“A lot of us have
unconventional
families,” says
Jones, above. “It’s
something that I
don’t think we’ve
fully discussed –
how that feels”OPPOSITE: TAYARI WEARSSHIRT, SKIRT AND JEWELLERY, AS BEFORE. THIS PAGE:SHIRT, ALAIA, AT MYTHERESA.COM. SKIRT AND EARRINGS, AS BEFOREbook raises pertinent questions about modern family life.
“A lot of us have unconventional families,” says Jones. “I met
someone just yesterday who had read Silver Sparrow and said,
‘My father remarried, and I got demoted from a daughter to
a niece.’ This is not uncommon at all. And it’s something
that I don’t think we’ve discussed fully – how that feels.”
Jones herself is a child of a second marriage, although “there
is no scandal there,” she clarifies. “My father is not a bigamist.
But I also say to people, ‘My father is not a bigamist that I know
of. Just as your father is not a bigamist that you know of.’ That’s
part of the mystery of fatherhood.” She has two sisters, but they
lived “600 miles away”, while Jones grew up with their father.
“I’ve always wondered what their lives were like; what they
thought of me; what they thought of the family that I grew
up in,” Jones says. “I wrote Silver Sparrow as a gift to my sisters.”
Born in Cascade Heights, Atlanta, in 1970, she describes
herself as a “child of two PhDs”. Her mother and father met
in graduate school and “were very much involved in civil
rights. I was a child born at the dawn of a new world in that
way.” Even so, her father, now 80 (“he texts me every day- he has a Bitmoji, it’s so cute”), was “frankly bewildered”
when Jones said she wanted to study creative writing. “He
felt it was frivolous. He would say, ‘I don’t understand where
I got this bourgeois child.’ My father has a PhD now, but
he picked cotton as a boy. And he would say: ‘When you
pick cotton, you don’t stand out there in the cotton field and
say, “This cotton doesn’t recognise my complexity, I fear this
is not my niche.” You just pick the damn cotton!’”
Jones has always been interested in “chronicling the
black middle-class experience” she was a part of in Atlanta.
It’s one of the reasons that, after 10 years in New York, she
recently returned to her hometown to live and write. “Every
time I was interviewed, it was by someone who lived within
walking distance of my place in Brooklyn,” she says. “What
does this mean for the future of American literature, if, even
though we come from different places, we’re all neighbours?
I feel like I’m almost an ancient cartographer making a map
of a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Where I live now,
one of the Real Housewives used to live down the block,”
she says, smiling. “She’s moved, thank God.”
Like An American Marriage, Silver Sparrow grapples with
the cultural and societal expectations of several generations
of women, particularly when it comes to marriage and
children. If in An American Marriage Celestial, wife to
imprisoned Roy, is criticised for not standing by her husband,
in Silver Sparrow it is difficult to comprehend why the
“second” wife stays.
“It’s very rare that you see novels by black women depicting
people leaving marriages for reasons other than the most
extreme,” says Jones. “Black people during slavery were
forbidden to marry, so every marriage feels like a bit of a
triumph. And to squander that – it’s just more at stake. And
there’s this persistent narrative that black fathers are in short
supply – not to be traded away lightly. These kind of pressures
explain why these two women are willing to be with the same
man. I didn’t want him to be this sweet-talking lover boy, so
it would be as though they were hypnotised by lust or romance.
No – he’s offered both of them what they hope is a stable
life for themselves and a future for their children.”
The biggest change Jones has seen “between the mothers
in Silver Sparrow and today, is the advent of safe, reliable,
affordable birth control. My grandmother gave birth to 12
children, 10 survived. Very, very late in her life she told me
that she had only wanted two children, a boy and a girl. But
you can’t really talk to your daughters about that, because
then it makes them feel unloved.”
Marriage and children haven’t figured in Jones’s life.
“I think I’m the first generation where this is not a startling
fact,” she says. “But we’re a generation without role models:
we’re making our way as we go. I bought a house, I’m almost
50 now, and a number of people were really concerned. They
felt like, ‘You should have a temporary home, because you’ll
marry and your real life will start.’ I’m of the first generation
where there are a number of women living their real lives
outside of marriage, outside of motherhood.”
Now, Jones is busy with the not undaunting task of writing
her fifth novel – one that, for the first time in her career, will
be highly anticipated. In line with her desire to chart the
changing face of her city, this book, she says, will follow a
woman who moves back to the neighbourhood where she
grew up, and watches as it undergoes gentrification. It sounds
like her most autobiographical yet. “I want to be a Southern
writer writing about the South from the South,” Jones smiles.
“So I’m back. I’m so happy. I am so happy, you just don’t
know. I am the happiest I’ve been in my adult life.” n
Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones will be published by Oneworld
on 19 March, priced at £1704-20-Well-TayariJones_1952352.indd 224 27/01/2020 12:13
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