Can we conceive of freedom without a core of domination—over other people, over the land, over groups less powerful than ourselves?

Why do we so often connect the project of Black progress and Black liberation to Black women’s bodies—whether they are pure enough, chaste enough, healthy enough, controlled enough to “deserve” or “allow for” freedom?

What does Black liberation look like when we refuse those definitions of freedom?

Black Motherhood as Literary Creation
An Interview with Kaitlyn Greenidge
by Liz Button

Liz Button: The book’s acknowledgments inform us that Libertie was inspired by an oral history recording you encountered while working at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. Could you go deeper into that origin story?

Kaitlyn Greenidge: The Weeksville Heritage Center was my first job when I moved to Brooklyn fifteen years ago. I worked there for a number of years and had a few different roles, but one of them was helping to restart their oral history program. We did an oral history with a descendant of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, one of the original residents of Weeksville, a free Black community in nineteenth-century Brooklyn. Her descendant is a famous soap opera actress named Ellen Holly who has written about her own family history in her memoir, One Life. So, she told us this beautiful and inspiring story about Dr. McKinney Steward and her daughter, who had married into this illustrious family of African American expatriates in Haiti, and how her mother helped her escape what turned out to be a very unhappy marriage.

When I heard that story ten or eleven years ago, I thought, oh wow, that’s so fascinating, that would make a wonderful novel. So, when I was trying to think of what to write after We Love You, Charlie Freeman, I was talking with my agent, Carrie Howland, and she said, you know, that idea seems manageable. I’m a pretty ambitious person, so I had been coming to her with all these ambitious three-novel-cycle ideas, and she said, let’s just focus on this story. And I’m so glad she did.

LB: Can you tell us about your research process prior to writing Libertie?

KG: I had worked in Black history museums for about ten years in total, so I already knew a lot about Black history, free Black communities in the North, and Reconstruction-era history. Reconstruction is a period that a lot of people say—these days it’s become almost a cliché— is a direct mirror to our own time. The level of civic violence, white backlash, extreme restriction of Black voting rights alongside extreme expansion of Black achievement really mirrors our own last eight to ten years, but most people don’t really learn much about it because the story isn’t one that fits into America’s idea of itself. In Reconstruction, the bad guys won, and that just set the tone of history for the next hundred years. So, I really wanted to explore that part of US history because I find it so fascinating, and the complications around Black people defining freedom for ourselves is really interesting.