![]() ![]() It’s only when she’s married and far from home, trapped in a house with in-laws who despise her, that Libertie discovers Emmanuel’s egalitarian vision will only be reality for women at some indeterminate time in the future. When Libertie meets Emmanuel Chase, a young doctor from Haiti, she is overwhelmed both by his eager courtship and his depiction of Haiti as a Black utopia. ![]() ![]() Libertie’s skin is dark, though, and the fact that Libertie has no desire to be a doctor means that her mother’s lofty dream for her is oppressive. Sampson’s light complexion means that White patients trust her enough to seek her treatment. Her mother overcame prejudice against both her gender and her race to become a doctor, and she expects her daughter to do exactly the same. Libertie was born free, but she knows that freedom is complicated. ![]() Libertie’s mother is a doctor, and the resurrection she has just witnessed is, in fact, an escape, the dead man merely drugged and smuggled North in a coffin. “I saw my mother raise a man from the dead.” This is the first line of Greenidge’s second novel and the first words we hear from the novel’s eponymous heroine. A young Black woman travels from Brooklyn to Haiti in search of herself in this historical novel by the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (2016). ![]()
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