“It was probably a bad sign when I touched my kindergarten teacher on the knee when she looked unhappy and said, ‘Marriage is complicated.’ ” But because, she says, she spent half of her life in The Pink Fox, her mother’s beauty shop, she thought she knew quite a bit about marriage even when a little girl.
While Dana lived with the constant knowledge of her “sister” and James Witherspoon’s other wife, Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon grew up innocent of her father’s second family. Hers was an electric affection burning away everything it touched, leaving me only with the clean lines of a lightning rod.” Dana says of her mother, “I used to love her desperate love for me, her weighty kisses. Living in close proximity to the other family, Dana’s mother takes Dana along for what she refers to as her occasional surveillance of them.Īlthough all six of these central characters are richly drawn, it is the relationships of the mothers and daughters that make this novel special. Like Jones’ two earlier novels, Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling, Silver Sparrow is set in Atlanta, where both families share a black middle-class life style of dance lessons, science fairs and Sweet 16 parties. The other daughter is close to her own age and given privileges Dana doesn’t receive. So Dana grows up with a father who visits once a week, a sense of being “outside,” and under the shadow of an accepted family. James explains that she is the secret and that she must never reveal the actual facts of their complicated lives. “Your other wife and your other girl is a secret?” Dana asks. At the end of the month when she brings her drawings home and shows her father the portrait, he reprimands her.
When Dana is around 5 years old, after being asked in school to draw her family portrait, she explains to the teacher that there are six people in her portrait because her daddy has two wives and two girls. The story of Silver Sparrow is told by the two daughters of James Witherspoon, Dana Lynn Yarboro and Bunny Chaurisse Witherspoon.
Rather, this is a story of warm, caring people who make mistakes, people you’d like to meet, people you pull for every page of the way. The label “bigamist,” of course, usually denotes a villainous or sinister character. Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones’s third novel, begins: “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” immediately drawing the reader into this engrossing and wry novel about the two families of James Witherspoon.
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