In her latest novel, “Kin,” Tayari Jones masterfully unpacks an important Southern Black archetype
The Black school teacher represents a crucial component of Black life
The beauty shop owner
The lady baking cakes from her house.
The school teacher
The Black school teacher is an archetype as important in cultural storytelling as the first two. She may not be the central figure to a main character’s development. However, her placement in any story signifies our protagonist needs good learning — of the book and life sort. The Black School Teacher will provide ample amounts of both, well before the rising action has turned into the climax.
Tayari Jones masterfully depicts a specific version of this archetype when she blesses readers of her latest novel, “Kin,” with the Southern Black School Teacher (known hereafter as ‘TSBST.’).
Miss Raynelle Jemison of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, is that specific type of Black teacher whose rigidity around respectable presentation is as consistent as her insistence that students master every syllable, sentence structure and punctuation mark of the King’s English. From the moment she steps onto the page, I’m brought back to the 9th grade classroom of Mrs. Ruthlyn Jasmine of New Orleans.
TSBST: A glimpse into the outside world
The fictional town of Honeysuckle is small. The Black side of town is even smaller. People rarely leave. And when they do, they tend to never come back. However, Miss Jemison does. She’s portrayed as a polished woman who had enough thirst for knowledge that she moved to Atlanta to attend Spelman College (class of 1927, thankyouverymuch). She returns to Honeysuckle and quietly lives out her days with her common law wife, Mrs. Ola Mae. An unmarried colored girl with a big city education is destined to become her hometown’s schoolteacher, of course. Because she has tasted the thrills of advanced learning that rewards a diligent student with an official degree, Miss Jemison graces the pages of “Kin” with an assured dignity. A regalness that her students don’t yet possess the language to name. She’s been Elsewhere and somehow it’s made her more committed to Here.
I didn’t know if Mrs. Jasmine had ever left New Orleans — for school or any other reason. I didn’t know if she had returned to our hometown to marry her husband, the equally respected Mr. Warren Jasmine. Or if she came back for the sole purpose of being the English teacher at our little community school in the lower ninth ward. My classmates and I did know something about her read as sophisticated. Worldly. If she had not actually been Elsewhere, she definitely was intimately acquainted with it. She’d probably read extensively about it, drawing ridiculously accurate conclusions about this mystical place before writing no less than 13 pages of error-free prose in perfect penmanship so it was sort of like having lived there, anyway.
TSBST: A foundational element of the community
Community life in Black towns has historically called for those with even the slightest access to resources to serve multiple roles. In a rural “country” town like Honeysuckle, that means the woman with enough education to teach school children also becomes the woman who writes letters for the semi-literate elders who want their words to their loved ones to come out sounding right. She also understands enough about the dynamics of her students’ families that she is one of the first to be called when one of those young charges turns up missing. Having taught the teenaged run-away and the best friend she left behind, TSBST knows to wait until the two of them are alone to ask the delicate questions a girl knows not to answer in front of an auntie or grandmother. Readers never get a scene with Miss Jemison dispensing “hard knock life” lessons to one of the main characters. Jones just has Jemison and her wife drive the main character all the way from Honeysuckle to Atlanta. She has Miss Jemison help this young woman move into her dorm at Spelman, giving the girl’s more privileged roommate a pointed look to let her know that she is not allowed to play in her or her student’s face. Miss Raynelle Jemison then reminds the young woman whose student she is and what her family has sacrificed before strolling out of the story.
Though technically from “a city,” my community as a young person growing up in 1980s New Orleans was similar to the one depicted in 1950s Honeysuckle. The school I attended up until 10th grade was run by our church. Mrs. Jasmine attended service every Sabbath and she prepared us in her classroom for the requisite church performances: Black History month programs, Easter speeches, Christmas plays, etc. When it was time for me to leave our church school to finish my last two years of pre-college learning, she was the first person I went to for advice on what monologue I should recite to audition for the local performing arts high school. I’d only wanted her to suggest something, maybe tell me which library to go to and get a copy of the play so I could practice. However, Mrs. Jasmine brought the piece she decided I would memorize and recite fluently to school and told me I’d be staying behind in the weeks leading up to the audition so she could coach me through diction and pacing.
While I would come to do similar things for my students when I became a Northern Black School Teacher, this intimacy and knowingness would not be something I could replicate. The North had many schools. New York City had the most in the country. There were many different types of Black in my school district alone (Caribbean Black, continental African Black, Afro-Latinx Black). The size and concentration of Black Americanness existed in the New Orleans of my youth as it did in the fictional Honeysuckle. Those specific Southern towns tend to turn out the Jemisons and Jasmines who are unmatched in the Black School Teacher universe.
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