Silver Sparrow

by Tayari Jones

This was the meeting of two people who were destined to love from before they were born, from before they made choices that would complicate their lives.

If I’d learned anything from my parents, it was that the law didn’t understand anything about what passed between men and women.

This was why I preferred smoking to drinking. Liquor made me emotional while weed put a little daylight between me and my problems. It wasn’t that I forgot my troubles, it’s just that they didn’t trouble me quite so much.

MAYBE IT WAS because I spent half my life in my mother’s beauty shop, but it seemed that I knew quite a bit about marriage, even when I was just a little girl. It was probably a bad sign when I touched my kindergarten teacher on the knee when she looked unhappy and said, “Marriage is complicated.”

“Silver” is what I called girls who were natural beauties but who also smoothed on a layer of pretty from a jar. It wasn’t just how they looked, it was how they were. The name came from a song my mother sang sometimes when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere

special. She sang along with Arethra Franklin at the end: “Sail on, silver girl . . . Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way.”

Like Grandma Bunny used to say, “Pretty ain’t easy.” Well, unattractive and unmotivated wasn’t easy, either.

When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate.

may have been my mother’s miracle, but I was my father’s other daughter. His not-silver girl. My mother wasn’t the only person in this house who had been cheated on.

want our life back like it was.” “Mama,” I said. “You can’t put the rain back in the sky.”

She doesn’t have his last name, but he picks her up on some Sundays and he loves her in public.

I often joke that our parents’ courtship story is our first encounter with propaganda.

I hope that readers will come away from the book with a sort of tolerance for people who find themselves in complicated and messy situations.