colonel of the Mexican Republic. The searchers ride far into the vast territory that was once known as Apacheria. Enrique tells us this ancient homeland of the various Apache tribes vanished before our eyes, like cassette tapes or incandescent light bulbs. Where Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona, and New Mexico meet today was an Atlantis, an in-between country. And straddling it were the Mexicans and the gringoes, like two children, eyes shut, their backs to each other.

While the Apaches scuttled back and forth between their legs, not sure where. to go with strangers bubbling up everywhere, filling their lands. The end game for the Apache began in March 1886, when their great leader and shaman, Geronimo, surrendered with a small band of warriors to the U.S. Army. According to the official transcript of that moment, Geronimo said, Once I moved like the wind, now I surrender to you, and that is all. Enrique's novel, which takes its title from Geronimo's eloquent words, loses some vitality when it focuses on the story of his surrender and afterlife as a prisoner of war and a curiosity. Geronimo appeared, for instance, at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis and rode in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade the year after.

given that Enrique writes with such unsentimental admiration about Apataria, perhaps recounting the story of Geronimo's fall, felt more like a writerly duty than a desire. Now I Surrender has been described as a revisionist or alternative Western, which it is, but given its scope, I think it might be more apt to call it an expandable Western. There's room for everyone in this epic of conquest and eradication. Native Americans, Mexicans, gringoes, formerly enslaved people, immigrants, and one lone writer, gamely trying to tell their stories before the curtain comes down on the whole enterprise. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.

She reviewed Alvaro Enrique's Now I Surrender. Coming up, novelist to Yari Jones talks about her new book, Kin, about a lifelong friendship in our chosen family. This is Fresh Air Weekend. My guest is novelist to Yari Jones. She wrote her first novel more than two decades ago, but it was her fourth, an American marriage that put her into the national spotlight. When it came out in 2018, Oprah chose it for her book club, and Barack Obama put it on his reading list. It went on to win the women's prize for fiction and has been published in more than a dozen countries, praised as a compassionate portrait of love and justice. By any measure, Tayari Jones had arrived, until she hit a wall, spending years on a new project that just wouldn't come together.

During that time, she was diagnosed with Graves' disease, and her heart rate was so high she nearly had a stroke. Even as her vision suffered, though, she put an eye patch on and kept writing. And what came out on the other side is Kin. Her latest novel set in 1950s, Louisiana, and Atlanta. It's about two girls, Vernice and Annie, who grow up next door to each other without their mothers. One mother was murdered. The other simply left. That shared wound binds them, but their lives take them in different directions, one to Spelman College and Atlanta's Black Elite, and the other on a journey through the Jim Crow South in search of the mother who had abandoned her. With just one word for a title, Jones asks the question, the entire novel is built around.

Who is your kin? Is it blood or something more profound? Tayari Jones, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. You know, I mentioned in my introduction that this book came after a difficult period in your life. It also came after an American marriage, after all of the accolades. You tried to write something. It just didn't come together. and then you got sick, and then you wrote this story.

And what was it about this particular story of two women that broke through when nothing else really could? You know, that question remains rather mysterious for me because I've never before had a novel kind of come to me. You know, you hear all these other writers saying, oh, you know, it came to me in a dream or I'm just a vessel. I was never the just-a-vessel type of writer. I'm not a controlling writer. Like, I don't know the end of the book, but I do tend to know what the book is about. So just imagine, I'm contracted to write a modern novel

about gentrification, you know, in the New South, in the 2000s. But the story wasn't coming together. Well, how can I put it? It's like, have you ever known anyone that plays in a jazz band and they say, oh, the band was really swinging tonight or the band wasn't swinging. The novel was not swinging, okay? It just was not.

And you know what Elephus Geraldine told us about that. What is it? It ain't got a thing if it ain't got that swing. A swing, right? It was not. I felt like I was using hammers and nails and saws and I was making a racket

when I should have been making music. And I finally just pulled out a piece of paper and just decided to write with the pencil like I did when I was a child and just write to kind of entertain and comfort myself. Like you said, I had been ill. Things, you know, we were just after the pandemic. We had lost people.

It was just a lot going on. And I just started to write, not with an eye toward a contract or with what social statement I wanted to make about gentrification in the New South. I just started to write to see what was there in my mind, who could come to me. during this moment and I met Annie and Bernice.

But when I saw that they were living in the 1950s, I thought, well, clearly, clearly, these are the parents of my characters because I am not a historical novelist. Right. Slow down here, though, because you have solidly said over and over, and all your writing shows to be true, that you are a contemporary novelist. So, I mean, to go back to the 1950s and to also focus on friendship and sisterhood, what happened? Like, this all sounds kind of mystical, but like, it just came to you. I felt like, you know, I felt like I was in, I don't know if I'm showing my age, but I felt like Marty McFright. Like I went back to the future. I went to the past. And I felt like creatively, I was looking around being like, why is everyone dressed like this?

What has happened to me? But I think I know where it came from finally. In hindsight, I think I know. You know, I moved back home to Atlanta eight years ago. And I moved back home to Atlanta because I wanted an opportunity to get to know my parents as an adult. I wanted us to talk as, you know, as adults, like in the book when Aunt Irene says to Nisi, you know, we're going to sit down and talk like two grown women. That, I think, was my fantasy that I was going to come home and have these kinds of conversations with my, elders, but it has become clear to me that that is not their fantasy. But I think that my imagination

took me back to my mother's era. My mother was a child civil rights activist. So this is the world from which she sprung. And my dad is from a small town in Louisiana. So I think, you know, they say meet people where they are. I think this was me not meeting my parents where they are, but meeting them where they were. Tadari, I want to talk to you a little bit about your first book, Leaving Atlanta. When did you know this was the first novel that you were going to write? I actually knew it when I was too young to write it. When I was about 18 years old, I would babysit a little boy,

and I'd pick him up from the bus stop and take him to tutor him in math. And once I went to pick him up and he was not there, and it caused me what I now would call a panic attack, but I didn't have that language. I couldn't find him. I was looking for him. I went back to my dormitory, and I asked everyone to help me.

I said, he's not there. Can you help me? And the young women who came to help me look for him were all from Atlanta. But I thought this was just kind of hometown allegiance. But I now understood that they also had grown up during the Atlanta child murders. So this little boy being unaccounted for

for five, ten minutes, registered to us as an emergency. The, you know, the girls from New York, from Philly, they said, oh, he's probably just, you know, at Popeye's getting some chicken. And by the way, that is exactly where he was. But I could not bear not knowing where he was. And I said to myself, one day, I should write a book about this. And for those who aren't familiar with the Atlanta child murders, from 1979 to 1981, there were at least 28 white black American children. and adolescents and adults in the Atlanta area who were murdered by a man who was later

arrested and convicted of many of the murders, Wayne Williams. The worst of the Atlanta child murders actually happened from the time period when you were around eight or nine until about 10 or 11? Yes. Two of the kids who were killed were students at my elementary school, were two boys who could not have been more different. One was very quiet and in the gifted class. And the other was, well, to me, he seemed like he was so much older than us. And he rode a moped. But when I did my research, I saw he was only 13. He looked like such a baby when I looked at his pictures, you know, in newspaper clippings.

But when I was like nine or ten, he was this almost like this adult person that was in our class. And it frightened me because I felt like, oh, if this invincible person is vulnerable, then what's going to happen to to us just regular kids. People ask you all the time if you believe that that experience kind of like stole your childhood and you always say no. But I wonder what do you call it then when you're 10 years old and you're worried about kids stuff like recess and all the fun things that you do as a 10 year old, but you're also worried that you might get murdered.

I think that a lot of young people, a lot of children all over the world, world worry about if they're going to be murdered, but they're still children. To say, when people say, oh, you must not have had a childhood, childhood is a fundamental part of our human experience. So that's almost like someone asking me, oh, are you not a human being? You do not need ideal circumstances to be human. So, yes, I was a child. I remember one of my key memories from that time is that when I was about 10 years old, I decided that I should have a training bra. Some other people had them. And I convinced my mother to take me to Sears and Roboc. We were going to get this training bra. And the lady measured me with the measuring tape and smirked at my mother and said,

I needed a size 28 triple A, which is essentially no brassiere at all. And I was, I knew they were mocking me. I didn't understand the sizing, but I knew they were mocking me. And I kind of flounced away. And you know, in those department stores, they would have all the televisions on the wall that they're trying to sell. They all turn to the same channel. And I looked and I saw the face of a boy I had gone to, that was in my elementary school. And so for me, those two things, this very childish experience of this 28 AAA bra. And this murder of, you know, of a classmate, they're the same thing to me. And I responded to it as a child. So everything I did, I did in a childish way because I was a child.

I mentioned to Yari that your parents were both civil rights workers before you were born. Your mother has this amazing story. She was 15 when she helped organize sit-ins in Oklahoma City. And your father was expelled from college in Louisiana for demonstrating. What did it mean to grow up in a house like that? I mean, I grew up with an expectation that would ever one chose to do with her life, it needed to be in the service of like race work. I knew that, you know, mommy had participated in the sit-ins when she was just a teenager and daddy had been expelled.

Daddy went through so much to go to college and he put it all on the line and, you know, was punished for it. And also I grew up in Atlanta where we all live in the shadow of Martin Luther King. I remember when I was a kid, I had a teacher who used to look at us. Like, let's say you did something trifling like, you know, didn't do your homework or didn't properly groom yourself. She would just look at you with sadness, more in sadness than in anger and say to you, that is not what Dr. King died for. So you constantly knew that this was, you know, Dr. King had died for you. And here you are.

You can't even put on lotion. So there was that kind of sense. You went to Spellman at 16 years old. Did you skip grades? I did. I did. I skipped grades very early. I remember when I was four, I did half the day in the kindergarten, the other half a day in the first grade. And the art teacher would come and see me in both spaces. And the art teacher said to me, oh, do you have a sister? Because there's a little girl in the kindergarten that looks just like you. And I said, I do. We're twins. And she said, oh, well, why?

is your twin sister in the kindergarten and you're in the first grade and I said she's slow but she's sensitive. Don't say anything. And so I had this lady thinking I was a set of twins for like a month and a half until my teacher said, Tiari is not a set of twins. She's one person. So I was always younger than my classmates and I have to say I do not recommend that people skip children in this way because you really encourage children to build their identity

around something that becomes less significant with every. passing day. That moment, when I was four and they were six, they were 50 percent older than me. Now, we're all the same age. They're two years ahead. I'm 55. They're 57. We are the same age. Well, that's true. But I wonder, going into college at 16, I mean, Spellman of all places, because it was a women's college, what was it actually like in the inside? When I arrived the Spellman College in 1987, it was a year that Spelman College inaugurated. our first black woman president, Dr. Janetta B. Cole, who if you've ever met her, is the most formidable person I have ever met. And she came into college when I came into college. So we were

in a way new. We were freshmen together. She was her first year as a president. And she said to me, once I ran into her crossing campus, she had this big voice. And she said, Tari, how is the writing? And I didn't have any writing to show her, but I said, said the next time I see her, I'm going to have something to say. And I was so moved that she remembered that I had mentioned that I wanted to be a writer. And she, like, it's like she held me to that. And all of the most exciting black women in the country came to Spelman when we were there. You know, so I was able to have breakfast with Tony Morrison, who had not been told she was having breakfast with me and she wasn't that excited about it. But I was excited enough for both of us.

You and Tony Morrison, just the two of you? Mm-hmm. And she was not happy about it. They did not tell her that a very eager 18-year-old was coming for breakfast. But this was back to when people used to smoke in public. And she was smoking a cigarette. And I said to her, ma'am, did you know that today is the Great American Smokeout? Remember there was that day when people weren't supposed to smoke?

Yes. And she inhaled on that cigarette and kind of, languidly exhaled that smoke and said, no, ma'am, I was not aware. Well, here's my thought in hearing you tell this story. You went to college knowing that you wanted to write, but as you're encountering these legends, did you see yourself as one? How were you thinking about yourself in the midst of all of them? Well, I will tell you, I saw a creative writing class listed in the, you know, the

bulletin for what courses were coming up. and I did not know that people could take a class in writing. I thought, you know how like you know some people in your life who can sing. I thought writing was like that. Like some people can sing, some people can write. But I didn't know that you could take it in school. And so I decided I was going to take this creative writing class. But it was not freshmen, we're not allowed to take the class.

And frankly, I thought this was discrimination. And I really wanted to take the class. And this was in the 80s when there were no computers. If you wanted to take a class, you didn't have the permission to take. You just needed your advisor's signature. And it was a little honor system, me. And I had seen my advisor's signature, and it wasn't much of a signature. It was more of a squiggle.

And I was thinking, like, let's just say hypothetically, maybe I could replicate this squiggle, and maybe that could be a kind of civil disobedience, because I did think it was wrong. that I was not allowed to take the class. And I thought it over and I just wanted it so bad and I may have squiggled. And I took the class. And there I met Pearl Clegg. I met a writer and she was my teacher. And I sat right there in the front and I hung on her every word.

And one day she said to me, what are you thinking about these days? And I got ready to tell her and she said to me, no, don't tell me, write it down. And with that, she became my first audience. And she took me seriously. And so I took myself seriously. And that is when I feel like I became a writer because I became one in my own head. And I had an audience. Tayari Jones, thank you so much for this book.

It's been a bomb for me. And I thank you for this conversation. I enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Dei Jones's new book is called Ken. Fresh Year Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Freshier's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorak, Ann Marie Baldwin, Marie Baldwin, Marjorna, Lauren Crenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaliner, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. Thank you.