Ordinary greatness: The story that inspired Civil War-era novel ‘Libertie’
When Kaitlyn
Greenidge learned about Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the third Black woman to earn a medical degree in America, she was working at a historical site in Brooklyn that seeks to preserve accounts of the daily lives of free Blacks in the 19th century.
While Greenidge was inspired by McKinney Steward’s incredible life to write a novel, her focus at the museum on honoring ordinary people — rather than history-making trailblazers and pioneers — shaped the book’s attention to the details of everyday life then, too.
The novel became “Libertie,” which tells the firstperson story of Libertie, the daughter of McKinney Steward-inspired character Dr. Catherine Sampson, and how her life is shaped by her mother’s relentless need to heal, even when the task is impossible or the cost is steep. To heighten the drama, the book is set 20 years earlier than McKinney Steward’s own career, beginning the action in the Civil War.
Libertie rebels against her mother through her choices at college, her marriage and her rejection of a life of professional caring. Greenidge’s novel, her second, also explores colorism in the Black community, the impact of posttraumatic stress disorder on former slaves, the destructive nature of gender inequity, and how freedom comes in degrees, even after a war is fought over it. Yet it never loses sight of its story and its study of Libertie and her mother as women.
Greenidge, whose sisters include a historian and an award-winning playwright, knows about being exceptional and about the desire for ordinary life. After the first draft of this book, she edited and rewrote while pregnant, and then as a new mother. She lives in New York but spoke by Zoom from Massachusetts, where she has spent the quarantine with her mother and sisters. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
QLibertie’s mother devotes her life to trying to heal others, initially only treating fellow Blacks, including runaway slaves, who are suffering emotionally as much as they are physically. Can we heal others?
AThe novel is a way to explore healing as a nonlinear event. Writing this novel was a new way of writing for me — I wrote it in chronological order, which I rarely do, but what’s often happening to the characters emotionally is often nonlinear. Characters are reaching a sense of physical safety at times when they’re emotionally unsafe and vice versa. A lot of us hope you can just reach a place where you’re healed and you can just move on, but as trite as it sounds, healing is a constant state and an ongoing process.
QLibertie is angered when her mother begins treating white women at her new hospital, because they are outwardly racist to the dark-skinned Libertie and because she holds them at least complicit in attitude for the recent murder of Blacks during the 1863 draft riots. Her mother is pragmatic and dismissive of Libertie’s attitude. How would you have felt?
AI try to set up a question for which there’s no easy answer. I don’t actually know what I would do in that situation. The answer is different for each of us. What I wanted to talk about in this book is how the first Black person to do X always faces those contradictions, those choices.
But I also hope this makes us question the celebration of exceptionalism when we’re writing the history of people. I spent a lot of time working in history museums and thinking about how we tell narratives, and why, for marginalized people, there is such a focus on firsts and not just on how people made a life. We want to honor people who were first but that does a disservice for people who look to history as ways to understand their own current condition.