Poured Over: Ayana Mathis on The Unsettled

By Jenna Seery / September 28, 2023 at 6:00 am

The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis follows a family through generations from small town Alabama to Philadelphia in the 80s as they struggle, succeed and learn to care for each other. Mathis joins us to talk about how long it took her to write this book, keeping joy in hard stories, how real events and culture shape her characters and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.   

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.  

Featured Books (Episode):
The Unsettled by Ayana Mathis
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and I have been so looking forward to this conversation. It has been a minute, since Ayana Mathis and I got to hang out and talk about books and writing and her fabulous characters. 12 Tribes of Hattie obviously was a huge sensation. It was not only an Discover pick, it was also, you know, a little pick of this book club called Oprah. I think that wasn’t you calling it Oprah’s book club 2.0.

Ayana Mathis

It was Oprah 2.0 at that point.

So we go from Cheryl Strayed to Ayana and it was great. And it was an amazing moment because we had a lot of people who suddenly were saying, I want to be part of this world. I want to be with Hattie, her children and her grandchildren. And I still think about this book with fondness even though sometimes it was a little bit of a hard read. But it’s 2023. And that was 2012. Where have you been?

I was in hiding. No, I have not been in hiding. Just this book just took a really, really long time. And unfortunately, other things happened. Like I’ve been writing some nonfiction along the way and things like that. But this book was just vexing. And it just took an extraordinarily long time to sort of become anything. And then it kept changing what it wanted to be. And it was very defiant and recalcitrant, a lot of fights. And we were in a really antagonistic relationship. And we had to heal. I mean, it really was just like a whole journey with this book.

We’re now in the 1980s. We’re in Philadelphia, and also a tiny town called Bonaparte, Alabama. And I love these characters, and I’m going to keep it kind of tight. You do have a wider cast, but I’m going to keep it to Ava and her son Toussaint. And Toussaint’s dad Cass and Ava’s mom Dutchess. And there are lots of folks that come in and out of their lives, but they’re sort of the core four, and we make them when Ava and Toussaint are in crisis, essentially, they’re in a homeless shelter. They’re being thrown out, and they’re in a homeless shelter. And we’re in Philadelphia, in 86.

Yeah. Well, it’s so it’s two years. So it’s first it’s 85. And then it’s 86.

how did we get here, because there’s a lot happening in these opening pages. And there’s one thing that I’m not going to, there’s like a little introduction that we’re, we’re gonna let readers find, but I just I really love Ava I really love Toussaint, and I really love Dutchess. And I’m just wondering how we got these folks?

Well, so I’ll start with the easy one. The easy one is Dutchess who just kind of like appeared, I’m so resistant to writers using really mystical terms about their characters, you know, they go they just kind of, but she just sort of did. She had this voice in this way. And it was kind of who she was, even before I understood what her name was or what her role was. I knew that there was this kind of itinerant, you know, former blues singer of middling success. It was she sort of admits at a certain point, like, well, it wasn’t that great, but she loved it. And she just sort of had that voice. And it was it was a puzzling. She was a gift, I think, from the writing universe, you know, and before I even know what to do with her, like, I didn’t exactly know where she fit or what she was supposed to be, but there she was. So she was the easiest of them. I think Ava was, was I when you asked me earlier, like what has been for the last 11 years, it’s Ava’s fault. She likes to hold up. Jokes aside, she just she just was a really difficult character. And she’s, she’s not easy. And she’s not easy in the way that he wasn’t easy, I think. So one of the things that wasn’t a struggle with Hattie but was with Ava was that I judged her a lot. Like I judged her. I didn’t like her. I was mad at her. And so I had to sort of have an attitude adjustment in order to be able to write her in a way that, yes, she’s flawed. Yes, she’s difficult, but she is still sort of fully human. And it took a long time to do that. And it took a long time to find a voice that I could inhabit that would sort of allow her to come across more fully on the page because her voice was just it was just squirrely, sometimes I wonder if it still is but I just it was really hard to get her.

I don’t think it’s squirrely. There were moments with Ava where she reminded me of Hattie. I’m not gonna lie. I’m not gonna lie. She did remind me of Hattie. But at the same time, her love for her son is really clear. And that’s the thing that keeps her grounded even when she’s making bad decisions. She’s doing the best she can with what she has because of her child. And I do think, you know, sort of bracing myself for some of the reviews and some of the coverage where people are going to have feelings about Ava’s capacity to be a mother, because we do we judge, and you saw this with that we also we’ve had it, but some of the reviews, people are like, well, she’s just a bad mother. And it’s more complicated than that. And I needed to be unsettled. I needed this novel, I needed someone to take on the 80s. I feel like we’re revisiting that moment. We’re reliving so much of that right now. And I needed someone to sort of sit down with the art and the characters and the language and say, Hey, wait a minute. Do you see what is happening here? We are just repeating ourselves. And there’s a lot, there’s a lot in the onset?

I think that’s also why it took so long, you know, I mean, I don’t, I never want to be the sort of writer who’s kind of writing from the top down. For me, that doesn’t work, like, oh, I have a theme, it’s the 80s, or it’s racism, or it’s socio-economic despair, you know, and then sort of trying to invent these characters that are sort of moving around in whatever situation. So the the, there is a lot that’s kind of large and beyond me, I think, in the book, and part of what took so long also was, was really figuring out how to, like, locate that stuff inside of the character, so that it was a book about people, in situations about a book about a situation in which there happened to be some people. And so that I think, also took a really long time, because many of these issues are so big, and so many of them are so close to me, you know, I mean, I grew up in the 80s. Like, you know, I had a kind of unstable childhood, like I So, so a lot of these things are, are really close and really meaningful and powerful to me personally. So there was also that task of finding enough distance to be able to make these people aren’t full people who are unbelievable, who can contain all of this stuff, but who are not kind of marionettes that I’m sort of moving around through history and through, in some ways, my own story. And my own story is not that, but there are overlaps. And so yeah, it was really difficult to find distance.

And overlap is one thing, overlap, there are slight overlaps with your actual experience. But I just want to be clear that this is not autofiction. It is not, this is an act of imagination, that this is a way of setting us as readers in a world that is really familiar. But honestly, when I do the math, I’m a little horrified to realize how long ago the 80s were. And it’s like, we’ve come a full generation. And yet, we’re sitting in almost the exact same place we were, and I’m like, wait a minute, what happened to progress, what happened to it, and in some ways, we have made some progress, we have been able to change in some ways, but it’s really striking to me, as someone who was also an adolescent in the 80s, like, a lot of that is still kind of in the air, and to see people not get it.

It’s very interesting, like, you know, we’re all sort of obsessed with the former guy, as I like to call him. But, but like, honestly, I mean, those Reagan years put so much in motion, and, and so much of what is now coming from that, or is mirroring that, and that I think is and we sort of seem to skip over the ad somehow, or we have these kind of weird narratives around the 80s that are just kind of like cocaine, disco, you know, stock market, these kinds of things, which sure there was that stuff. But there was also this kind of intense political and social stuff that was going on, that is absolutely laid foundation and ground for where we are now. And in fact, that’s maybe even a misstatement. It kind of was that. Do you know what I mean?

It’s entirely a mirror because the other thing is like Bonfire of the Vanities has not actually aged well. Like it reads almost like a satire.

I haven’t reread it, but I watched the movie again. And I was just like, yeah, like it did not, no, not at all.

And even some of the devices in American Psycho, obviously had become sort of larger, pervading pieces of the culture and people use sort of ideas from that, like brand names and all that kind of thing. And again, like, wow, the 80s are, I mean, we laid the groundwork for privatization and closing state hospitals and all of these things where we just took, we pulled the rug out from ourselves.

Willingly, willingly, willingly. Willingly, we laid the groundwork for the opioid epidemic, we laid out the groundwork for how to respond to the opioid epidemic, you know, I mean, like, like crack, this is sort of decimation of it, you know, I mean, all of these things it was like, and we also made a kind of weird psychic groundwork, in which it became easier and easier to sort of say, like, oh, yes, all of these horrors are happening. But we’ll just kind of look over here. And I think like, we and that’s the thing that’s existed in the United States for a long time. But in the kind of very modern context, we really laid a kind of groundwork for, like how to handle this sort of decimation and catastrophic events, on our fellow citizens. I mean, and on our brethren really, and our sistren, and, and how to just kind of manage to sort of look another way. And, and the other way we’re looking is often around like, we’re looking, we’re looking for money, we’re looking for a leg up, we’re looking for all of these things, and in the 80s also, you know, speaking of Bonfire of the Vanities, etc. Right? Like, it was like that, you know, wealth became a thing. Like in the 60s and 70s. I wasn’t born in the 60s, but I remember when I was a kid, like, sort of like in the late 70s, like early early 80s. Like, extreme wealth was like a thing that weirdos had. Do you remember? Like, it wasn’t, it wasn’t like a general aspiration. And for much of like, what I can remember even watching older movies, like it was like, oh, there were these really rich people. And they were also weird and eccentric, and regular people weren’t like that. It’s very interesting, like, even the way that we conceptualize like, like wealth. And our relationship to it is totally different.

Exactly. Because CEO pay changed with Jack Welch in the 80s. And GE. And that’s the moment that is absolutely the tipping point where suddenly the inequality goes off the charts. And we’re becoming Argentina, you know, it’s wild. It’s absolutely wild. And we’ve been sort of moving along this path. And we also have as a culture, this idea that somehow if you are not successful, it’s because of a moral family. And one of the things I love about reading you and it because this is something Okay, Pagan baby, totally raised as a Pagan, you were raised as a Pentecostal. Unitarian, like Unitarians. It’s coffee and doughnuts in the woods, right, like, pagan. But you do wrestle with faith, you do wrestle with belief. Right? And, and it is, I mean, church, but also systems of belief, right, throughout the African American community. Yeah, I mean, certainly Asian American communities. There’s a huge now Christian piece of it in a sort of evangelical Christian kind of way, that was not part of my story at all, like I said, Unitarian coffee and doughnuts and woods. But, you know, you do it in a really modern way you studied with Marilynne Robinson, at Iowa. And I mean, if I think of Gilead really is, Housekeeping, and Gilead are sort of the two big touchdowns for me out of her work. But she does a similar thing where the faith is there. It’s clear that she has a connection to whatever system you want to call it. But you wrestle with it. You wrestle with it the way Baldwin wrestled with it, you wrestle with it in a way where you’re like, I know, this is part of the world. Toussaint has this interaction with a local pastor, and Ava does not like that woman. Does she not like that woman? Oh, no, she doesn’t. She wants no part of it. But she doesn’t say to her kid, you can’t do this. She doesn’t. And in fact, there are some connecting points later. But you know, for some people, faith is a really easy decision. It’s not necessarily something that they have to question. It’s something that they were raised with, and they continue to do and they raise their families. And if that’s what you do, that’s fine. But you wrestle. you wrestle with it in both books. And I just can we talk about that for a second? Because I’m not even sure where to begin?

Neither am I in some ways. I mean, I think so I was raised, I’ll kind of go back to a little bit personal stuff. So I was raised Pentecostal, very religious family. My mother remains a very religious person. My grandparents were extraordinarily religious, etc. I left the church when I was like, in my teens, and then I went through this period where I wanted to be like a sophisticated, you know, modern person who was just like, No, I don’t believe in God. I’m totally an atheist, like, I don’t like any of these things. It’s all your All sheep, you know, the whole thing, right? And it just didn’t stick. I tried to make it stick but didn’t stick. So kind of going back to the book. I think that that what has remained, you know, you mentioned James Baldwin, one of the things that he talked about, you know, I mean, he was railed against the Christian church, like it just you know, at the same time, he was very much marked by it. And he would talk about how he was very much marked by and he wrote about it in essays etc. Not to mention, like the prose itself is often like sermonic and soaring and the whole thing, right. So I think what I have found is that is that I believe in belief. And I think that my characters often believe in belief in what we don’t know. Right, I don’t think that Ava thinks too much about God. But I do think that she thinks about things like a homeland, sacred, larger than life godlike figures, who in her estimation, often happen to be men. I think that she thinks about those things a lot. And I think she believes in those things. And she seeks those things. So I think of it as a kind of religious belief, sort of secularized, whereas her son, she sign is very much attracted to like, actual belief in God. And like, what and I think, and I think it’s almost as though his mother is an obstacle for him being able to believe in God in some way that he would want to. And then there’s other characters, you know, she has an ex-husband, Ava, I mean, who didn’t know what I don’t I don’t know if I think he’s a true believer or so much as a person who sort of uses God as a kind of weapon or as a kind of, you know, as a kind of bludgeon or a sort of tool of manipulation. But in any case, I think belief that is either directly religious, or quasi-religious in as much as it takes on the enormity of religious belief is a really big part of this book, and I think was a part of Hattie, too.

Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think Ava’s ex-husband, honestly, it’s both. I think he does have a deep faith, at least my experience of the character. He has a deep faith, but also, he is using it as a tool to maintain power in his in his world. I mean, it’s not a good guy. But you know, Dutchess, Ava’s mother, I mean for her faith is what she knows about the land that she’s from. She’s born and raised in Bonaparte came back after her sort of middling career on the road. But, you know, she talks about having the deed to her land, and protecting her land and not selling her land. And for her, that belief is the thing that keeps her going into that, even though Bonaparte is becoming much smaller, because there’s a town next door that’s encroaching, and basically taking all the land. And, of course, people have had to sell because they don’t have resources. There’s a moment where Duchess is talking about having paid the taxes on her store, which has been burned down by nefarious neighbors. And she’s like, No, you can’t take it from me, I am going to end she pulls together the money and she goes, and she pays the tax bill, because that’s where her belief system keeps her she’s just like, you can’t take this for me. And I get that I don’t like the rules, but I am gonna pay my tax bill. Yeah. And then you cannot do anything. And then I just I love that about her where she’s just like, nope, nope, I can do it. There are other things about her that are complicated. But that one moment, that was clear.

She and I think I think Bonaparte, like with regard to thinking about religion a little bit like what apart is both Christian and not, it’s a little bit sort of like old ways of belief, like it’s a little bit pre Christian in its belief system, which Ava does have a little bit of it. And so I think more than being I think she doesn’t think about God too much. But I think she also if she works, she’s real skeptical of Christianity as a system like she’s not into that. And Dutchess has this kind of syncretized belief system, which I think was what Bonaparte had. And then of course, there’s the directly Christian, I won’t get into her role too much. But you know, there’s a there’s a, there’s a pastor who helps the family a lot with you, who you are whom you already alluded to, and how he was really not having her. And that woman is a very Christian woman, I think in the best sense of things. Like I think she’s a true believer in the best sense.

I also love the image of her just sitting on the steps with a sandwich waving her sandwich at people when they’re passing by. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s her community and the way she experiences community. It’s not formal. It’s not I have a role, but it’s just like, I’m eating my sandwich you’re walking by you’re my neighbor, I am part of this place. Yeah. And, you know, Dutchess is part of Bonaparte. The way Ava has not yet found in Philadelphia, but is trying to find, I mean, she becomes part of this sort of household where, okay, let’s call it communal living, but it’s not, you know, no one’s it’s just communal living and everyone’s raising their kids and growing garden, but they’ve also got, you know, clinic for the community and, and they’re just part of the world. But when I opened the book, and I realized that we were sitting in Philadelphia, in 86, 88 around there 85, I couldn’t help but think of the MOVE bombing, which happened in May of 85. And John Edgar Wideman if you haven’t read it Philadelphia Fire is amazing. Really great. I know you’ve read it, just in case for listeners. And there’s a new edition with an introduction by Imani Perry, that is spectacular. Yeah, so I have a very beat up old, high on two editions of this book. Because of that introduction. Philadelphia had a Black mayor who say, go ahead to the police dropped this bomb. Literally, there is a firebombing in a major American city. Countless people die, countless houses are burned to the ground, we find out what last year, the year before that some of the bones of MOVE members were in the basement.

Make it just a little bit more horrifying,

In a basement, in a building at the University of Pennsylvania, I don’t think and especially to the way the some of the community responds to Ava and Cass and their house and their household. This is in the air right? This is, you are not in a place like Philadelphia, where this giant tragedy has happened and not have it sort of in the back of your brain when you have new neighbors fixing up the house and living off the land right there trying to live off the land and whatnot. How much of that was sitting in the back of your brain while you were working on this book?

I mean, it definitely was, you know, I mean, I was a kid, when the bombing happened, and I remember it very well. I remember the footage on the news. And I remember the adults in my household who would have been my mother and my grandparents at that time. I remember understanding that they thought that this was very bad, just as I thought that it was very bad. But nobody, but we didn’t talk about it. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it, actually. So it was that was to say so it was very much in my mind. And I it’s important to say that it isn’t that. You know, MOVE is still an excellent group, one of the people who was in the house that was bombed is still alive. She just got out of prison not very long ago, in connection to her arrest at that time in the 80s. And it’s such it’s a wound, I mean, it just MOVE is a real wound in Philadelphia, where I’m from, in case people don’t know, I’m from Philadelphia. And so I didn’t presume to tell that story. But I think what it has left in me are a lot of questions about sort of what happened there, why it happened. And I’m a writer, so therefore, you know, my imagination decides that it’s, you know, it kind of keeps turning it over and turning it over. And so what the book I think, I think ARC, which is a group that that Ava became involved in, I think that that group is like a way this ask a series of questions about what happens if a group of Black people try to create an autonomous groups that is running on a very different economic basis that is not, you know, sort of participating in the usual kind of market economy, etc, etc, who are trying to sort of have some kind of rules that are their own rules, who want to extend something to a larger community, what does that look like? And what are the challenges to a community like that? What are the internal challenges because not everybody’s perfect? You know, it’s also inside, right? And also, what are the external challenges? Like, what are the racial pressures? What are the economic pressures, all of these kinds of things? Like, what, what could happen in a place like that? And then also, why so often, when a group of people try to create a community like that, why does it meet state violence? Like, why is that? Why is that almost inevitably, the place where you end up? And so there were a lot of questions. And I think, you know, the other thing I think is that is that Bonaparte, which is the sort of other pole in the book is another sort of attempt at a Black utopia, very different, with very different motives and motivations, a very different kind of leader and leadership. So it has a very different trajectory. Nonetheless, they’re sort of mirror images in a way, like almost like, like, almost like the Philadelphia stuff is a dark mirror of, of the, of the stuff that happens in Bonaparte. And I think too, you know, going back to thinking about MOVE and what happened there, you know, I mean, it’s super complicated, because the other reality is, is that MOVE weren’t great neighbors, people didn’t people, you know, it was it was hard to be their neighbor, you know, now, the means by which having difficult neighbors translates into murdering them and, and blowing up a city block. You know, needless to say, right, like, anything about that, but I mean, but so I was also interested in like what happens in a community where you have this kind of fractious relationship between the people that live there and the people that come there, what does it mean for a Black community to kind of be like, Well, hey, you know, these neighbors really kind of suck and they do this that in the other thing, and for there to be first no response. And then the response is an outsize violence that also, that also victimizes them like what is that? You know, like, like, where are your rights is sort of a citizen in the neighborhood like, so it’s about, it’s about what happens to the people in the house. So what happens in the neighbor? Like, what is this whole dynamic, it’s really fraught, it’s really complicated. What I hope is that they don’t think there are many clear heroes in this book, you know, I think the leader of our cast is write a lot of battle a lot of things, but he’s also a real bastard, you know, so. So it’s so it’s complicated, you know.

Very charismatic, definitely has his moments though, where patriarchy is his friend, he’s got some very definite ideas about what women should be doing and where and, and yet at the same time, the way he comes across, it’s very easy to see how people would follow him and believe in him and want, I mean, part of what gets me about both books, but especially in The Unsettled, is, you know, you’ve sort of moved from well, let me start with you. And I both grew up in the northeast, right? And there’s this idea that somehow there’s more freedom in the north, there’s less racism, there’s less this there’s less, right that somehow we’re doing it right here to the south. And, you know, how do you obviously centers around the Great Migration and how that inform people and here we are in the 80s. And it’s kind of like, you’ve gone from this sort of hopeful moment in our culture in our world and our perception of the world, right? Where the idea is, you could go to a better place to better take care of your family and yourself, and then the 80s just kind of wipes that out for everyone. And so like, we’re sitting in these places, right, north, south, east polarities north south, hopeful, super not hopeful, we really do tell ourselves stories, right? It’s all a form of mythology. It’s all these are colliding beliefs. And it brings us back to you believe in belief, and oh, man, some of the some of the choices, the characters, they are their choices. They are absolutely their choice. And there’s some stuff that also just purely from storytelling point. I mean, you and I were talking about it before we have record, but there are some moments in this book, you do stuff with story where it’s like, Yep, this is awesome. This is great. Because why should we lose the joy of story, though? I mean, we had to record this stuff, right? Like, we have to talk about it, we have to record it. How do you didn’t want to talk about I think Dutchess doesn’t want to talk about anything except when she does. And it’s Yeah, generational thing where you’re like, hi, I would like the stories, please. I would like you to have this recorded. And even if maybe some of the details are hard, there is joy in holding on to the story.

Yeah, yeah. And they’re still in places that are unexpected. I mean, like we were talking a little bit about before, before we started, you know, folks make all kinds of choices. But it’s interesting, you know, like, I think like a character like Ava, for example, who gets involved in this group with this man who’s a lot of things, charismatic, etc, also violent also, there’s a lot of things, and one of the things I was interested in is, is to think about what joy or a good life or a fulfillment looks like, if it is outside of the ways in which we have kind of agreed that those things should look like, like, what happiness looks like, this is what, you know, Joy looks like. And, you know, we have a little bit of a, there’s a little bit of a spectrum, but essentially, you know, the parameters are fairly fiercely guarded, actually, and very well defined. And so but these people, I even though I think this is a hard book, and I think people have a hard time in many ways. I think that there is also this sense of which people have absolute autonomy, absolute agency, and they make choices that make them feel good or feel like they’re sort of a part of something or feel like they found what they were looking for. I mean, that’s certainly the case with Ava when she you know, when she kind of gets involved with Ark, like she finds what she was looking for. She left her home, which was a certain kind of Utopic sort of situate a failing one, but in any case, led by these two with these two enormously larger than life figures her stepfather and her mother, and then she kind of gets to the north and she wanders in the wilderness. You know, that’s what she does. And she did. She can’t find anything to sort of grasp onto she can’t find anything that feels like home. She can’t find anything that feels like it means something to her. And then she does. And we might say, well, that’s a bad thing to have found. I don’t know what I don’t know, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not what I would have chosen, it might not be what you would have chosen, it may not be what a lot of people watching listening would choose. But it is nonetheless something that is enormous and means something to her and lends meaning to her life. And so, one of the larger things that I think about a lot is the ways in which, for poor people, for people of color, there is this sense in which there’s some goal that you’re supposed to have, right, like you’re supposed to, you know, want to become this kind of bourgeois or whatever. And that would mean that you had turned your life around or become successful or climbed out of poverty or whatever, like all those terms. You know, in reality for many people, maybe it’s not that at all. And, and I think, if we could just even expand just a little bit, our sort of notion of what a fulfilled life might look like, and therefore what our expectations are of people who we have decided are not leading good lives or who are failing, I think that a lot would change, we just need, there’s just more breadth is needed.

Mothers are also more frequently on the receiving end of that judgment than fathers. Without a doubt. I mean, there are and yes, it is a primal relationship. But we have also created this mythology around motherhood, and mothers and you know, some folks shouldn’t parent straight up, like just shouldn’t. And this idea that somehow you become a more fulfilled human being or better human. This my favorite part of the trope, you become a better person if you have children. Wow, that yes. Okay, okay. We actually have empirical evidence that in some cases, that really super does not happen. But let’s, let’s work with that mythology, right. So all of these things, we tell ourselves, the 80s, we were we were barbarians. I mean, we’re still kind of barbarians. But like, it was really like, all of these moments where the men sort of behave in a certain way. And they’re just like, their expectations. And there’s still some folks who would like it to continue that way. And it’s like, well, actually, if we’re going to evolve as a culture and a society, and as the people language of our roles evolve. Yeah, we don’t have to keep doing the same thing, simply because that’s what we did before. Yeah. And that’s the piece, you know, that’s weaponized.

We’re not still saying, thou, just a dumb example.

I grew up not that far from Plymouth Plantation, you know, I mean. And did they cast me and Sarah Alden in the pilgrim play in the third grade? Oh, yes, they did. Yes. Because I was the tallest kid in my class. I’m good not doing a pilgrim play ever again. But yeah, we’re in no danger of that happening. But at the same time, like I still laugh about it.

Have you been getting invitations?

You know, strangely enough, I think I’ll stick with the book world. But again, like all of these pieces that we’re talking about, right, like who gets to make decisions about their own lives, who gets to make decisions about their children’s lives? Who gets to make decisions about where they live and how they live? You know? And yes, please don’t be bad neighbors when no one’s advocating for being bad neighbors, especially when you live in a very tight space. And you really have to learn how to literally be a good name, but the emotional payoff of The Unsettled so the first time I’ve read it twice now, and the first time I read it, I read it in a single sitting, because it had been too long. And had Hattie’s great, but I needed something new. I didn’t want to put it down because I needed to know what was happening to Ava and Dutchess the most honestly, because I was curious to see where that was gonna go. And then the second time I read it, and I let myself sit with the discomfort. Because I felt really bad for Ava, more often than not, and I felt really bad for the kid. Yeah, because he’s trying to puzzle out what’s going on with his mom, and he’s 11- and 11-year-olds, really? They don’t know. They’re very great, but they don’t know. And, and here’s this kid trying again, what does home mean? What does family mean? What is community like? And so I had two very different reading experiences with this same story. And it’s great. If you have time to read it twice. I highly recommend doing it really, I just I was so curious to know sort of where you’d been. And I like, you’ve just done this big piece for The New York Times book section on faith, and how slave narratives are a form of prophetic writing, which, if you haven’t read it, go back. Read it. It’s online, but I see a lot of your nonfiction work popping in this book. And it’s partially because you’ve been writing more essays, sort of putting them out into the world and whatnot, but there’s some stuff that’s burbling. I mean, you’ve been writing about class all along, you know, you’ve been writing about voice in lots of different ways, all along, and also ambition. Yeah. And here’s the thing. So Cass has an ambition that people might recognize, you know, property community. Ava’s ambitions are different. And I think she’s going to be judged a little more harshly for it. And ambition, women and ambition, right. Like, it’s still a sore point for some folks.

And I think it’s interesting. I mean, she, her missions are, are quite different. I don’t think that she has so much a will to power as she has a will to be near power and to keep power moving. She’s very interested in that. And that’s a hard thing to say, right? Because it’s, it’s a hard thing. Because, you know, people could say like, well, why doesn’t she want her own power, but that is her own power you did like that is her own power, which she has, once enormously. And I think what she’s also in a way that she perhaps wouldn’t say, I think it’s just ingrained in her, I think that she also is interested in legacy, you know, and she doesn’t, as her mother, Dutchess is interested in legacy. And the legacy is about, it’s about material things sure, like actual land, you know, that you would pass on to someone. But I think it’s also I think the legacy is also something is also kind of psychic and spiritual, it’s about it’s about safety. It’s about, it’s about autonomy, it’s about it’s about passing on to people some way in which they might become self-realized, or self-actualized, or at base, not afraid for their own sort of physical safety, and also for their kind of intellectual and spiritual safety. And both of these women, the sort of, you know, the main female character to the book was, really the main characters of the book, they’re both really interested in notions of legacy. And I think that that’s also something that we don’t think about as much. Or rather, I guess another way to say that is that something that we sort of often attribute or we say, all those considerations are sort of to like, rich white people who have a lot of land to give, you know what I mean, or, or want to go to Harvard, or whatever, like these. But that legacy is, this is only this sort of, very, I don’t know, lofty, like in a state or something like that, right. And we don’t grant the idea that all kinds of people want to pass something to their children. And we’ll work very hard and do nearly anything to be able to do that.

Or that legacy only belongs to a certain stratum. That legacy doesn’t even exist, exactly, if you’re not part of a certain class. And I find that extraordinary. I mean, you meet people who maybe have one photograph. And I say, this is someone who was like, frighteningly documented as a child, because apparently, that’s what my parents did, less so for my brother who’s a little younger, but like, we were those, there are photo albums where you’re like, okay, that’s not that interesting. But when you meet people, though, who like have two photographs, or one sort of real focused memory or experience or something, like, it’s a very different experience, but it is no less legitimate simply because there’s a little less documentation. And that’s the thing, it’s like, almost, you know, do you have your right, do you have your paperwork? Can you prove?

Like a legitimate and valid family, right, are you know, I think, there’s always also this interesting thing about there being some sort of a record. It’s impossible for there to be a record of any family, right, like every member of that family on any given day will have a different version of every event, right? But in this family, these people in this book, there’s you know, all the other lie all the narrators are unreliable. So it’s like, who like what is what is the actual story and there’s something about, you know, we would keep kind of going back to this thing about belief and the series that I’m writing for The Times and, you know, the kind of having grown up in this very religious environment, in which the Bible was like, very, very sort of central to everything about my upbringing. And so you know, rejected it etc, etc, but then kind of came back not as a not as a sort of literal document that’s supposed to tell me what to do. Right, but as a kind of repository of wisdom, but that gets to wisdom through these sort of like, odd sometimes paradoxical juxtaposing narratives like there’s an accumulation of things that almost seem to contradict each other that don’t. And that that sort of that accumulation is the way that we sort of arrive at meaning if we were, if I for me that if I were to say that there is meaning in biblical literature, I think that’s what its meaning is. That’s what constitutes its meaning. And so in many ways, I think Hattie was like that, you know, all of these different stories about this woman who can only partially be glimpsed and cannot ever be fully understood. And she’s not going to tell you anything. So that you know what I mean. So there’s all these narratives that sort of add up to some idea of what she might be or who she might be. And I think the same thing, though, of course, structurally, it’s very different. And there aren’t as many voices, I think that there’s a similar action kind of happening. In this book where there is no definitive record, all the narrators are unreliable. And so there is perhaps an accumulation of these people’s experiences and voices, that leads us to something that feels like it might be a truth or a thing that is real.

Which is why we need to capture the plurality of voices. Right? Like, that’s what our art should be doing, our art should be saying to us, Hey, we all have a place. And yeah, you may remember something differently. It doesn’t mean one negates the other. Like I mean, there’s, there’s a moment to an Ava’s history with her dad. And when that happens, and I’m being absolutely vague on purpose, but when it happens, suddenly, a lot of Ava made a lot of sense to me, when you will, and I know you know what I’m talking about. But it is that moment where you’re like, oh, okay, there are like, Ava may not want to give up her story all the way. But she’s going to and same thing like Dutchess doesn’t really want to give up all of her story. But she’s going to, I mean, there are people who try to control their own stories, right. But ultimately, the only thing you can do is be a person in the world. I mean, that’s all you can do. Is be a person in the world. And hopefully, you have a better go of it than not, but you can’t live a life where you don’t have the good and the bad, like you need the two to exist.

You do and I don’t think you know, you don’t, I think surviving the world is a lot harder without a sense of that kind of multiplicity and without a sense of like, that paradox and contradiction. Like if you if you spend a life trying to find the ways in which it’s all going to make sense it’s just you’re just banging your head against a wall, it just seems like a great big recipe for enormous amounts of frustration I was even thinking about land as we talked about, like land is a really big thing in this book and the land that is Bonaparte you know is it was I was also really you know, there are all these kind of Black settlements or Black utopic attempt attempts, all Black towns are etc, etc, that cropped up all through the reconstruction, etc, etc, some of which lasted some of which didn’t. So there’s a long kind of historical precedent of all of that sort of stuff. And of course, like crops up in, in books too like, you know, Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God or something like that. But in any case, you know, one of the complications even of that of like, of like, a Black homeland in America, is that it’s not it’s not our homeland, either. Right? You know, it’s, it’s, there were some indigenous people that were living there, you know, so right. It’s just sort of endless complications around like home and like home that is improvised and what has been lost or sacrificed in order for someone else to make home you know, I mean, it’s very, there’s a there’s a place in them and actually existed, and it’s called the kingdom of the Happy Land, and the kingdom of the Happy Land. Say what now?

I’m just having a moment with the place name, but okay.

Exactly. The kingdom of the Happy Land. And the kingdom of the Happy Land existed from roughly, like, 1870 ish, by the turn of the 20th century, it was gone. And it was sort of at the very sort of the tail end of this at the basically the end of the Civil War. There were a group of emancipated enslaved people who kind of left Mississippi and they have this kind of leader guy, brothers, they wanted to find a place where they could be and so they’re sort of wander around and they wander through Alabama and up through Georgia and all these places, and they ended up it’s a long story, but I’ll make it short. They ended up basically on the, on the in Appalachia, sort of in the North Carolina, South Carolina border. And they ended up like getting some land from first, there’s a white woman there who owned many, many, many acres, but like all of the, it’s the end of the Civil War. So all the people that she had enslaved, that we’re working on land, they’re all gone. So it’s just her and like her son, or something like this, everything’s falling apart, etc. So first, these folks agree to like work the land, and like in exchange for food, and etc. But they become more and more invaluable in this situation. They, you know, they have a plan. And so, eventually, they entered into an agreement with this white woman by which they buy 180 acres of land from her for $1 an acre, and they essentially, like form a settlement. And it exists for many, many years. It’s Utopic in its kind of ideas there except for the sort of, because there’s also literally a king and the queen. So much of the records of it and have been lost. Okay, the estimations that I’ve read, go anywhere from 200 to 400.

That’s not nothing. I mean, that’s actually like a town in the history of America, right. And they small settlements and everything. 400 people in a team, whatever, that’s even 200 Like, no, it’s not nothing, because it’s not like you’re walking down to Home Depot and buying the supplies to build a house. And then you’ll go to the a&p to pick up dinner, like it’s a, it’s a very conscious thing you have to do.

And it’s in common, right, so people would build cabins and things on it, but the land was in common, like, resources were being shared. They, they did subsistence farming, they also sold things, those were being shared, they were Teamsters, which then meant was like a term really like driving a team of why, like a horse and buggy team of horses to do delivery. So they were kind of like, you know, they were sort of like 19th century truck drivers, you know, so they make all this money, not a lot of money, but they make money. There’s a long history, but then, you know, and that’s a very beautiful experiment, you know, it fell apart for various reasons, because of reconstruction, you know, like everything did in the south by that turn of the century is all the, and also a railroad comes, all kinds of things happen, right. Also their own naivete, and things that are happening inside the group. Point being, I guess, two points. One, is that there is that even that land, it was Cherokee land, you know. And so there are some Cherokees still like up in the foothills a little further who, who, and it was Cherokee land, and they were all removed in the Indian Removal Act in 1830. And they all walk the trail of tears, and then it becomes this white woman’s land. And then, you know, so it’s like, there is no, you know, I don’t sort of have an answer to any of that. But just this assembly, just to say that this sort of, like, endless complications of being, and of legacy and a place, one of the things that I hope that the book does is sort of like, just ask some questions about it, because I don’t know what that is. And I don’t know what to do with it. And I don’t know even how to think about it, except to sort of wonder about it and ask questions about it.

I liked the questions you were asking, even when they made me uncomfortable. So yes, you did all the things you set out to do. I’m wondering there, do we think Toussaint is okay. Like, do we think he grew up to find his place in the world? Or do you think he had a rough go of it?

I think he probably had a rough go, but I think he’s okay. Yeah, that’s sort of what I think like, I don’t, I don’t think it was easy. He doesn’t seem to me to be a lost soul.

I didn’t think so. I just, you know, I just thought he was going to have a rough go of it than some. But, you know, ultimately, the book ends on a hopeful note, I think.

I’m glad you think that, sometimes I’m just like, what is what I think a hopeful note, not what other people will think.

Okay, that’s okay. I’m sorry, if there are people who think this book does not end on a hopeful note, that’s weird. I’m sorry. That’s just the arc is also so very compressed. I mean, you covered what, 55 years in 12 Tribes with having, like, almost 60 years, and here we are sort of, in this very for you compressed timeframe.

I mean, all of it back to your original, like, the difficulty of I was like, I don’t know how, like, how do I don’t know how to how do I how do I write how do I write inside of these, like what seemed to me to be, yes, very compressed confines, in terms of time and, you know, for people who are who are watching or listening who might be right. You know, one of the other things I think that was a real struggle for me, is kind of managing the time. You know, like, I’m really good when you can just sort of leap I’m like, I don’t really care what happened in 1937. So we’ll just go from 1923 to 1948. Moving in my happy place. But this book really has to account much more almost certainly in the in the first half of the book, but both I guess but really the first half of the book like almost a dailiness, or at least a weekly-ness, and so like, that was also I think, a big, a big kind of struggle. It was a lot of relearning how to write anything, you know, any sort of myths that people have about it, you write one book, and then you forget, like, it was like, I had never done any I’d never was like, I’d never done it before. It was like I had to relearn everything.

Which hearing you say that is wild, because that’s not how The Unsettled reads. It. That’s just not how it reads at all. I mean, I’m listening to everything you said about this being just a bear of a book. But for you, everything feels organic. In this book, even when folks do things first, like, oh, no, no. I get very involved. Sometimes when I’m reading a book that’s set up in a way that I just connect, I just connect with the language and connect with the characters might connect with it set. It just sometimes you get all of the things you want in a single book. Not always, but when you do, sometimes you do. It’s transcendent. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. And I’m really hoping that when readers come to The Unsettled, yeah, it is in some ways, a different reading experience from Hattie. But again, like there are some things that you’ve sort of been scratching at across your work, not just in the fiction, but across your work. Anyone who’s read your essays, anyone who’s read some of the journalism you’ve done, it all sits on a continuum.

I think it’s always just the same questions like, explored in some different way, or some shiny thing catches my eye. And I’m like, Oh, I can ask the question that way. We think people are, can ask the question that way. But it’s always, you know, it’s always the same. It’s always the same question. And I think I’m so grateful for the time, you know, I mean, I, you know, in the middle of writing the book of just taking so darn long, I was like, but like it needed the time that it took, because I think it just, it just needed it needed the time.

Do I dare ask if you started thinking about the next thing or am I jinxing it.

You know, I may have, I’m not gonna say anything. I may have. It’s just like a fantasy, like something I think about in the shower. Sometimes you didn’t I mean, or like, or, like when I wake up, like, there’s nothing. I’m nowhere near any language to bring to bear on this thing. And I want you to just always sort of challenge that, like, between, but you know what, I mean? Because you had, I was at some talk, and Jennifer Egan called it a few years ago, call it a voice hangover. You know, where it’s just like the voice from that book. Like you’re, you know, you’re, you know, you’re somewhere else, you know, you’re with different folks, you know, you need it. But it just until you figure out either enough time has passed, or you write your way in and out, there’s this kind of hanging over, you know, mouth puppet that you just kind of keep sounding the same as the last one. Until you until it doesn’t.

Yeah, no, you know, I think writers in the UK have an easier time sometimes then writers in the US audience was like, I’m just thinking of Hilary Mantel or Jim Christ. Yeah. You know, I mean, people are just like, I’m just going to do whatever. And the book comes out into the world. And like, especially if I think of Hillary Clinton, right, like there are a lot of readers obviously, who know her for the Wolf Hall trilogy, more than anything, but there’s some early work

No, and I mean, she made me care about the French Revolution, which that’s not really my thing. But A Place of Greater Safety is this epic, crazy novel about the French Revolution? And I could not think it’s like 700 pages, just like yeah, I’m here for every single page. Anyway. Ayana, thank you so much. This was so much fun. But you know, we could probably keep going for like another hour. And yes, I don’t know.

Oh, thank you. Thank you for so it was such a great conversation. It just it felt like we could have just been having coffee and having a chat.

We can do that too. Ayana Mathis, thank you so much. The Unsettled is out now. 12 Tribes of Hattie is in paperback if you haven’t read it, go pick it up. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.