Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Historical Fiction Unites the African Diaspora

There is a bit of a lull in Ohio. Libertie’s self-pity is presented in a repetitive and stunted monotone that can read as indulgent. But Libertie’s mother has taken on a new apprentice, Emmanuel, a handsome, bright recent medical school graduate from Haiti. The two meet, and the book swells again with cautious hope as the attraction between Libertie and Emmanuel carries her to his home in Jacmel.

For all Emmanuel’s assurances — that Haiti belongs to the Black man, that “none of us will ever triumph … until we are completely free,” that he and Libertie will have a “companionate marriage,” because “it is only logical that a man and wife should share friendship and charity and understanding” — the reality of her future looks quite different. The ship ride there is not unlike a honeymoon, and yet so reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s “Wild Seed” that any reader familiar with that work will know to suspect that true equality between the husband and wife might not be possible.

As lushly as Kings County is described, Greenidge grants the same favor to Jacmel, and despite the American filter, we can’t help hearing echoes of Edwidge Danticat in the line “the market was a kingdom of women,” or in the Haitian Creole tune the children make up for Libertie upon her arrival, because, Emmanuel explains, “anything here that happens at midnight is known by dawn. And by morning, the neighborhood has turned it into a song.” Still, the rich local color stands in conversation with the confinement of standard gender roles — recalling Janie in “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In this way, Libertie’s fate represents an ingenious nod to the unity of the African diaspora.

As with Janie, it soon becomes clear Libertie has run away from, not toward, something. Greenidge leans into the ache of this mother-daughter rift with heartbreaking, deeply rendered letters from the older woman finally declaring what she was unable to convey in Libertie’s adolescence.

Through a series of revelations, discoveries and Dickensian coincidences, Libertie ultimately decides the promises of Jacmel come with too high a price. “Was freedom worth it if you still ached like that?” she asks. “If you were still bound on this earth by desire?” Was it actually even freedom at all? For Ben Daisy, who in a way never actually escaped his captivity, the answer was no. But Libertie may be able to invent a new world, an autonomy within herself that extends outward no matter which home she claims. At the end of the novel she writes to her mother that she has only “almost reached the garden.” The sheer force of Greenidge’s vision for her, for us all, gives us hope that it won’t be long now.