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

We are making some bold predictions for Hollywood's biggest night, and we may help you win your

“Oscar's pool. Listen to pop culture happy hour in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.”

From WHY and 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 is earned Lindo his first Academy Award nomination. He says he "what's 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 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 noblest to Gary Jones. Her new book, Ken, 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 your 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. It's Oscar season, and we watched the nominated movies, so you don't have to. We are making some bold predictions for Hollywood's biggest night, and we may help you win your Oscar's pool. Listen to pop culture happy hour in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Tonya Mosley. My first guest today is Del Ray 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 side-or-house rules. From me, Del Ray's characters often feel”

lived in and complicated and hard to shake. In Ryan Kougler's latest film centers, Del Ray Lindo plays Delta Slim, a hard drinking, deeply knowing blues harmonic a player, and 1930s Mississippi. Blues won first on its like that religion. He brought this with us from home. It's magic what we do. It's sacred. Del Ray 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 Theatre in San Francisco and made his name in the theater, Broadway, Yale rep in the Kennedy Center, performing August Wilson in Lorraine Hansbury, 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 floods, playing a traumatized

Vietnam that returning to the jungle to recover buried gold and the remains of a fallen soldier. Del Ray Lindo, welcome to fresh air. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I want to set up centers for those who have not seen it and to remind those who have seen the film. So, centers 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 troop joint,

only to find that their plans are overtaken by the supernatural evil as vampires and Houdu and there's Barry 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 Duke Joint's opening night. And your hesitant at first until Michael, as Stack, wins you over and Stack speaks first.

I need you to warn it all of us to come play at our Duke tonight. Yeah, I wish I could. I'ma be a mess in this tonight. Simmer's on 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 a day. Maybe $2 a night. Tomorrow night. And we got the dead?”

Nah. I've been a mess in this every Saturday night for the last 10 years. Mess is going to beat up another 10 years after that. At least I play. Now get as much corn liquor as I can drink. Simmer that I'm not going to get any more than that. That's my guest today, Delta Slim and Seniors. You know, there's kind of a rhinus to your character. There's a little bit of humor there. He knows exactly what he's worth and he kind of

draft of the film. As it was written, your character kind of begins and ends there and you kind

“of told the director, Ryan Cougler, like he needs to be built out more. He's rich and I want to see”

him more in the film as I 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 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 there's a scene that I

“love so much. It's where you and Stack Michael B. Jordan and preacher boy are driving through”

your in the car. You know exactly the one I'm talking about. You're driving through the cotton fields and you start to talk about a lynching 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 Mary Baraka who was the Roy 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's there are no words for some things 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 that 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 a 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

and then turn around and come back and go in the opposite direction and do it again.

“On probably the the sixth take and I'm forever indebted to Mike playing stack.”

Mike didn't stop the car. We got to the 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 Dilroy Lindo

nominated for his first Academy Award for his role as Blues Musician Delta Slim

and Ryan Kougler's Centers will continue our conversation after short break. I'm Tanya Mosley and this is Fresh Air weekend. It's Oscar season and we watched the nominated movies so you don't have to. We are making some bold predictions for Hollywood's biggest night and we may help you win your Oscars pool. Listen to pop culture happy hour in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. 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 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. A black people because it's at 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 AFTA party, the BAFTAs

and I don't know what I was thinking but a gentleman came up to me at the AFTA party and said he introduced himself and said, "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 a spoken to Mike and I. 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. On the verse of the day is my wife sends verses, affirmations, various people. Being out overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good Romans 1221, a negative turn into a

positive, which essentially is what I didn't quote that Bible passage. I wish I told her that

“when she sent me this God, I wish I'd have said that. Do you remember the verse time you?”

Someone called you the inward. I don't, but I do remember the first time I was

other 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 in 2027 and I reference this incident in the book. I do remember very, very clearly what happened and my other confusion.

My mom went to England as part of a movement of Caribbean people from the Caribbean to England.

“And they became known as the Wind Rush generation. As a result of the boat,”

called the Empire Wind Rush 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 there after 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 baby babies. No, I was not. I live with them. I live with them.

Very loving family. By the way, I was 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 thought he was a playmate. And we we had exchanged garments. I was wearing like his sweater. I had it tied around my neck and he was wearing my sweater on my jacket, tied around his neck.

And we were pretending to be superheroes. 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 him ever was in the car, which I now know what his parent is, 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 for 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 N prints.

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 like 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 is 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 that's I'm using that word very advisedly scrutinized. It's a scrutiny. It's an examination of oneself. But in my case, because of very, very, very significant part of

what I'm writing has to do with re-examining my relationship with my mom. And so my mom is a protagonist in my memoir. I'm examining history. I'm examining culture. I'm taking a, I'm looking at certain passages of history through the lens of the Windrush experience.

right? It was 2014. I got a master's from NYU in 2014. I came to formal education late.

“I got a, my undergrad degree in 2004 from San Francisco State University. And I got my masters”

from NYU in 2014. I wanted to delve deep into your mother's experience and 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.

They're all these black and brown people. They're two four 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. 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 I thought, huh, where are the future 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 Monkreef. Sometimes she would go by Luna Monkreef and that's all over the 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 about us and the various, various stories had surfaced on the internet. Essentially, people just give me love, just just, 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 Arilandau, this has been such a pleasure to talk to 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. Doe Arilandau is nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Delta Slim and Centers. Mexican novelist Alvaro Enrique reimagined the 15-19 meeting of Spanish

Explorer or Non-Cortez with Aztec Ruler, Mach de Zuma, in his 2024 novel "You Dreamed of Empires." Enrique's latest novel called "Now I Surrender," also reimagines an infamous clash of cultures. But critic Marine 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

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 Delilo, 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”

greeting of history, as a character in Libra, Delilo'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 swirving toward her. When the dust raised by the pounding of the horses 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 underscirts 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 Apache area. 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 Enit Lantus, an in-between country. And straddling it were the

Mexicans and the gringos, like two children I shut their backs to each other. While the Apache's 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 after life 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 uncentimensional admiration about Apache Maria, 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

Native Americans, Mexicans, Gringo's formerly enslaved people, immigrants, and one lone writer,

“gameily trying to tell their stories before the curtain comes down on the whole enterprise.”

Marine Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Elvero Enrique's "Now I Surrender." Coming up, novelist Yari Jones talks about her new book "Kin" about a lifelong friendship in our chosen family. This is Fresh Air Weekend. It's Oscar season, and we watched the nominated movies, so you don't have to. We are making some bold predictions for Hollywood's biggest night, and we may help you win your Oscar's pool.

Listen to pop culture happy hour in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

My guest is novelist 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, Yari 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 1950's Louisiana and Atlanta. It's about two girls, Bernice and Annie, who grew 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, want to spell them in college, and Atlanta's black elite. And the other on a journey through the Jim Crow South and search of the mother who had abandoned her. With just one word for title, Jones asks the question, "The entire novel is built around. Who is your kin? Is it blood, or something more profound?" To Yari 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 and them told us about that. What is it?”

It ain't got a thing. If it ain't got that swing. 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 Denise. 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

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. No. 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 McFried. Like I went to 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 Ann Irene says, to, "Necie, 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 I think, 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. Today, 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 them. 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 an accountant for for five ten minutes registered to us as an emergency. The, you know, the girls from from New York, from Philly, they said, oh, he's probably just, you know, a papaya's getting some chicken in,

by the way, that is exactly where he was. But I could not, 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, they were at least 28 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 were two boys who could not have been more different. One was very quiet and then 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 nine or ten, he was just 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? People ask you all the time if you believe that experience, kind of like stole your childhood

and you always say no, but I wonder what 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 there'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

going to get this training bra and the lady measured me with the measuring tape and smirk that my

“mother and said, I needed a size 28 triple A, which is essentially no. And I knew they were mocking”

me. I didn't understand the sizing, but I knew they were mocking me and I kind of flounce the way. 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. 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, 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 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 and sadness than an anchor in 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 skipped grades very early. I remember when I was four, I did half the day in the kindergarten, other half the day in the first grade and the art teacher would come and see me in both spaces in 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 wear 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, I had this lady thinking I was a set of twins for like a month and a half until my teacher said, Tiri is not a set of twins. She's

one person. So I was always younger than my classmates and I had 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% older than me. Now we're all the same age. There are 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, Spellman of all places because it was a women's college. What was it actually like in

the inside? When I arrived at the Spellman College in 1987, it was a year the Spellman College

inaugurated our first black woman president, Dr. Janeta 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, you know, it was her first year as a president. And she said to me once I ran into her crossing campus, yes, big voice. And she said, "Tell Yari, 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, it's like she held me to that and all of the most exciting black women in the country came to Spellman 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

was coming for breakfast. But there, and this was back to when people used to cook a smoke in public.

And she was smoking a cigarette. And I said to her, "Mem, did you know that today is the great

“American smoke out?" 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 and 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 took a writing, 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 freshman. 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 to permission to take. You just needed your advisors signature. And it was a little honor system me.

And I had seen my advisors signature in it. It wasn't much of a signature. It was more of a

“swivel. And I was thinking like let's just say hypothetically, maybe I could replicate this”

swivel. 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 swivel. And I took the class. And there I met Pearl Kleg. 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 right 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. To Yari 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. De Yari Jones' new book is called "Can." Fresher weekend is produced by Theresa Madden. Freshers executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director in engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews

and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shirak, Ann Marie Boltonado, Lauren Crimson, Loneek Nazareth, Thayachaliner, Susan Yacundee, Anabalman, Amnico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Sivine Sperr, with Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Migsley. It's Oscar season and we watched the nominated movies so you don't have to. We are making some bold predictions for Hollywood's biggest night and we may help you win your

Oscars pool. Listen to pop culture happy hour in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.