The Unsettled

The questions, discussion topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation of Ayana Mathis’s The Unsettled, a novel that follows a mother and son as they navigate the challenges of homelessness and the inescapable tugs of history and family in the volatile environment of Philadelphia in the mid-1980s. 

1. Many of the employees at Glenn Avenue judge Ava for behaving as if she is too good to be there. Is this judgment justified? From what we know of Ava’s perspective of and experience at the shelter, why is she so determined to not accept it as her and Toussaint’s home?

2. Throughout the book, the characters refer to themselves and their homes by numbers: 813 is Ava and Toussaint’s room at Glenn Avenue; 248 becomes Ark. What effect do these references have on the characters’ ability to achieve a sense of home? Are the numbers more or less distancing—and/or do they prevent too much attachment in a world where home is unpredictable? 

3. Discuss the different vantage points we have of Toussaint while he and his mother stay at Glenn Avenue—from his perspective, his experiences at school and venturing around the city, versus how Ava sees his behavior and general appearance when he comes home every afternoon. How does the shifting perspective throughout the novel provide a more holistic view of Toussaint and other characters, as well as reflect the state of their lives? Which narration seems most accurate—a character’s view of themselves, or someone else’s?

4. Neither Abemi nor Cass seem particularly suited to “settling down” as a husband or father. What attracts Ava to these men? What need and desire in her do they satisfy, especially compared to what we know life was like where she grew up in Bonaparte? Consider Dutchess’s opinion of Ava: “She can’t hardly take care of herself. It’s like her own self is always jumping out at her” (page 42).

5. Like any parent, Ava has doubts about motherhood throughout the novel: “When you’re somebody’s mother you can’t admit that you can’t manage the mothering” (page 138). What factors make her task of motherhood particularly challenging? What drives her to protect Toussaint even when Cass begins to consume her world again? Does she believe that Cass will allow her to mother better, or is he more of a distraction from the challenge of mothering?   

6. Toussaint matures emotionally very quickly given the circumstances of his childhood, especially when it comes to his view of his mother: “He wanted Ava to be like regular people so he could be too” (page 155) he thinks, even as he later considers that staying a boy would allow him to “fix things for his mother before he grew up and was too scared” (page 203). What aspects of childhood is Toussaint deprived of? How does his spirit stay so resilient throughout the trauma of Glenn Avenue, the raid, and more?

7. What draws Toussaint to Zeek? How might have things turned out differently if Zeek didn’t come with them? 

8. Discuss the political and social influences at the time, as they’re presented in the novel, that add additional challenges to Ava’s quest for home. What does Cass carry over from the Black Panther ethos into Ark, and how is the police raid representative of both Cass’s resistance toward the system and the system’s flawed approach to justice?

9. Cass is described throughout the book in almost mythic language: he “walk[ed] down the road till the slanting sun swallowed him up and there was only gold light where his body had been” (page 113) and is so mercurial that “the adults talked about him like he was the weather” (page 186). How is he able to bring Ava and his neighbors under his spell of charisma? Do you think this behavior was conscious?

10. When Dutchess shares that Cass came through Bonaparte as Barber and conned the town, Ava is sent into both shock and a state of “long-awaited revenge for her pop, for Bonaparte, for everything she had lost” (page 308). Do you think she always suspected he was lying about his identity, his mission, his goals, his love? Is it Dutchess’s words alone that break her from her spell?

11. Did any of the attributes of Ark make it seem like a cult to you? Consider in particular Ava’s relationship with Cass, the leader, and her infatuation with him despite his various abuses; as Toussaint says, “Wherever Cass was, some part of her was always angled toward him, her foot or her knee or her whole body. Toussaint could have been on fire and she wouldn’t’ve noticed” (page 219). Was this pure love, or something else?

12. In Dutchess’s chapters about Bonaparte, she paints a picture of a town run down by white developers, held together by only a few remaining members. Consider the pros and cons of a life in Bonaparte versus Philadelphia for someone like Ava. What material, spiritual, and communal needs would be met in each place, and which ones would be impossible to fulfill?

13. What was Barber/Cass after by taking Dutchess’s land? Did you think his intentions of redeeming freedom for and the rightful inheritances of the black people there were genuine?

14. What do Ava and Dutchess have in common? Consider their almost intuitive way of communicating with each other, demonstrated in the narrative arrangement of the book, as well as their relationship histories, attachment to place, and general sense of pride and stubbornness.

15. Where do you think Ava and Toussaint would have ended up if Cass hadn’t come back into their lives?

16. Do you believe Toussaint makes it to Bonaparte? What compels him to return to his mother’s home without her? What promise does Toussaint’s arrival hold for Dutchess and Bonaparte at large?

17. Considering the title of the book, what would being “settled” look like for these characters? Does home consist of a building, land, people, care, love, and/or a combination of these things (or others)?

18. What moments of joy, connection, and “sweetness” (page 150), in Dutchess’s words, stood out to you while reading? Did these moments seem strong enough to carry the characters through their hardships?

19. Which aspects of the civil services depicted in the book—homeless shelters, job agencies, public schools, healthcare, police—seem familiar to the conditions at the time you’re reading the book? How much has changed or improved since the 1980s in America for people like Ava?