22 Mar / Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge [in Shelf Awareness]
*STARRED REVIEW
Kaitlyn Greenidge wowed the literary world with her disturbingly delightful debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman; her follow-up, Libertie, shows no hints of sophomore slump. Inspired by Susan Smith McKinney Steward, New York’s first Black female doctor (and the third U.S. Black woman to earn her medical degree), Greenidge alchemizes history into a gorgeously affecting story of a powerful mother, her headstrong daughter, and the complex challenges they must deal with as Black women before and beyond the Civil War.
The titular Libertie is the freeborn daughter of Dr. Sampson, a woman so powerful that Libertie introduces her with a riveting opening sentence: “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead.” Libertie recognizes her mother’s “magic” when coffins are delivered to Brooklyn and enslaved escapees rise into freedom. At “eleven, nearly twelve,” Libertie begs to help, to learn, to fulfill Mama’s dream of having “a horse and carriage together, with ‘Dr. Sampson and Daughter’ written in gold on the side.” But as Libertie matures, she recognizes that her dark skin and her mother’s lighter one mean very different lives, that degrees of color are inextricably linked to both privilege and oppression. As Mama attends to more white women during Reconstruction – even as they dismiss Libertie’s darker, assisting hands – Libertie’s sense of betrayal solidifies into polarizing resentment.
Mama announces she “cannot teach [Libertie] anymore” and sends her to Ohio’s Cunningham College, where Mama’s revered reputation still reigns. But medicine is not Libertie’s passion; she’s drawn to music and poetry, eventually failing at anatomy, biology, chemistry. Her escape from Mama’s control is ironically found back in their Brooklyn home, where young Dr. Emmanuel Chase is living in Libertie’s room and working beside Mama; his “high yellow” Blackness resembles Mama’s lightness. Libertie marries Emmanuel and emigrates with him to his family home in Haiti, a promised land of equity and acceptance that proves anything but.
Greenidge prominently, achingly makes the evolving mother/daughter bond her narrative focus, but what gives her 19th-century fiction evergreen urgency is her arresting examination of the degrees of freedom and their surprising consequences, the degrading subtleties of colorism within blatant racism, the enabling of gender inequity – and even abuse – by those oppressed, the individual’s less-than-guaranteed right to claim agency. And yet, Libertie prevails. Greenidge writes with an effortless flow, her prose enhanced with songs, chants, and verses that remind readers how words have other functions beyond straightforward storytelling. As her characters grow into self-awareness, readers, too, are granted the illuminating gift of bearing witness.
Shelf Talker: Inspired by the life of New York’s first Black female doctor, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s sophomore title superbly examines the mother/daughter bond through a 19th-century lens rife with race and privilege.
Review: Shelf Awareness Pro, March 16, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021