Tayari Jones
Flame - Spring / Summer 2008

Tayari Jones is the author of Leaving Atlanta  and The Untelling, winners of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and The Lillian C. Smith Awards, respectively.  She has been described by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as "one of the most important writers of her generation,"  and called "A Writer to Watch," by Essence Magazine. Jones has received awards and accolades from many arts organizations including Breadloaf Writers Conference, Illinois Arts Council, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and The Corporation of Yaddo.  Jones’s work has appeared in McSweeny’s, Callaloo, The New York Times, New Stories From The South, and The Believer.  She is a very popular speaker; over last the two years she has been invited to give almost one hundred readings, lectures and workshops.

Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta (2002), which is set against the backdrop of the Atlanta Child Murders, was critically acclaimed and awarded best of the year nods from The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Creative Loafing and Atlanta Magazine.  Leaving Atlanta has been taught in the English and Writing departments of dozen of universities including New York University, Emory University, The University of Georgia, Vassar College, Reed College, George Washington University, and The University of Illinois.

The Untelling (2005) has met with similar success, earning the Lillian C. Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council, which recognizes literary achievement from a social justice perspective.  This novel is also  featured on course syllabi and has earned its author invitations to read at the PEN/Faulkner Gala in Washington, D.C., Richmond Junior League Book & Author Dinner, as well as the North Carolina Book Festival, where Jones appeared in a discussion with her mentor, Pearl Cleage.  In February 2007, Jones was headline reader at the AWP Conference.

Tayari Jones is both a writer and a professor of creative writing, and holds degrees from Spelman College, Arizona State University and the University of Iowa.  Last year, she served as  the Jenny McKean Moore Writer in Residence at George Washington University.  In Fall 2007, Jones joined the newly-established MFA faculty of Rutgers University--Newark, one of the most diverse college campuses in the country. She keeps a well-read blog on writing and the writer's life at www.tayarijones.com/blog.

Interview with Tayari Jones
by Ana-Maurine Lara

AL: Well, to start off, I love your fiction, and your narrative style. It's wonderful to be getting to know a little bit more about you as writer.   

TJ: Thank you for the complement.  It is always encouraging to know that the novels have somehow reached a reader somewhere, somehow.  You never really know what becomes of your work. You give it all you have and then it just goes out into the ether.  It’s like a message in a bottle with no return address.  You just hope someone found it. 

AL: In both of your novels, Atlanta is the landscape that holds your characters' lives, and the reference points for their epiphanies. I'd love to know about your choice to use Atlanta as a setting.  What role does landscape play in shaping your narrative? And lastly, what are your geographies? 

TJ: I set my stories in Atlanta because it is the city I know best and also because it intrigues me.  When I set out to write Leaving Atlanta, it was obviously set in Atlanta as that was the scene of the child murders, but it was an invisible locale, a sort of default setting.  I wrote what I knew in the detail which I understood it.  It is sort of hard for me to answer questions about process or setting because I tend to tell the stories where they are set.  The story couldn't be set any place else. I think of the characters and who they are and where they live. The thing about fiction, for me, is that I tell a story that feels true.  People sometimes say, "Why did you choose to put the story in this or that neighborhood..."  And I say, "It's where the people live."  I thought them up and this is where they are.  Once the novel is finished I can, as a critic of my own work, say how it functions in terms of narrative, but that has little to do with my experience writing the novel.

Answering questions about writing is sometimes like answering questions about love.  Can you imagine if someone said, "How did you fall in love?"  You could probably cough up a couple of anecdotes, but the truth is that it's not deliberate like that.  I feel the same way about writing a novel.  I sit down and I struggle.  I try. I fail.  I try again.  I explore different plots.  Some work.  Some don't.  I break up with the novel, decide to write something else.  We get back together again.  

I can say that I tried to write a novel set in Phoenix. I was living there at the time. I found the landscape to be so interesting that I thought I could write a novel set there. I couldn't.  I had only a superficial knowledge of the place, I couldn't access its metaphors, it's histories.  

AL: It's a powerful contrast that you set out: the hills and expansive green of Atlanta in comparison to the desert of Phoenix, its harshness and brutality. In a way, it's not only your cultural, historical source, but also, that there must be something about the way the world actually looks, and the way the people inhabit that world.  And, it sounds like your process with regards to landscape and land is very much like cruising through the city/town/country, touching upon moments when you see them.  Very much like a visual artist. Your narrative descriptions within your writing also made me wonder...are you at all influenced by visual art and/or artists?  

TJ: The Atlanta that I write about is more the urban Atlanta.  I think a lot about the housing projects on the Southwest side and the working class neighborhoods scattered thereabouts.  There is a certain attention to landscape.  A person can't be a southern writer without at least one magnolia tree, but I tend to dwell more on the architectural landscape.  I am an urban Southerner.  We sort of shake up people's expectation of Southern literature.  When I was trying to write about Phoenix, I was very interested in the man-made greenness.  Did you know that they use billions of gallons of water to keep those golf courses green?  It's a desert out there, but so many resources are expended to keep it from looking like one. You can see why it would have been a great setting for a novel. Irony wherever you look.

But as for visual art, I don't really ponder it much. I am drawn to photography, as I often try to image a frame prior and one just after.  I love visual art.  (I once had a chance to see Charles Rowell's collection.  I am still moved by the experience and it has been more than a year in the part.)  However, I don't feel myself collaborating with it the way I do with music.  When I was writing The Untelling, I wanted it to sound like a duet between a fluted trumpet and a soprano. I don't think I actually achieved that, but for a while, that was my goal.

But sometimes there is the shock of recognition.  Just this weekend, I went to a gallery with Rogoberto Gonzalez, a great friend and colleague.  He wanted me to see the work of a Mexican-American painter Franco Mondini-Ruiz.  I went along, just to be polite.  As soon as I walked into the gallery I saw this huge canvas entitled “The Goya Gown.”  I though. “Oh my God! It’s Dana!”  Dana is the heroine of the novel I am working on. She’s just like the painting. All anger and ribbons. (link to the painting is here http://64.124.30.119/html/Detail.asp?WorkInvNum=857&whatpage=artist)

AL: I love that idea about a duet between a fluted trumpet and a soprano in The Untelling. I see those kinds of notes between the characters of Aria and Rochelle, between Keisha and Dwayne, between the possibility of her pregnancy and her mother's loss. Do you listen to music as you write? Or is it that you search for the sound of language? How is it that you envisioned composing the music of the piece?

TJ: My original idea was that Aria and Rochelle would share the story.  I wanted their lives and voices to intersect, but still be really distinct.  The song I had in mind was “La Chanson Des Vieux Amants” by Judy Collins.  I don't listen to music with lyrics when I am writing unless the singer in singing in a language I can't understand.  That way, I can get caught up, but not so distracted.

The reason, though, that I ended up making Aria the forefront is that my editor liked her better.  She felt Rochelle was too "ordinary."  That sort of hurt my feelings, but I try every suggestion that my editor gives.  I figure that as writers, we are luckier than painters in this:  We can try out a suggestion and if we don't like it, we still have our original in tact.  Whereas a painter makes a change, she can never have the original back.

A lot of young writers refuse to try suggestions.  They are just stubborn or prideful.  I figure it never hurts to try.  You lose nothing but time.  

AL: I absolutely agree with you about what we get to keep in terms of materials.  A brush stroke will always leave its mark, as will a tendril of thread through paper.   I think about jazz and how in jazz, we're not even trying to "keep" notes as static entities, but rather, the notes are changed by life, by surroundings, by the musician's relationship to her instrument. What do you do with your stored words?  Do you ever weave them into other work, or do you let them go? How do they get transformed by your lived experience?

TJ: When I have to cut a passage, I promise myself that I will use it later, but in the end, I hardly ever do.  I save them in a file, but I hardly ever peek in there.  (But talking about it makes me want to go see what gems are in there.)  Although last summer, I found a good-looking chapter that I had discarded.  A long, meaty chapter.  At first, it just didn't work, but because of the revisions I had done with the rest of the manuscript, suddenly it made sense.  That was such a gift.  

AL: Do you remember what it was like to sit down and write the first words of Leaving Atlanta?  Where were you? How did you write those first words - on paper, on computer, on scraps of paper, etc?  What about with The Untelling?  Where were you then? 

Also, your work has a time specificity, but could also be taking place right here, right now, two years ago...in other words, it flows between being time-specific (linked to specific historical events that are in the larger consciousness), and being read as work that is contextualized by the events of the late 20th century, early 21st century.  Could you talk about your decision to use a historical event in Leaving Atlanta?  And, your decision to use historical reference points in The Untelling?

TJ: I started Leaving Atlanta when I was in graduate school at The University of Georgia.  I wrote scraps of the middle novella "The Opposite Direction of Home" in a poetry workshop taught by Kevin Young. I am not a poet, didn't want to write poetry. I was sort of forced into the class and I had attitude for days.  We compromised and I tried writing really word-heavy, language-y prose.  I didn't know then that it would end up being my first novel.  The part I wrote first isn't usually the opening lines. I sort of think that until I have figured out the end, I can't know exactly how to start it.  

As for the historical events at the heart of Leaving Atlanta.  I was ten years old when thirty African American children were killed in Atlanta. When I contemplate my own coming of age, those murders are right in the background. I don't think I could have written a coming of age story and not have included it.  It was the formative event of my childhood.  I didn't set out to write a history. I set out to write the truth. To capture memory.

I think all of my work is like that.  I decide when the story is set and then just tell the truth of that time.  For example, in The Untelling, Aria is sitting in the chapel at Spelman.  Well, if that is true, and she is on the stage, there is a plaque there that says that MLK lay in state there.  Well, since that is true, then the historical event is then part of the novel.  I believe that history is everywhere.  You don't have to move your story to find the history. Wherever the story is set, there is history already there.  As the writer you just choose to highlight it or not.

AL: What's on your mind these days with regards to the events around you?  What kinds of histories are being worked into what you're developing right now? 

TJ: One thing that is on my mind these days is the questions of how writers can become more involved in changing the world. I used to feel like it was enough for me to write stories that tell a certain truth.  Someone once told me that the job of the writer is to make a record. To let people know what happened. I liked that thinking. It seemed like something that I could handle.   

But now, it seems like the world is in crisis.  I feel like I want to do something and since it seems like my writing is the gift I have, how can I make it work to help the world in a way that I can really SEE results.  Last week I heard about the rape in the Dunbar Village housing projects. I was so appalled, particularly when the NAACP came to the assistance of the suspects and not the black woman and her child, who were both brutalized.  I really didn't see how writing a story about it was going to really help this sister who so desperately needed help.   

So, I got the idea that I would offer my services as an editor to raise money. I put on the internet that I would do a manuscript critique.  Then, I asked other authors and artists to contribute something. So many people joined in. Emerging writers, photographers, and really established folks. We ended raising about $3000 in five days.  I sent it directly to the victims.  I have to say that it felt really good-- not just to help, but to know what other folks in our writing world wanted to help too.  And it spirals out because writers bought the critiques and then we are collaborating.  It was a beautiful thing. 

AL: What writings are you working on these days? What can we hope to see from you in the future? 

I am working on a novel called THE OUTSIDE CHILD.  Or that's what it's called now. It's about two families that share the same father.  The main character is the daughter who is "illegitimate."  I am always really interested in the idea of insiders/outsiders and the concept of an open secret.  I plan to finish it this summer. I am going to make it my reason for living between now and August.

AL: You talk about this notion of an open secret as a subject of exploration in your work.  Why this? What about open secrets interests you as a concept/subject?

One thing I have learned in my exploration of Atlanta is that there are many things hidden in plain sight.  One thing I tend to explore in fiction is the idea that the same things that go on, on a societal level, also play out on a personal level. So in Atlanta, a city where significant historical moments like The Atlanta Child Murders are just not spoken of, I create families that just agree to keep their own history as secret, but an open secret.  It is as though silence can make an issue disappear.  It's as though you can see it, you can hear it, but as long as you don't SAY anything, it didn't happen.  It's like the opposite of "The Secret."  You know the thinking that you can speak things into being.  Well, I write about people and cultures that think you can not-speak things away!

THE OUTSIDE CHILD
an excerpt

My father, James Witherspoon, is a married man.  He’s been that way since before I was born, when he met my mother, Gwendolyn, at Davidson’s downtown.  She was working in gift-wrap at the time, and he came to her counter with the electric carving knife that he had bought his wife for their ninth anniversary.  My mother says she knew that something wasn’t right between a man and a woman when the gift is a blade.  I say that maybe that means that there was a kind of trust between them, that he thought he could give her such a weapon and still sleep peacefully at night.  But I don’t have to tell you that my mother and I tend to see things a little bit differently.  The point is that James’s marriage was never hidden from us.  James is what I call him.  His other daughter, Chaurisse, the one who grew up in the house with him, she calls him Poppy, even now.

When most people think of bigamy, if they think of it at all, they imagine some bizarre practice taking place on the pages of National Geographic or in a farm house in Utah.  Some of us in Atlanta remember one sect of the Back-to-Africa movement, headquartered in the West End.  The women were dealt out four to each man.  From time to time, you can still see them, resplendent in white trailing six paces behind their mutual husband.  If you spend anytime in beauty parlors, you will hear tales of new widows surprised at the funeral by the other grieving widow and her five kids.

It’s a shame that there isn’t a true name for a woman like my mother, Gwendolyn.  My father James is a bigamist.  That is what he is.  Laverne is his wife.  She found him first and my mother has always respected the other woman’s squatter’s rights.  But was my mother his wife, too?  She stood with him in front of a judge just over the state line in Alabama, but to call her only his “wife” doesn’t really explain the full complexity of her position.

There are other words, I know, to describe a woman like my mother and when she is tipsy, angry, or sad, she uses them to describe herself:  concubine, whore, mistress, other woman.  There are just so many and none are fair.  And there are nasty words, too, for a person like me, the child of a person like her, but these words were not allowed in the air of our home.  “You are his daughter.  End of story.”  If this had ever been the end of story it was in the first four months of my life before James’s wife, Laverne, gave birth to Chaurisse, his legitimate daughter.  My mother would wash my mouth with soap to hear me use that word, “legitimate”, but if she could hear the word that formed in my head, she would go to her room and cry.  In my mind, Chaurisse was his real daughter.  I was just the outside child.  With wives, it only mattered who got their first.  With daughters, the situation was a bit more textured.

 When I was a little kid, my mother and I used to spy on James’s wife, Laverne, and his daughter, Chaurisse.  It doesn’t sound right when I say it.  This is why I wish I had my mother’s gift for laying the truth in such a way that the result was smooth as water.  As soon as I try to explain to anyone the way we lived they get this look on their faces as though having a father who had other obligations was like being an accessory to murder.  It really wasn’t as scandalous as all of that.  I have to agree with my mother that a lot of people suffer from a failure of imagination.  They think there is only one right way to do things, only one right way to be happy.

 When did I first discover that although I was an only child, my father was not my father and mine alone?  I really can’t say.  It’s something that I’ve known for as long as I’ve known that I had a father.  I can only say for sure when I learned that this type of double-duty daddy wasn’t ordinary.

I was about five years old, in kindergarten, when the art teacher Miss Russell asked us to draw pictures of our families.  I was something of a competitive little kid, and I liked Miss Russell.  I wanted her to notice me.  So while all the other children got busy with their crayons or soft leaded pencils, I used a blue ink pen and drew James, his daughter, and his other wife.  This was years and years ago, but I can still remember my drawing.  I hung a necklace around the wife’s neck.  I gave the girl a big smile, stuffed with square teeth.  My own teeth had been missing almost a month.  The pink hole in my mouth made me ugly and I knew it.

Miss Russell came up behind me and said, “Now who are these people you have drawn so beautifully?”

I was delighted.  Miss Russell was a white lady, the only white person I had ever seen.  It was like she had jumped out of the television set just to praise my drawing.

“That’s my daddy and his other wife and his other little girl.  Her name is Chaurisse.  She is the same age as me almost, but I am older.”

Miss Russell got a strange look on her face.  “I see,” she said.

I didn’t think much more about it.  I was still enjoying the memory of the way she pronounced “beautifully.”  To this day, when I hear anyone say that word, I feel loved.  At the end of the month, we kids brought all of our drawings home in cardboard folders.  I laid mine out on the kitchen table for my mother and James to look at.  My mother was making all the right kinds of noises, ooh and ah and James opened up his wallet which he kept plump with two-dollar bills to reward me for my school work.

I saved the portrait for last, as it was my masterpiece, being as it was so beautifully drawn and everything.  I slid it out of the folder.

“Is that me?” James said.  He smiled and I was pleased that he had recognized himself.  Now that I am a mother myself I understand how hard it is to identify the things your kids draw.  What you think is a fish could turn out to be a palm tree.

“Yes sir,” I said to him.  “That’s you.   That’s your hat.”

“That’s worth a two dollar bill right there,” he said.

“And is that me?” my mother said.  “I like how you drew my hair so pretty.”

“No,” I said, getting irritated.  “That’s not your hair.  It’s his other wife.  And that’s his other girl.”

The air in the room changed.  It was like when John Marc, a little white boy whose mama worked with mine, came over our house and called us niggers.  The air in the room stopped circulating.  John Marc didn’t know what he had said wrong and neither did I because he said it in such a polite way.  “I never been over a nigger-house before.”  But we both knew something had gone horribly awry.  I never saw him again.

This is how it was when I showed my mother and James my picture.

“Did you tell your teacher who was in the picture?” James said.

I nodded slowly, the whole time thinking that I probably should lie, although I wasn’t quite sure why.

“James,” my mother said.  “Let’s not make a mountain into a mole hill.  She’s just a child.”

“Gwen,” he said.  “This is important.  I’m not going to take her out behind the woodshed.”  Then he chuckled, but my mother didn’t laugh.

“All she did was draw a picture.  Kids draw pictures.”

“I just want to talk to her,” James said.  “Go on in the kitchen, Gwen.  Let me talk to my daughter.”

My mother said, “Why can’t I stay in here?  She’s my daughter too.”

“You are with her all the time.  You tell me I don’t spend enough time talking to her.  So now let me talk.”

My mother hesitated at the door and then looked over at me.  “She’s just a little kid, James.  She doesn’t even know the ins and outs yet.”

“Trust me.” My father said.

 She left the room, but I don’t know that she trusted him not to say something that would leave me wounded and broken-winged for life.  I could see it in her face. When she was upset she moved her jaw around invisible gum.  At night, I could hear her in her room, grinding her teeth in her sleep.  The sound was like gravel under car wheels.

“Dana, come here,” James said.  I walked closer to him.  He was wearing a navy chauffeur’s uniform.  His hat must have been in the car, but I could see the ridged mark across his forehead where the hatband once rested.  “Come closer,” he said.

I hesitated, looking to the space in the doorway where my mother had disappeared.

“Dana,” he said.  “You’re not afraid of me, are you?  You’re not scared of your own father, are you?”

His voice sounded mournful, but I took it as a dare.  “No, sir,” I said, taking a bold step forward.

“Don’t call me sir, Dana.  I’m not your boss.  When you say that, it makes me feel like an overseer.”

I shrugged.  My mother told me that I should always call him “sir.”  With a sudden motion, he reached for me and lifted me up on his lap.  He spoke to me with both of our faces looking outward so I couldn’t see his expression.

“Dana, I can’t have you making drawings like the one you made for your art class. I can’t have you doing things like that.  What goes on in this house between your mother and me, all of that is private.  Grown people’s business.  I love you.  You are my baby girl, and I love you, and I love your mama.  But what we do in this house has to be a secret, okay?”

“But I didn’t make a picture with us in it. I didn’t even draw this house.  I drew you at your other house.”

James sighed and bounced me on his lap a little bit.  “What happens in my life, in my world, doesn’t have anything to do with you.  You can’t tell your teacher that your daddy has another wife.  You can’t tell your teacher that my name is James Witherspoon.  Atlanta ain’t nothing but a country town and everyone knows everybody.  You have to learn to keep yourself quiet.”

“Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?” I asked him.

He put me down from his lap, so we could look each other in the face.  “No.  You’ve got it the wrong way around.  Dana, you are the one that’s a secret.”

Then, he patted me on the head and pulled one of my braids.  With a wink he pulled out his billfold and separated three two-dollar bills from the stack.  He handed them over to me and I clamped them in my palm.

“Aren’t you going to put them in your pocket?”

“Yes, sir.”

And for once, he didn’t tell me not to call him that.

In the kitchen my mother sat the bowls and the plates on the glass table in silence.  She wore her favorite apron that James brought back to her from New Orleans.  On the front was a drawing of a crawfish, spatula aloft and a caption, “Don’t make me poison your food!”  It was something that we used to laugh at.

James took his place at the head of the table and polished the water spots from his fork with his napkin.  “I didn’t lay a hand on her; I didn’t even raise my voice. Did I?”

“No, sir.”  And this was entirely the truth, but I felt different than I had just a few minutes ago when I’d whipped my drawing out of its sleeve.  I wasn’t old enough to really understand on the surface of myself what had happened to me, what had transpired between my father and me.  My surface stayed the same while this difference snuck in through a pore and attached itself to whatever brittle part forms my center.  You are the secret.  He’d said it with a smile, touching the tip of my nose with the pad of his finger.

My mother came around and picked me up under my arms and sat me on the stack of phone books in my chair.  She kissed my cheek and fixed my plate with salmon croquettes, a spoon of green beans, and corn.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded.

James ate his meal, spooning honey onto a dinner roll when my mother said there would be no dessert.  He drank a big glass of coke.

“Don’t eat too much,” my mother said.  “You’ll have to eat again in a little while.”

“I’m always happy to eat your food, Gwen.  I’m always happy to sit at your table.”

*          *          *          *          *

That night, after James had gone home to his real life, I took in my own reflection along with my mother’s in the narrow mirror attached to the top of my chest of drawers.  Of course, James wanted to keep me as a secret.  Who would love a girl with a gaping pink hole in the center of her mouth where her two front teeth used to be? 

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked me.

“I want to be like that other girl,” I said finally.

She had been lying across my bed, like a goddess on a chaise lounge, but when I said that she snapped up.  “What other girl?”

“His other girl, the one that is not a secret.”

“You can say her name,” My mother said.

I shook my head.  “Can’t.”

“Yes, you can.  Just say it.  Her name is Chaurisse.”

“Stop it,” I said, afraid that just saying my sister’s name would unleash some terrible magic the way that saying “Bloody Mary” while staring into a pan of water would turn the liquid red and thick.

My mother rose from the bed and got down on her knees so we were the same height.  She clamped her hands down on my shoulders.   I could smell the traces of cigarette smoke in her tumbly hair; I reached out for it.

“Her name is Chaurisse,” my mother said again.  “She’s a girl, just like you are.”

“Please stop saying it,” I begged her.  “Stop it before something happens.”

My mother hugged me to her chest.  “What did your daddy say to you the other day?  Tell me what he said.”

“Nothing,” I whispered.

“Dana, you can’t lie to me, okay?  I tell you everything and you tell me everything.  That the only way we can pull this off, baby.  We have to keep the information moving between us.”  She shook me a little bit.  Not enough to scare me.  Just to get my attention.  It’s hard to be a mother; I know that now.  There is so much you want to tell your little girl, and you can talk and talk but you have no way to know if it’s soaking in.  So she shook me by my arms a little bit.  It wasn’t a big deal.

“He said I was a secret.”

My mother pulled me into a close hug, crisscrossing her arms across my back and letting her hair hang around me like a magic curtain.  I will never forget the smell of her hugs in those early days when I was just a smaller version of her.

“That motherfucker,” she said.  “I love him, but I might have to kill him one day.”

The next morning, my mother told me to put on the green and yellow dress that I’d worn for my school picture, two weeks earlier, before the teeth were lost.  She styled my long hair with slippery ribbons and strapped my feet into pretty patent leather shoes.

“Where are we going?”

My mother turned off Gordon Road.  “I am taking you to see something.”

I waited for more information, poking my tongue into the slick space where my nice teeth had once been.  My mother didn’t say anything else about our destination, but she asked me to recite my “at” words.

“H-a-t is hat; -a-t is bat.”  I didn’t stop until I got to “M-a-t is mat!”  By then, we’d pulled up in front of a small pink school building trimmed in green.  Across the road was John A. White Park. My mother and I sat in the car a long time while I performed for her.  I was glad to do it.  I recited my numbers from one to one-hundred and then I sang “Frère Jacques,” which is a song in another language.

When a group of children spilled out into the yard of the small school my mother held up a finger to stop my singing.  “Roll down your window,” she said.  “And look out.  You see that chubby little girl in the blue jeans and red shirt?  That’s Chaurisse.”

I found the girl my mother described standing in line with a group of other little kids.  Chaurisse was utterly ordinary back then.  Her hair was divided into two short puffs in the front and the shorter hair in the back was held down in a series of tight braids.

“Look at her,” My mother said.  “She hardly has any hair.  She is going to be fat when she grows up, just like her mammy.  She doesn’t know her “at” words, and she can’t sing a song in French.”

I said, “She has her teeth.”

“For now.  She’s your same age, so they are probably loose.  But here’s something you can’t see.  She was born too early so she has problems.  The doctor had to stick plastic tubes down her ears to keep them from getting infected.”

“But James loves her.  She’s not a secret.”

“James has an obligation to her mammy and that’s my problem, not yours.  Okay? James loves you equal to Chaurisse. If he had any sense he’d love you best.  You’re smarter, more mannerable, and you’ve got better hair.  But what you have is equal love, and that is good enough.”

I nodded as the relief spread all over my body.  I felt all my muscles relax.  Even my feet let go and settled themselves limp in my pretty shoes.

“Am I a secret?” I asked my mother.

“No,” she said.  “You are an unknown.  That little girl there doesn’t even know she has a sister.”

“God knows everything,” I said. 

“That’s true,” my mother said.  “And so do we.”