Asked to fill out forms at the Cherry Street Intake Center for the Homeless in Philadelphia, Ava Carson writes a story full of details that have no bearing on her placement in a shelter. She is 45 years old, and her personal history exceeds the allotted space. It is not that she does not understand the task: “She knew that wasn’t the kind of answer they wanted, but she had to tell somebody.” Later, as an imposing shelter official reviews the paperwork, Ava, unprompted, begins to describe her wedding: “Philadelphia. West Oak Lane. Pale yellow dress. Empire waist.”
“The Unsettled” by Ayana Mathis is an invitation to reject the impersonal, to find “the real story” in the details that cannot fit on forms. The third-person narration roams throughout the shelter, though there are bursts of first-person from the perspective of Ava’s estranged mother, Dutchess, who lives in the Alabama town of Bonaparte. When Mathis hands the point of view to Miss Simmons, a shelter employee, the language is striking for both its coolness and its degradation of Ava: She is “Miss Carson,” then “this Carson woman,” then “813,” the number of the room she and Toussaint, her 10-year-old son, are assigned.
This novel, the second from Mathis after her 2012 bestseller, “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” is an antidote to the casual depersonalization its characters endure, just as its title can be read as an alternative to the term “homeless.” Ava has left one home, at the insistence of her ex-husband, Abemi, and struggles to find another. In 1986, after a stint in a family shelter, she is reunited with Toussaint’s father, Cass, and the family begins sharing a house with others. At first, it seems conditions for Ava have improved. Of the communal home, Mathis writes, “Their fellowship was called Ark” because “they were a refuge from the devastation and deluge of the city.”
In a wall-mounted “manifesto,” Cass announces, “The fierce are the inheritors of the earth.” Claiming self-sufficiency, he resorts to theft. “Ark was one body,” Mathis writes. “Ava didn’t mind being the hands.” Mathis effectively conveys both the allure and lack of credibility from Cass. The novel is less interested in his machinations than it is in Ava’s choice to overlook them. Her willingness to “be the hands” attenuates slowly. Mathis refuses to rush Ava to the seemingly inevitable break from Cass, a wise decision that extends and deepens the suspense.
Cass makes a glancing reference to “inheritors,” a nod to the thematic importance of inheritance. Mathis also includes street names, house numbers and even intersections, emphasizing how critical it is for people to know where they are and to whom the land or structure belongs. Property is essential to identity of Dutchess back in Alabama, where her sections are simply called Bonaparte, as if she and the town are one, and she makes sacrifices to ward off a development company called Progress and maintain the local Black ownership. “My three hundred acres ain’t going nowhere,” she says. “If I don’t keep it there won’t be any Bonaparte left.”
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It is unsurprising that Cass sees Bonaparte as an opportunity for himself. Readers will recognize his scheme long before Ava does. When she finally talks to Dutchess, the call is part reunion and part revelation. The rift between mother and daughter remains slightly opaque throughout the novel. Though they are not particularly compatible, the length and intensity of the estrangement are confounding. “She has convinced herself I had it in for her,” Dutchess says. “She wants things to be simple, but they never were and she thinks that’s my fault.”
Whether in the shelter or the Ark, Ava cannot find what she needs. By contrast, Mathis offers a resonant image of caretaking in Bonaparte. During a time of hardship and hunger, young Ava finds “a pot sitting on the porch” and feeds her grieving mother by the spoonful. A neighbor, Mathis writes, “saved them with her pot of dumplings in the worst winter of their lives.” The pot is an object of nourishment and dignity, a warm relief from the repetitive paperwork, sanctimony and violence that Mathis evokes so well.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy has written for American Short Fiction and One Story. She was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.
The Unsettled
By Ayana Mathis
Knopf. 336 pp. $29.
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