Best Of: Delroy Lindo / Tayari Jones on ‘Kin’

March 14, 2026·48 min·2 clips

Delroy Lindo describes the moment at age five when a white playmate's father drove up and ended their friendship forever.

Host Tanya Mosley opens by framing Delroy Lindo's career as spanning more than 50 years across theater, film, and television, from Spike Lee's Malcolm X to The Good Fight. Lindo's current nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Sinners is his first Oscar nomination despite decades of acclaimed work. Mosley plays a clip of Lindo as Delta Slim, a hard-drinking blues harmonica player in 1930s Mississippi, negotiating his fee at a train station. Lindo explains that he approached director Ryan Coogler to expand Delta Slim's presence in the film's second act after finding the character's dynamic introduction was not matched by sufficient screen time later. He describes his preparation as rooted in two books Coogler sent him — Blues People by Amiri Baraka and Deep Blues by Robert Palmer — which gave him an understanding of itinerant blues musicians' lives and their deep connection to music as a constant. The episode's most discussed moment is the unscripted humming during a three-page lynching monologue filmed in a moving car: Lindo reveals it emerged on the sixth or seventh take when Michael B. Jordan refused to stop the car at the planned endpoint, giving the scene more time and allowing the emotion to surface organically. Mosley then asks about a racial slur shouted at Lindo and Michael B. Jordan during the BAFTA ceremony by an audience member with Tourette's syndrome. Lindo describes thanking the Black community for their support at the NAACP Awards and shares a Bible verse his wife sent him: 'Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.' Asked about his first experience of racial othering, Lindo recounts a childhood memory from London at age five, when a white playmate's father drove up and the boy threw Lindo's garment at him and said he could not play with him anymore. Lindo was born in England to a Jamaican mother who came to Britain as part of the Windrush Generation and was placed with a white foster family while his mother trained as a nurse. He is currently writing a memoir focused on re-examining his relationship with his mother, Anna Cynthia Moncrief, and the broader Windrush experience, which he pursued through a master's degree at NYU in 2014. The second interview features novelist Tayari Jones, whose fourth novel An American Marriage became an Oprah Book Club pick and won the Women's Prize for Fiction. Jones describes hitting a creative wall after that success, being contracted to write a contemporary novel about gentrification that simply would not come together. During the pandemic, while ill with Graves' disease and wearing an eye patch, she abandoned the contracted project and began writing freely with a pencil, which led her to the characters of Annie and Bernice in 1950s Louisiana and Atlanta. Jones attributes the historical setting partly to moving back to Atlanta to be near her parents and wanting to imaginatively meet them in their own era: her mother was a teenage civil rights activist who organized sit-ins in Oklahoma City, and her father was expelled from college in Louisiana for demonstrating. Jones discusses her debut novel Leaving Atlanta, which grew from a panic attack she experienced as a college student when a child she was tutoring briefly went missing, triggering memories of the Atlanta child murders of 1979 to 1981, which killed at least 28 Black children and adolescents. Two of the victims attended her elementary school. Jones pushes back on the idea that the murders stole her childhood, arguing that childhood is a fundamental human experience that does not require ideal circumstances. She describes going to Spelman College at 16, where she forged her advisor's signature to enroll in a creative writing class, met playwright Pearl Cleage, and had breakfast with Toni Morrison. The episode also includes book critic Maureen Corrigan's review of Alvaro Enrique's Now I Surrender, a revisionist Western novel about the Apache, Geronimo's surrender, and a Mexican woman's abduction in the mid-1800s borderlands.

As heard by us

Two reflective interviews about art, memory, and the personal stories behind creative work.

Fresh Air Weekend spends its hour on work shaped by memory. Delroy Lindo reflects on the role that brought his first Academy Award nomination, and Tayari Jones talks through the grief and friendship behind Kin.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for two calm, serious conversations about why artists keep working.

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