Two motherless girls with similar upbringings take very different paths in life.
I didn’t really like An American Marriage, so this new book by Tayari Jones wasn’t on my list until one of my book clubs elected to discuss it.
I listened to this one on audio. It has two different narrators, one for Annie and one for Vernice, and they both do a great job.
It’s interesting that neither girl has a mother or a father to raise them, but they almost never talk about their fathers. The focus is that they are two motherless girls. The fact that they’re both fatherless seems to be taken for granted.
The nature of their motherlessness is different and seems to have a big impact on their lives: Vernice’s father killed her mother and then himself, leaving her to be raised by a maiden aunt who had been very much enjoying her independence before inheriting a baby girl.
Annie’s mother left her with her own mother and ran off, never to be seen or heard from again. She has no idea who her father might be, and she doesn’t seem to care.
Annie remains convinced her mother will return for her. At one point, there’s talk around town that Annie’s mother was back in town for a day or two, but she never even tried to get in touch with Annie.
Despite her grandmother and Vernice trying to convince Annie to forget about her mother and move on with her life, Annie refuses to do so, and that obsession defines her life.
While Vernice goes to Spellman College and starts hobnobbing with the wealthy and influential Black families of the South in the 1960s, Vernice talks her way into getting a job at a bar in the hopes her alcoholic mother will show up.
Having gotten word that her mother might be in Nashville, Annie manages to hitch a ride with a guy she thinks is her boyfriend and his cousin.
Turns out the guy she thought was her boyfriend already had a girlfriend and she came along on the journey to Nashville.
Annie is understandably upset to begin with, but it all works out when it turns out his cousin is perfect for her.
They live happily together for a while, but Annie’s obsession with finding her mother eventually gets between them.
Annie gets a job at another bar in Nashville, but because she doesn’t even know what her mother looks like, she has to guess, which means she ends up freaking out every Black woman of a certain age who walks into the bar.
After her boyfriend leaves her, she starts sleeping with her married boss, which is such a colossally stupid idea, and it ends exactly how you think it would.
While Vernice doesn’t exactly live happily ever after, she gets as close to it as is probably realistic for a young Black lesbian in the 1960s.
Vernice fell in love with her classmate at Spellman, but she wants children, and she knows she can’t have that if she spends her life with a woman.
So she marries a young Black man from a wealthy family. She doesn’t love him, but he’s good to her and she knows he’ll always provide for her.
Her mother-in-law also seems to fall in love with her right away, to the point where it’s implied that she’s the one who picked out Vernice for her son.
And while she also seemed to get everything she wanted (a man who loves her and provides for her, an especially impressive catch for someone who came from a poor background similar to Vernice’s), it’s obvious she’s not happy. She’s bored, she drinks too much, and while the whole house is considered her husband’s home, she has to be content with one, small room to herself.
Although she promises Vernice she can also have her own room when her husband builds his own house, when it’s revealed that the plans for the house don’t include a parlor for her, her mother-in-law points out that she had to give her husband sons before she got her own space.
Despite their best efforts, Vernice and her husband seem unable to have a child.
Meanwhile, Annie is struggling with the opposite problem: her boss got her pregnant before firing her and she can’t decide whether to keep the baby or try to get an abortion. The latter is easier said than done in a time before abortion was legal.
The ending is as predictable and sad as you think.
This is a book about family: both biological and found. It’s also about the cards we’re dealt and how we use them to forge our own paths in life, for better or worse.
I didn’t love this book as much as other people in the book club did, but I liked it much more than An American Marriage.