What she told us was astonishing. The doctor’s daughter married a family friend, the son of another prominent Black political family, the Hollys, who had emigrated to Haiti at the start of the Civil War, certain that Black freedom was impossible on American soil. In the all-Black nation of Haiti, the Hollys hoped to establish true Black liberation. The patriarch was Bishop Holly, eventually the archbishop of Haiti in the Episcopal Church. The whole family lived in a sprawling, lush homestead in downtown Port-au-Prince, a home and city that Anna McKinney fell in love with.

She did not, however, love her husband. Reportedly, Anna knew on her wedding day that she did not want to marry him and begged her mother to let her back out of the marriage. Her mother refused. So, Anna traveled to Haiti and found the promising young Black striver she had married was in fact an abuser and a womanizer. She wrote her mother many letters from Haiti relating the deterioration of her marriage, begging to come home.

After Anna gave birth to twins, her mother made a plan to smuggle her and her children out of the country. She was able to help them escape to New Jersey, where mother, daughter, and grandchildren lived together, never returning. For the rest of her life, Anna missed Haiti but dreaded ever seeing her abusive husband again. His family repeatedly sent her letters telling her she was ruining the institution of the Black family by leaving him.

To put this into context, Sarah, her daughter, Anna, and the Holly family were all members of the burgeoning Black professional and upper class soon to be immortalized by W. E. B. Du Bois as the “talented tenth.” The ethos of this class—an adherence to respectability and a deep respect for white American and European cultural values, while simultaneously advocating for a narrative of deep Black pride and racial uplift—has dominated definitions of Blackness and discussions about how to navigate and fight racism, both in Black communities and outside our communities, for generations. What fascinates me about this class in the decades after the Civil War, especially in the period during Reconstruction, is the intense faith put in democracy, in the systems of American governance, in the really heartbreaking dream that white power brokers will ever play fair.

As I was writing Libertie, I was captivated by the belief, still possible to believe in the years after the Civil War, that equality was close at hand, that it was possible, that change was coming. You’re talking about a person who had seen a three-hundred-year-old institution fall apart in less than four years, and so I was most interested in writing into that spirit of immense possibility.

I tend to approach novels as a puzzle, as a way to answer questions. For this project particularly, these are the questions that drove it, that I am still grappling with:

What does freedom actually mean?