https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9769-1378
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Christina Cecelia Davidson, Libertie, The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 971–973, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae235
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Kaitlyn Greenidge. Libertie. New York: Algonquin Books, 2021.
Beautifully written, Libertie is a bildungsroman set between New York state and Haiti during the United States’ transition from slavery to freedom. It follows the story of a free African American girl, Libertie, the daughter of a remarkable Black woman doctor, Cathy Sampson. Dr. Sampson intends for Libertie to become a doctor too, but Libertie doubts her ability to emulate her mother. Rather than follow Dr. Sampson’s carefully laid plans for her to pursue medical studies after the Civil War, Libertie flunks out of college, marries her mother’s Haitian assistant, and returns with him to Jacmel, Haiti. Once in Haiti, Libertie realizes the cost of her decisions. Miles away from home, she finds herself pregnant and isolated from the outside world. She eventually plots an escape to reunite with her mother in New York.
Libertie is based on the real history of Anna Peaches McKinney, the daughter of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, New York’s first Black female doctor and the third Black female doctor in the United States. Anna married the son of Reverend Theodore Holly, an African American emigrant who founded the Episcopal Church in Haiti and became its first bishop. Although related to well-known historical figures, Anna’s story is known only because of the letters she wrote to her mother about her abusive husband; she too flees Haiti to rejoin her mother in the United States. Greenidge’s recasting of McKinney’s story through the fictive character of Libertie, whose dark skin contrasts her mother’s light, near-white complexion, reminds readers that not all African Americans formed part of the talented tenth. Through Libertie, Greenidge asks what became of the freedom dreams of the other ninety percent. This question remains at the forefront of the novel through Black characters who experience the horrors of slavery, fugitivity, and racial violence. Other aspects of African American life—Black churches and colleges, spirituals, and community building—feature too. Through haunting renderings, Greenidge reminds readers of the terror unleashed on Black people, the burdens especially placed upon Black women, and the immense hope for a different world that once seemed possible.
