A short chapter from KIN written by one of our brightest stars in fiction, Atlanta’s Tayari Jones. This is the story about a lifelong friendship between two women
fated to live different lives. In Chapter 41, we hear from Vernice. Enjoy.
May 14, 2026
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Originally Published in Issue No. 13 of The Bitter Southerner Magazine
Ruby Falls is in Tennessee, a couple hours outside of Nashville, if you are traveling from Atlanta. Miss Jemison once took Mrs. Ola Mae there. She told me that story on my way to college and I had mostly forgotten about it. It’s an underground waterfall. A river crashes from a cliff that you can’t even see from the woods just above it. Everything seems placid and calm as a prayer. And underneath, a violence of water.
Mrs. Ola Mae told me because she wanted me to learn to cry like regular people, to wail, holler, and beat my chest. She was worried because I had never really mourned my mother. But maybe it was normal not to grieve a stranger. Yes, I had a loneliness in me that had her name all over it. And if I ever had a daughter, custom said to call her Arletha, and I would. It is sad to not have a mother. It is sad to be incomplete. But sadness is one thing. Grief is another.
Mrs. Ola Mae meant well, but she went on too long about the truth of women’s emotional composition. She should have told me more about the workings of these fragile bodies we are cursed with. Why did she not tell me that someone could bleed to death from the inside and never shed a drop of blood on the slate-gray sheets I’d ironed the day before? She could have mentioned that my cradle friend could tell me she loves me and thank me for the envelope of money, despite grave danger hidden deep within her body. Grinning, Annie asked me if someone like her could go to college. She wondered if we each have one true love and if the person doesn’t love you back, does that mean he’s not your true love? So tired that she could hardly hold her eyes open, she said that somebody should write a reverse dictionary where you could look up what you were feeling and then it would give you the word. No one, not one person, ever mentioned that it was possible for Annie to go to bed full of questions, lay her head over three hot quarters, and all the while be bleeding to death because real doctors don’t work for pussy at Mississippi whorehouses. ◊
New York Times bestselling author Tayari Jones is the author of five novels, with the latest Kin, released in 2026. Her 2018 novel An American Marriage was an Oprah’s Book Club Selection, on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and year-end roundup, and awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize). A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, the University of Iowa, and Arizona State University.
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Excerpted from Kin by Tayari Jones. Published February 2026 by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Tayari Jones.
