Ben is revealed to be a formerly enslaved man who escaped, a fugitive who was drugged to ensure his silence in cross-state transport, and subsequently stowed away to avoid detection. Arriving at Libertie’s home in the morbid vessel of a pitch-black coffin, Mr. Ben, had survived a fate worse than death-slavery. As Libertie learns, the near-dead man, known to her as Mr. Sampson helps this man escape his stupor only to discover he’s plagued with an additional ailment-“a problem of the spirit”-that she can’t begin to diagnose or heal. Sampson “raise a man from the dead,” she does so without pageantry. In Libertie’s recollection, on the fateful day when Dr. Named “for a dead man’s dream,” Libertie’s journey is shaped by a generational hunger for freedom and an inherited project to imagine a life worth living. Through self-narration, Libertie uses her memories to draw readers into the world of the dead and the near-dead that populate so much of both her family’s history and her mother’s profession as a doctor. Instead, she finds a hunger for life that calls her to refashion herself in her own image. Over the course of the novel, Libertie is pushed to emulate her mother’s respectable comportment and follow in her footsteps.

Sampson-a “colored woman” with a conviction to serve her community-became an expert in the science of resuscitation. Galvanized by the traumatic death of her younger sister, Libertie’s mother, Dr. Raised by her mother, a light-skinned and wealthy freeborn woman, Libertie is most often compared to her deceased ancestors because of her darker skin and childlike curiosity.Īs the novel asserts, Libertie shares a great resemblance to her deceased father, a dark-skinned fugitive born into slavery, and to her mother’s deceased freeborn sister, who died prematurely on account of her inability to pass as white. And though she is freeborn and class-privileged like her mother, Libertie’s dark(er) skin continues to constrain the freedom she has inherited as she must bear the weight of colorist impositions and imaginations. Sitting at the intersection of freedom struggle in the Americas, Libertie is born to a freewoman and a fugitive, defined on both sides of her family tree by the legacy of slavery near and far.

“I saw my mother raise a man from the dead,” the book’s eponymous protagonist Libertie Sampson-a free Black girl living in the 1860s-remarks in the novel’s opening line. Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie begins with a resurrection. Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie (Photo credit: Syreeta McFadden)

Liberte by kaitlyn greenidge