Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge Coming in March

Kaitlyn Greenidge received accolades for her unique debut novel, “We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” which burst on the literary scene in 2016. But first and foremost I believe she would tell you that she is an historian, and it is that penchant for riffling through old manuscripts and newspapers that led to her writing a second novel with one of the most beautiful covers I have ever seen.

“Libertie” was inspired by Greenidge’s discovery of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, the first Black female physician to be licensed in the state of New York during the post-civil war era. We meet the fictional Dr. Sampson at her spacious home on a farm that was handed down through several generations. Situated at the top of a hill, graced with a long driveway, it is quickly apparent that Dr. Sampson’s office is a stop on the Underground Railroad and that she keeps this fact carefully guarded from her young daughter Libertie.

As the story unfolds readers will learn that Dr. Sampson keeps many secrets from her daughter but doesn’t shy away from laying the burden of inheritance upon Libertie’s young shoulders. Dr. Sampson teaches Libertie all that she knows about anatomy, herbal medicines, the setting of bones, and the dark truths surrounding childbirth and abortion.

What she fails to talk about with Libertie but what Libertie instinctively picks up on is how, even though they are free Negroes on their own land, for Dr. Sampson’s practice to survive, race and color are at the heart of every transaction. Dr. Sampson could pass for white. Her pale skin tone makes her an “acceptable” physician to the white women in town who will pay handsomely for her discretion.

But Libertie, who is dark, velvet black, is a bridge too far. The patients cringe when Libertie touches them and Libertie’s disdain for them is mutual. She remembers every escapee, scarred, beaten, and battered, brought to them under cover of night from a slave holding state and it makes her ill to see her mother fawn over these women who wield such power.

Greenidge writes with such empathy about the breach between mother and daughter that I wanted to reach through the pages and shake the two of them. Talk to one another! Explain yourselves! But no. Pride, hurt, and misunderstanding combine to push Libertie into a rash decision that will take her far from her mother, to a place where she will need to learn a new language and to adjust to other inequities just as acute as the ones she has left behind.

This lush, lyrical novel bursts with vibrancy and color. A mash-up of historical, coming-of-age, and racial justice story with a sprinkling of magical realism, there is something for every reader in this tale of Black women forging their own paths in those heady days of Reconstruction when anything seemed possible, until it wasn’t.