A Violent Woman: A Novel

At the Academy, Mathis will work on her new novel, “A Violent Woman” (forthcoming with Knopf). It tells the story of Dutchess and Lena Carson, an estranged mother and daughter separated not only by a thousand miles but also by Dutchess’s shadowy past as an itinerant blues singer, and Lena’s mental illness and recruitment into STEP, a radical political group loosely based on MOVE, active in Philadelphia in the 1970s and ’80s. Dutchess lives in Bonaparte, Alabama, a once vibrant African American town and refuge during the Jim Crow era now depopulated and menaced by developers. Lena’s home is Philadelphia, a city dogged by fiscal woes and violence. She and her son, Toussaint, move constantly from place to place, as Lena’s emotional instability grows and her involvement with STEP and its leader leads her to transcendence—and eventual tragedy. “Dutchess and Lena are disruptive and disrupting women, wanderers along the margins of conventional life whose experiences swing between joy and devastation,” Mathis writes. The “violent women” of the title, they are also free women, “women who enact who or what they are despite the strictures placed on them by their communities, by society, or even their loved ones.” The book details the high costs of this freedom: for Dutchess, isolation and estrangement, for Lena, dislocation. “It is possible, “Mathis asks, “for people wounded by personal circumstance and societal ills to fully recover?” She will explore this question amid Berlin’s own uniquely fraught history.