There is a sentimental strain in black literature that casts back to an ancestral African heritage to locate a sense of self. But a yearning for home in the Deep South is a more fraught concept, and Ms. Mathis nicely gets at ‘the weight of [an] inheritance’ that includes bloodshed and oppression … The Unsettled follows Ms. Mathis’s debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012), whose loosely assembled family vignettes also explored the ambivalent aftermath of the Great Migration north. But this is a far better book, more focused and cohesive, and also more alive. This may be because here the South is not merely a ghostly memory but, in the form of Dutchess’s riotous monologues, an expressive voice, cajoling and imploring its exiles and calling them back home.
