Sometimes you read a book & something about the characters stands out to you or stays with you. We would love to share our thoughts with you & hopefully get feedback if you also have the same experience.
Through this column, we explore literary characters as mirrors into society; reflecting on race, class, gender, identity, power, and lived experience. We share our thoughts and invite yours, because the best stories continue in conversation.
The Moat She Built
Black Neoliberalism, Internalized Anti-Blackness, and the Devastating Cost of Walling Out Your Own.
Beyond the Page · Character Lens. Mrs. McHenry
"You better build a moat and fill it with alligators, crocodiles, electric eels, and whatever else."
— Mrs. McHenry
KIN
by Tayari Jones · 2025
If Black excellence requires building walls against Black struggle — is that excellence, or is it exile dressed as achievement?
She reaches for your glass before she reaches for her words. It is one of the most precise images in Tayari Jones's Kin: a brutal, sugar-soaked manifesto from a woman who has decided that survival requires the systematic erasure of everyone who looks like where she came from.
Mrs. McHenry is rendered with Tayari Jones's characteristic precision — the caftan lifting with every drunken breath, the rouge and mascara garish in sunlight, the belch she fails to trap. She is not a monster. She is, far more disturbingly, a woman who has made peace with monstrous logic. She is the mother-in-law. She is upper-class. She is Black. And she has constructed an identity entirely around the...