Ayana Mathis Examines Generational Struggle in “The Unsettled” https://ift.tt/lPFqVjJ
The relationship between hope and grief is often one-sided, with hope assuaging the impacts of grief while grief seeks to smother hope out of existence. In her second novel, The Unsettled, author Ayana Mathis puts these issues on center stage as they battle for control of a young boy’s destiny in a story of survival and legacy.
In a profound, unflinching way, the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie weaves together two seemingly opposing narratives into an uncertain ending, her vivid and evocative prose dripping with sorrow and grief.
We meet 13-year-old Toussaint Wright in the opening pages, in the ashes of his former home, as he’s on his way to meet his grandmother, Dutchess – an appointment that’s been a long time coming. While the beginning of the novel reveals where the story ends up, there’s nothing predictable about what happens in-between, and the final pages reveal a cataclysmic shift that answers what really wins out.
Three years before we first meet Toussaint, he and his mother, Ava, find themselves living in the Glenn Avenue Family Shelter after Ava’s abusive husband kicks them out of the New Jersey home they shared. By chance, Ava and Toussaint are later reunited with Toussaint’s birth father, Cass, and they move to another part of Philadelphia where Cass is leading a Black liberation movement, which is met with fierce resistance from the neighborhood and, eventually, from law enforcement.
Nearly a thousand miles south, Dutchess is facing another battle. The all-Black-owned town of Bonaparte, Alabama, where she raised Ava, is on the verge of extinction. The town is being devoured acre by acre by Progress, an ironically-named company that’s been preying on landowners for decades, even building over the graves of past Bonaparte residents in the name of development.
After a fire burns down their general store, which has supported them through sales of preserves and other goods, a mysterious man shows up with no story or background and helps the five remaining townspeople rebuild. He turns out to be the thread that winds Ava and Toussaint back with Dutchess. It’s odd that the man they call Barber can even find Bonaparte – Dutchess swears the entrance to the town is hidden by supernatural forces, which she encounters the first time she leaves in seven years. We later find out why.
The pages overflow with vivid examples of the challenges Black Americans face – as much today as in the mid-80s setting of the novel. There’s the abysmal conditions of the family shelter with filthy bathrooms, carceral mandates, and threats of Toussaint being removed when Ava slips into depression. The broken system exposes the most vulnerable to exploitation and judgment, showing just how close so many come to finding themselves in its grasp. The shelter security guard sleeps with the residents, steals from the pantry’s limited supplies, and sells their food stamps; and the place is overseen by a director who blames her charges for circumstances beyond their control, and disparages them for expecting the shelter to be livable. “Did she expect the Hilton?” Miss Simmons asks of Ava. “Did she think making a mess of her life didn’t cost anything?”
Ava is haunted throughout the novel by the memory of having witnessed her Pop being murdered in cold blood by white men when she was young. The trauma of this hate crime impacts Ava’s relationship with her mother, who spent a considerable time incapacitated by her loss, as well as Ava’s relationship with Toussaint later on. Caro’s death is not just one Black man’s life taken – an atrocity in and of itself – but it impacts generations, the poison seeping down family lines to erode the strength, dignity, and vitality of countless others.
Mathis examines the complexity of the Black liberation movement through the treatment of Ark, Cass’ group, which offers a free health clinic and food while also meeting resistance and backlash. The Black community is not a monolith, and opinions on Black liberation are as diverse as the individuals of which the community is comprised. Additionally highlighted is the way Black women, specifically, continue to be the most disrespected group in America, as noted by Malcom X. When group member Winnie donates her house for Ark headquarters, a neighbor asks her why she’s letting the group “use” her. She notes that not once did the neighbors reach out to her when she would leave the house bruised and broken from her ex-husband’s violent rampages.
Mathis also shows it’s possible to want something so badly you lose it – Ava, in caring so deeply for Toussaint’s health and safety, is pushed nearly to the point of breakdown and loses a large part of her son in the process; Cass, who had so much taken from him by the racist systems in America, finds himself on a quest for liberation but battling something else entirely; Dutchess, in trying to hold on to the hope of Ava returning, nearly loses the very thing she was trying to save for her daughter. Throughout, fire refines. Continually, the question seems to be whether or not one’s future is really in their own hands, whether fate is a friend or foe.
“Maybe [the shelter] had been waiting for [Ava] since she was born, since before she was born. Could be that ‘now’ is already curled up inside ‘then,’ like a family’s generations already inside a woman’s body. What a terror. And what a sweetness too, like some hand had laid it all out for you, lovingly, like you might lay out a child’s clothes.”
In The Unsettled, Mathis has tucked a well-folded, fitted sheet neatly in a drawer, requiring one to completely unwrap it before recognizing it for what it is. The Bluest Eye meets Great Expectations (but not nearly as wordy), with short chapters, multiple points of view, and dynamic characters with compelling stories and richly developed personalities. This is a book that will live in resonance long after it’s finished.
FICTION The Unsettled
Ayana Mathis
Knopf Publishing Group
September 26, 2023
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