BookBrowse Reviews The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis

BookBrowse:

Set in the 1980s, the story of a mother-daughter estrangement and the consequences that ensue.

Eleven years after The Twelve Tribes of Hattie became a global sensation, Ayana Mathis offers another domestic portrait. The Unsettled, set in the 1980s, is about a multi-generational black family who are estranged from one another and carry the painful freight of the past.

The story opens in an uncomfortable place. Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son Toussaint are forced to find residence in a Philadelphia homeless shelter after Ava's violent husband Abemi Reed kicks her out of the house. Shaken and feeling betrayed, Ava gropes through her new life while suffering from headaches, depression, and despair. The shelter's feeble attempts at normalcy fill her with distaste and contempt. They are a reminder of her mother, who she blames for her hardships.

Hundreds of miles away, Dutchess lives on a rutted red dirt road, fighting off developers from the Progress Corp who want her land, the last thousand acres left. During the twentieth century, Bonaparte, Alabama — whose placard reads Negro Incorporated Town, established 1868 — was sold off, one farm plot after another, or as the locals saw it, taken by "white folk's thieveries." Dutchess sneers at the numerous attempts to drive her out. Besides, what would Caro think? Her deceased husband, a furniture maker, was murdered by whites on the very earth the developers want to raze.

Anger is a waste of energy for lethargic Ava, who has not looked for a job in weeks and is nearing eviction from the shelter. She tells Toussaint they are going to Bonaparte, even though it's been years since she has laid eyes on her mother. Uninterested in finding employment and living in a place where roaches are stomped out of mattresses, she is out of options.

But before Ava can return home with her son, she stumbles upon Toussaint's father, a reformed alcohol abuser with a fiery rhetoric of self-improvement. When Ava encounters Cassius Wright he is preaching to the lost, challenging men to give up their drinking. He bellows to a crowd about his once unrestrained habit. "Chivas and Cutty Sark and Crown Royals could fix anything. But only for the night, that was the catch." Ava and Toussaint become a part of Cass's cultish fellowship, called Ark, with its strict manifesto and dietary and behavioral rules. They live with him at 248 Ephraim in companionship with other families who adhere to the following.

Mesmerized by Cass, Toussaint both inhales and exhales his father's climatic energy. Mathis describes the hero-worship liturgically: "…mostly he watched his father's body because there was power in it, and the power was something to believe in and something to be like." It is Cass's violence that raises the pressure of the story, quietly projecting that something tragic may happen.

As the tension between Ava and Cass accrues, Toussaint escapes by writing. He finds his grandmother's Bonaparte address and introduces himself. Dutchess is excited to hear from him. She records tapes and sends them to Toussaint, reflecting on her life gone by as a blues singer and what it felt like loving Caro. Dutchess's language is salty and inappropriate but appropriate just the same because grandparents give children history and wings, they allow them to fly in a straight line instead of circles when their present world is bleak and inescapable.

I read Ayana Mathis's first novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which is a story about adult children who resent their mother while also being a personal story about the Great Migration. The Unsettled feels similar but more contemporary, and sadder because Mathis layers within the mother-daughter dynamic domestic partner violence, female submission, toxic masculinity, and thievery. Creating a larger social map, Mathis threads a fictional story with current events, such as the ongoing fight of rural black families in southern states to keep their ancestral land from developers and the suffering of the homeless. There is also mention of Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's notoriously racist mayor, which adds gravity to Ava's story in its time and place.

I was moved by The Unsettled and by Ava, whose pathos had seeped into me midway through the novel. The plot, at times, is fraught with tension because of the impulsivity of its financially fraught characters. Nevertheless, the story is sensitive in the way a family story can be. Mathis has an acute understanding that touching the wound doesn't dampen optimism, it creates it. Imperfect people surround us in our families. Their love for one another and us may not erase the petty grievances of the past but compromise, forgiveness, and common ground — most notably children — can cut through distance, pain, and lingering bad blood.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in October 2023, and has been updated for the July 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.