Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

This is a good Independence Day weekend book to read. The book is inspired by the life of Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black woman doctor in New York State and the third in the country, and her daughter, who married the son of an Episcopal bishop from Haiti. Libertie’s hometown is based on the real nineteenth-century community of Weeksville, a town of free Blacks in Brooklyn during Reconstruction. Libertie's mother has a mystical quality to her, but while she can heal the body, the spirit that has bewen harmed by slavery does not heal so easilty. There are a lot of layers to this book, but the story itself is about a mother-daughter relationship, wrapped in an exploration of race, gender, and colorism. Libertie's mother would like her to follow in her footsteps as a physician and a healer. She is not as gifted as her mother, and she struggles in school. When she ends up failing out of college, Libertie makes the rash decision to marry her mother’s protégé Lucien Chase, the son of an Episcopal bishop, and follow him to Haiti. She hopes that Haiti, as a Black-led republic, will offer her a different life than she can find in the U.S., but soon discovers that the island has its own problems and is still not free of the bitter disease of colorism. It is beautifully written, suffused with layers of hurt and pain.