People Like Us: The Search for Home and Belonging

Thematic claim: home as an unresolved negotiation, not a destination

In People Like Us, Jason Mott frames the search for home not as a journey toward a destination but as an unresolved negotiation between two impossible options: the ancestral land that anchors Black Americans to a history of both belonging and trauma, and the promise of refuge abroad that offers relief from American violence but never genuine membership. The novel's central claim is that home is not a place you are from but a place you are of—and for the characters in this book, no such place exists. What remains is the search itself: the effort to locate belonging in bodies, in memories, in chosen families, and in the stories we tell about ourselves.

The ancestral pull: land, graves, and the anchor of belonging

The novel opens its exploration of home with Soot's stubborn attachment to his family's land in North Carolina. In a scene where he, his ex-wife Tasha, and their daughter Mia clear brush from family graves, the narrator describes the land as never having belonged to Tasha's family—land she married into and then divorced out of. For Tasha, the land is not home; it is a burden she chose to leave. For Soot, it is an anchor. Standing on the back porch, he feels the ground calling to him, an anchor in his belly telling him this is where he was born and belongs. To leave, he believes, would be to abandon the dead—no one would tend their graves, and they would be swallowed by the earth.

This attachment is not sentimental nostalgia. The land carries generations of history—through slavery and sharecropping and all the rest, as Mia puts it. The graves are not just family; they are the physical record of a people's endurance. But the same land that holds the ancestors also holds the trauma. Mia, who has skipped two grades and dreams of college, tells her father plainly that she will never live there like him. She understands the pull—it is family land, and he does not want to leave—but she refuses to be bound by it. The novel thus sets up the central tension: the land is home because it holds the dead, but it cannot hold the living.

Tasha articulates the counterargument: you cannot save anyone by staying. She has already left, moving to Toronto with Mia, and she believes the only way forward is away. Soot's reply—I can't leave—is not a choice but a compulsion. The novel does not resolve this argument; it lets both positions stand, and the tension between them drives the rest of the narrative.

The promise of refuge: Europe and the limits of escape

If the ancestral land represents the pull of the past, Europe represents the promise of the future—a place where, as Victor puts it, people like us can do something different. In a Paris dinner scene, the narrator's companions describe the relief of living abroad. Not Toni Morrison, who has lived in France for seven years, says every time she comes back to it, she exhales. Victor agrees: the volume of American life—the guns, the bullshit—is quieter here. The promise is not that Europe is home, but that it is less hostile. Not Toni Morrison is explicit: it is the best people like us are gonna ever get.

But the novel immediately complicates this promise. Victor tells the story of his pilgrimage to Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, where he hoped to experience what he calls that Great Diaspora Catharsis—the homecoming he believed would make him feel at peace. Instead, he found just another place, a square of brick and mortar where everyone looked like him but nothing felt familiar. He had to learn how to walk and talk to people; it was culture shock. His conclusion is devastating: home is the place where you fit, where you belong—a place you are not just from, but of. And by that definition, he has no home. Not Toni Morrison agrees: they are from Africa but not of it, from America but not of it. She is not of any place.

Victor's response to this realization is defiance: he has no home, and no Black person does—and they do not need one. But the novel does not let this defiance stand unchallenged. Dylan, the young man who has been listening silently, asks the question that Victor cannot answer: what about the ones left behind? Do they not owe them something more than running away? Victor's answer—a string of curses against Georgia, Mississippi, and the rest—is a refusal, not a resolution. The novel leaves the question hanging.

The internal search: where do you exist?

The novel's most direct meditation on home comes in a therapy session. Soot's therapist asks him a question that reframes the entire search: where do you exist? She clarifies that she did not ask where he lives, but where he exists—whether he truly exists in North Carolina, in his hometown, in the town where his father was killed. Is that where he feels not only from, but of?

Soot's DNA test tells him he is mostly from Ghana and Congo, with a chunk of Europe—France and Italy—from the legacy of slavery. But the test cannot tell him where he belongs. The therapist pushes further, asking where his daughter lived in his body. Soot points to his throat, below his Adam's apple. Because he no longer has the memories of her, he explains, he only has the sounds of her name and the words he wants to say to her but cannot. Home, the novel suggests, is not a place at all. It is where we keep the people we love—in the body, in the throat, in the words we cannot speak.

This internalization of home is echoed in the narrator's confession to Dylan: he does not know for sure if he has ever felt at home in this world, which is why he lives in his head so much. The narrator's habit of signing other authors' names—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter Mosley—is not just a joke; it is a strategy for not having to be himself in a world where being himself feels unsafe. He has always felt most like himself when wearing someone else's name, or no name at all.

Complexity and contradiction

The novel refuses to resolve the question of home. It offers three competing positions and does not declare a winner. Soot's rootedness in the land is presented with sympathy, but it is also shown to be a kind of paralysis—he cannot leave, even when leaving might save his daughter. Victor's rejection of home is presented with energy, but it is also a form of running—he admits he stopped doing concerts because the word nigga had been co-opted, and his Fuck-it-all speech is a surrender, not a solution. Dylan's desperate desire for home—he just wants to be somewhere where he does not have to fit because he is already built in—ends in his death, shot by Remus in the mansion that was supposed to be a refuge.

The novel's darkest insight is that the search for home may be inseparable from the violence that makes home impossible. The narrator's own history is threaded with guns: his father's shotgun that he nearly used on himself at fourteen, the Heckler & Koch .45 he buys in his twenties, the loaded gun in his bedside nightstand. The gun is both a symptom and a cause—a response to the fear that home is never safe, and a reminder that safety is never guaranteed. When Remus shoots Dylan, the narrator flees and drops the gun over the Seine, but it hangs suspended in midair, refusing to fall. The violence cannot be discarded; it remains, suspended, part of the landscape of any possible home.

The novel's most hopeful suggestion is that home might be found in chosen family. Kelly, who can hear the narrator's thoughts, has seen him from the inside out and is still there. The group in the mansion—Victor, Not Toni Morrison, Mateo, Dylan, Kelly, the narrator—forms a kind of makeshift home, a place where people like us can really lean into being ourselves. But even this is fragile. Dylan dies. The narrator flees. The mansion is not a permanent solution.

In the end, the novel suggests that the search for home is not a question with an answer but a condition of existence. The narrator's daughter, in a vision, tells him that people like them feel too much and want to fix too much, and sometimes it swallows them. The search for home is part of that feeling and wanting. It cannot be abandoned, and it cannot be completed. What remains is the search itself—the effort to find, in the words of the therapist, a place to belong.

Study questions and answers

1. How does the novel define the difference between being from a place and being of a place?

Victor articulates the distinction in the Paris dinner scene: home is the place where you fit, where you belong—a place you are not just from, but of. Being from a place is a matter of origin—birth, ancestry, history. Being of a place is a matter of belonging—fitting in without effort, being already built in, as Dylan puts it. The novel's characters are all from somewhere—Soot from North Carolina, Victor from Jamaica, Dylan from outside DC—but none of them are of anywhere. Not Toni Morrison states it directly: they are from Africa but not of it, from America but not of it.

2. Why does Victor's pilgrimage to Cape Coast Castle fail to give him the homecoming he expected?

Victor went to Ghana expecting what he calls that Great Diaspora Catharsis—a moment of spiritual connection to the Motherland that would make him feel at home. Instead, he found just another place. The people looked like him, but everything sounded weird and bothered him. He had to learn how to walk and talk to people; it was culture shock, not homecoming. His conclusion is that home cannot be inherited through ancestry alone; it must be lived. The place was from him, but he was not of it.

3. What does the therapy session reveal about Soot's relationship to home?

The therapist's question—where do you exist?—forces Soot to move beyond geography. He initially answers North Carolina, but the therapist pushes him to consider whether he truly exists there, in the town where his father was killed. The DNA test offers no answer: he is genetically from Ghana and Congo, with European blood from France and Italy, but none of these places feel like home. The breakthrough comes when she asks where his daughter lived in his body. Soot points to his throat, where he keeps the sounds of her name and the words he wants to say to her but cannot. Home, the scene suggests, is not a location but a relationship—a place in the body where we keep the people we love.

4. How does Dylan's story complicate the novel's treatment of escape?

Dylan is the character who most fully embodies the desire to escape. He ran away from his parents and his hometown outside DC because life back home did—it made him run. He begged his parents to stay in Europe, where he could breathe better. But in Paris, he confesses that Europe is not home and never will be; there is a hierarchy here, just like everywhere. His question—what do you do when your home does not love you and the other homes you have tried do not love you either—has no answer. Dylan's death, shot by Remus in the mansion that was supposed to be a refuge, suggests that escape is not a solution. As Remus says, running away never would have fixed anything.

5. What does the novel suggest about the relationship between home and violence?

The novel repeatedly connects the search for home to the threat of violence. The narrator's own history is marked by guns: his father's shotgun, the .45 he buys for safety, the loaded gun in his nightstand. The gun is a response to the fear that home is never safe—a fear embodied by the sixteen-year-old girl at Festival America who confesses she will die at school one day and dreams about it every night. The novel suggests that violence is not an external threat but a condition of existence for people like us—it shapes where they can live, how they move, what they can call home. When the narrator drops the gun over the Seine and it hangs suspended in midair, refusing to fall, the image suggests that violence cannot be discarded. It remains, suspended, part of the landscape of any possible home.