Gabe Hudson was a remarkable writer and reader, who showered those around him with care and affection. He worked tirelessly to uplift other writers, to help them believe in themselves and the value of their work. For many, he was a beacon, an inspiration, the consummate literary citizen. After he tragically passed away, due to complications related to undiagnosed diabetes, his mother, Sanchia Semere, endowed a new award in his honor. Each year, on Gabe’s birthday, September 12, the Gabe Hudson Award will be given to a writer who has just completed their second book-length work of fiction, and who embodies the spirit of humor and generosity that Gabe and his work did.
We are thrilled to announce that the winner of the first-ever Gabe Hudson Award is Ayana Mathis for her new novel, The Unsettled.
Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into sixteen languages. She was born in Philadelphia and currently lives in New York City, where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program. The Unsettled is a multigenerational epic, whose setting shifts between the rural South and 1980s Philadelphia. Mathis artfully brings to life a wide cast of characters, endowing them all with complexity and dignity. Each time the novel shifts to a new perspective, we are immediately enmeshed in that person’s experience, a testament to Mathis’s deft storytelling. And as the novel develops, we begin to see how these individual narratives intersect, how they explore themes of home and rootedness and belonging. There is a symphonic quality to this novel, a rising, gathering speed to it. Like all great books, it creates its own time, its own dreamed reality, and we are happy to be absorbed by it.
Mathis and I spoke over the phone a couple of days before the award was announced. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
—Daniel Gumbiner
DANIEL GUMBINER: The first thing I wanted to ask you about are the settings for this book. It has two distinctive settings. There’s the fictional town of Bonaparte in Alabama, and also Philadelphia in the 1980s. I’m curious: Did you always conceive of the book as linking these two locations? Or did you start writing about one first and then later incorporate the second?
AYANA MATHIS: I pretty much always knew that it was two settings. I didn’t know exactly what Bonaparte was, but I always knew that Philadelphia would be a setting. I’m from Philadelphia, and my first book, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was set in Philadelphia. I have kind of an obsession with Philadelphia—I think in some ways, because it’s underrepresented in literature, as a city. But I also realized that there was some southern-ish setting early on, and one of the reasons for that is because there’s a character in the book named Duchess who lives in this little town in Alabama who appeared early on in my writing. I didn’t know where she belonged, but I knew that she was southern.
Ultimately, this is a book that is about connections, about how things beget other things, and it’s about mirror images. As soon as I understood where this Duchess character fit into things, I understood that this place she was from, Bonaparte, was a kind spiritual homeland for all of the characters in the book—even, and especially, those who end up in Philadelphia. I understood that these were twin poles in which similar things were happening, and that they were playing off of each other. That dual setting was always really important. In the book, the characters move from Bonaparte—where there was belonging and a grandeur and a legacy—to Philadelphia, where they try to find those things that were left behind in Bonaparte.
DG: You mentioned this idea of mirroring. How did that develop as a theme in the book, and what interested you about it?
AM: I’m always very interested in, as I mentioned earlier, the ways in which things beget other things—which is basically history. A bunch of people do a bunch of stuff that leads to a bunch of other stuff, and we flow along in this river of time and event. One of the things that happens often, particularly in the United States, is that we think that what happened in the past was somehow frozen in amber or something. We forget that the past is always active. I think a lot about this when I think about character, because I don’t feel it’s possible for me to accurately describe a person or their experience if I don’t give a great deal of attention to what they’ve come out of.
In my first book, there’s a lot of that, and in this book, I really wanted to try to consider what the next step was in thinking about a person’s history. It began to feel to me like one way to approach that would to have the events of the book call back and forth to each other across time and geography. That’s the mirroring effect. So, there are things that happen in Bonaparte that happen in Philadelphia. I made the joke that I basically wrote the same book twice, which, in a way, I did. Imagistically, there’s repetition of things. All that sort of stuff is fun to write, but also it’s a way to think about how history is active in individual lives.
DG: This makes me think of the utopian aspect of the book too. You were just talking about history as the process of one thing begetting another thing, and to a certain extent, our fate being controlled by these things that preceded us. But the book is also very interested in attempts at utopia—and utopias are, in a way, efforts to cast aside the constraints of history, to start anew. Bonaparte has a utopian quality, and so does the fictional group Ark in Philadelphia, which some of the characters become involved in. Why were you interested in exploring efforts at utopia in the novel? And were there any historical sources you relied on when developing those parts of the book?
AM: Utopias have—and I hate to use this word again, but I’ll use it again differently—they have this strange quality of holding up a mirror to the societies from which they spring. We know that utopias generally don’t work out, because of external pressures and because of internal pressures, and just because people tend not to be creatures that can be corralled into perfect behavior. They don’t work, usually, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not useful. If you’re creating a utopia, you’re creating it over and against something else that doesn’t work. In the creation of the thing, you’re basically holding up a big signpost that says, “These are the things about this society that don’t work.” Both of the utopian groups in The Unsettled—Bonaparte, which is a rural Black cooperative of many years standing and then, of course, Ark—are interested in cooperative economics. They choose cooperative economics, because they’re like: Well, this whole market economy situation is leaving out Black people. It’s hurting everyone. We can’t get ahead in it. In fact, nobody can. So what could we do that’s not that? And that’s part of what interests me about utopias: even if they don’t work, even if they end up corrupting or being corrupted, they still have an enormous utility in society, because they help us to see very clearly what we’re doing wrong.
In terms of historical sources, Bonaparte was partly inspired by a place in Alabama called Gee’s Bend. If readers know it, they’ll probably know it from some very famous quilts that come from there. There’s one in the Smithsonian, and they’ve toured all over the world. Gee’s Bend is an extant Black community on the Alabama River, and it’s very beautiful, and so I thought a lot about its history and also its geography when imagining Bonaparte. With Ark, I thought about a group that existed in Philadelphia called MOVE. MOVE still exists but its heyday was in the 1970s and ’80s. They were a Black separatist group, utopic in vision, politically radical, who ultimately got into an armed standoff with the police. The police chief and the mayor ended the standoff by dropping a military-grade explosive onto the roof of the MOVE house. This destroyed much of the surrounding neighborhood and killed eleven people (five of them were children). My book isn’t about MOVE—Ark isn’t MOVE—but it is very much inspired by those events. I was eleven when the bombing happened and have been haunted by it all these years.
I was also really interested in Black utopias that have existed throughout US history, basically since the Reconstruction. There were many of these communities all over the South and even in the Midwest. Places like Mound Bayou, which still exists, much diminished, not nearly as many people anymore, but it still exists. It was a sort of free Black settlement. If people are readers of Zora Neale Hurston, they will know Eatonville, Florida. There’s a place called Freetown in Alabama. I was interested in what those places represented, which is this desire for safety, economic and bodily autonomy, and also a psychic sense of your own worth in a country that was so incredibly hostile to Black people’s presence.
So I was interested in what places like that looked like, and what sort of people would have gravitated to them, and what the challenges would have been, both externally and internally. People are always people, right? What are the disagreements about how we should do things? How do personalities clash or become problems? Also, logistical stuff: how do you educate the kids? How do you feed yourself? How do you keep the lights on? All these are questions I was drawn to in thinking about utopic situations.
DG: You mentioned people just being people, and the relational dynamics of the characters in these situations, which I think really comes through in the book. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you build out your characters. Many of them have such rich inner lives. You said Duchess just sort of appeared to you out of the blue. In general, how do you go about developing your characters?
AM: So, I was very, very lucky with Duchess. She appeared telling a story—which actually appears in the second half of The Unsettled—about a flood that she was in. She’s from the South. The book takes place in the mid-1980s and she’s already in her seventies, so she was born quite early in the twentieth century, in a period in which the Mississippi River was still always flooding, and flooding out crops, and killing a bunch of people and such—before they dammed it up. Anyway, she kind of came to me, telling a story about having been in one of these floods. So she was really just an incredible stroke of luck and a gift. She always sounded like she sounded. I hate to seem “woo woo” about things, but she really was a gift, and in certain ways, the storyline about her had to conform to her. It wasn’t possible to impose a plot on her.
But with one of the other main characters, Ava, I had the opposite of a gift. She was just recalcitrant, unwilling, and we were basically in a fight for like, a decade. I mean, it was awful. I couldn’t hear her.
DG: Why do you think there are some characters who are like that compared to others? What do you think makes it hard to draw out a character like that?
AM: I think I was judging her. I would try to write her, and she would just fold her arms and stand in the corner and refuse. This book took about a decade, and I do think about five or six years of it was fighting to figure out who the hell Ava was, what she sounded like, what she wanted. As a writer, I needed to get out of her way. She’s tough. She’s a tough lady, but I think I had a lot of judgments about her. She makes horrible choices. She’s not interested in self-reflection, even though she thinks that she is. She’s super stubborn, and in a way, she’s stuck. I think stasis, in many ways, is the enemy of good fiction. Fiction needs to move. So, what do you do with a character that’s stuck? Ultimately, one of the ways that I began to be able to deal with her—and it is one of the ways that I approach character, in general—is I had to quiet down my judgment. I had to quiet down the ways in which I was trying to make her into a paper doll—like I was trying to sort of shove her around and make her do stuff.
Of course, for me, plot grows out of character, not the other way around. So, in order for me to kind of create any sort of plot, those characters need to have room to grow, and I need to begin to understand them a little bit better, and understand what their proclivities are, and what their desires are. When I’m really stuck, I try to remember that part of my responsibility is to move bodies around space and time. They go here, they go there, they come back, they talk to people. That helps me remember that the characters have a body. And going back to the bodies is always very useful for me. What does this feel like inside their body? What is their body doing?
DG: That makes me think of all the movement in this book that the characters experience. Many of them are in a state of precarity when it comes to their home or their own land. I wonder if you could talk about how that type of dislocation affects them, and why it emerged as a theme of the book.
AM: Yeah, I mean, it’s called The Unsettled, right? Which is a title that addresses many aspects of the book. It addresses the characters on a personal level, because many of them are unsettled emotionally. This is a story about people who are trying to love each other across time and geography and old wounds. And they do, in fact, love each other, but have a lot of trouble convincing one another that they are loved. And they’re certainly “unsettled” in the sense of home and land to varying degrees. Bonaparte was this very glorious, storied, independent Black settlement, on a bend in the Alabama River. But its future is uncertain, as its acreage and legacy is being chipped away at by all sorts of things: government incursions in the form of eminent domain; there’s a land developer, a company that’s called Progress, which is slowly buying off the land as people in the town leave. One of the big questions that is posed to the reader at the outset of the book is: Is this place going to survive, and what’s going to happen to the few people that still live in it?
Bonaparte is becoming diminished, which has been happening for many years. It begins to diminish shortly after its favorite daughter, Ava—the character whose life mostly takes place in Philadelphia—leaves the town. In a certain sense that precarity of place drives the plot and character enormously, because Ava lives in Philadelphia, but essentially, she’s looking for something that is as grand, as storied, as secured, as fortifying, as Bonaparte was in its heyday. So that precarity, that sense of having had a place whose future is [now] unstable, and your relationship to it is also unstable, is essentially what drives the whole book. She leaves Bonaparte, goes to Philadelphia, and a whole bunch of stuff happens, and in particular, she becomes a part of this group, Ark, which becomes a very dangerous place and a violent situation. She’s driven to that, I think, by this search for a place that is grand and stable.
The people in this book have a very deep sense of what it means to own land. If you have a piece of land, you have a strong link to some sort of autonomy—which, of course, is the case for Black people in the United States, in general. By around 1910, Black people in America owned millions and millions of acres of land. By 1997, a vast majority of that had been lost to various threats. The conservative estimated value of that lost land is $326 billion. Owning a piece of land can change your future and your present. It’s about material well-being, but it’s also about legacy. That’s what everyone wants, right? What do we leave to our children?
DG: I have one more question for you, which is about the award you’ve just received. It honors the late author Gabe Hudson, and it specifically recognizes a writer who has just completed their second book. I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges of writing and publishing a second book. What was the experience like for you?
AM: First of all, I really want to say that I’m so grateful to McSweeney’s, and Gabe’s mother, for creating such a generous fund to endow this award. I also think it’s a really smart award, because I don’t think there is a second-novel prize. I think this is it, which is pretty amazing, and it’s really needed. Second novels, you know? It is the notorious sophomore slump, or fear of the sophomore slump. You were writing a first novel your whole life, in a sense, right? It’s been sort of building up in you, and then, out it comes. For some people, it might have happened in the context of an MFA, which is increasingly the case. With the second novel, it’s like you’re a grown-up, and you don’t get the benefits of workshop or certain kinds of support systems that may have been present for a first novel. And, internally, there is this enormous pressure to feel as though you’re not a one-hit wonder or just a one-book wonder. And that you can sort of out-write yourself. You’re going to do better no matter what. You’re going to go bigger.
These types of concerns can become so outsized in your mind that they make it really difficult to write. They circumvent your system of discernment about your own work. Certainly, this is worse if you’ve had a big first book. I was fortunate enough to have that, for which I’m very grateful, but at a certain point, I couldn’t hear myself think. My ability to say: this is a strong character, this is a good paragraph or a strong plot line, felt like it was hijacked by external assessing voices. It was like the New York Times was telling me whether my sentences were good or not. I think that my example might be a bit of an outsized one, but for everyone, when you publish a first novel, no matter what happens to it, there is this sudden exposure to a public, an eye that is now on you suddenly becomes real in a way that it wasn’t when you were in the privacy of your first novel. This thing that you have been doing that was so private, so personal, is changed, and you have to figure out a new relationship with how you work and with the work itself.