From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend.
I'm Tanya Mosley.
Today, Delroy Lindo.
He stars as Delta Slim in 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.
The vicissitudes 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 Tayari 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.
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 Delroy 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 in 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 Coogler's latest film Sinners, Delroy Lindo plays Delta Slim, a hard-drinking, deeply-knowing blues harmonica player in 1930s Mississippi.
Blues.
It wasn't forced on us like that religion.
No, sir.
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 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 Defy Bloods, playing a traumatized Vietnam vet returning to the jungle to recover buried gold and the remains of a fallen soldier.
Delroy 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 hoodoo, 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, as 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 with you tonight, same as I am every Saturday night.
I ain't paying you $20 a night, I know that.
You ain't paying no $20 a night.
You paying $20 maybe tonight.
Tomorrow night, the week after that, nah.
I've been a messenger every Saturday night for the last 10 years.
Message gonna be there another 10 years after that, at least.
I play, and I get as much corn, liquor as I can drink.
Sending like me, I can't ask for more than that.
That's my guest today, Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim in Sinners.
You know, there's kind of a wryness 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 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 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 Leroy 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.
That's where the music comes in, 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 hollering, no, it was not scripted.
It happened organically on probably the sixth 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 scene.
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 be the end point 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 in Ryan Coogler'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 BAFTAs 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 NAACP 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 words to the effect that Mike and I sinners, appreciate all the love and 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 NAACP 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 BAFTAs, 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, 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 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.
Yeah.
Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12, 21.
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.
That will be out in 2027, and I reference 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 Windrush Generation as a result of the boat called the Empire Windrush that transported approximately 300 Jamaican 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 lived 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, 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 the full weight of that.
It took you time.
But it's a story that has 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 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, scrutinize.
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 experienced.
You went to get a master's degree.
I did.
And study this.
I did.
And that wasn't that long ago, right?
No, 2014.
I got a master's 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.
But you wanted to delve deep into your mother's experience in the Windrush.
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, right?
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.
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.
I wanted to write a screenplay about my mom, because I looked around and And I thought huh, where are the feature films that have as protagonists 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 But I wanted to address that.
I wanted to correct 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.
And my editor said to me last week I'm pretty certain it was in the aftermath of what happened BAFTAs 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.
Delroy Lindo, this has been such a pleasure to talk with you.
Thank you so much.
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 in Sinners.
Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrique reimagined the 1519 meeting of Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes with Aztec ruler Moctezuma 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-1800s, 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 US, 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 Doctorow 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 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 a flower in the wind.
Camilla's abduction spurs a second narrative featuring a ragtag 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 gringos, 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 endgame for the Apache began in March 1886, when their great leader and shaman Geronimo, surrendered with a small band of warriors to the US.
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 Apacheria, 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 gringos, 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 Tayari Jones talks about her new book Kin, about a lifelong friendship in our chosen family.
This is Fresh Air Weekend.
My guest is novelist Tayari 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, Bernice 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 Ella Fitzgerald 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.
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, 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 McFry.
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
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 how 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, 10 minutes registered to us as an emergency.
The girls from New York, from Philly.
They said oh, he's probably just 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 children 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 till about 10 or 11.
Yes.
Two of the kids who were killed were students at my elementary school, or 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 could.
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 9 or 10, he was 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 us, just regular kids?
Right.
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 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 Roebuck.
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 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 triple A bra and this murder of, you know, of a classmate, they are 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.
And, 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 whatever one chose to do with her life, it needed to be in the service of 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 this, you know, didn't do your homework or didn't properly groom yourself.
She would just look at you with sadness more 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 Spelman 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 slowly 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 Tiare 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.
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 Spelman of all places, because it was a women's college what was it actually like in the inside?
When I arrived at Spelman College in 1987, it was the year that Spelman College inaugurated our first black woman president, Dr Jonetta 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 our, you know, it was her first year as a president.
And she said to me, once I ran into her and crossing campus.
She has this big voice.
And she said, Tayari, how is the writing?
And I didn't have any writing to show her.
But I 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 Toni 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 Toni Morrison, just the two of you?
Mm hmm.
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 were 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 were 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-y.
And I had seen my advisor's signature, and it wasn't much of a signature.
It was more of a squiggle.
Yeah.
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 teacher.
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 too.
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.
Tayari Jones's new book is called Ken.
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With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.
