Libertie

There will be some spoilers, so don’t read if you haven’t finished the book! I read Libertie, the new novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge, in three big gulps, late at night when I should have been sleeping. I had read her first novel, We Love You Charlie Freeman, and enjoyed the complexity of Greenidge’s first person narration, which depends on a character coming into strange, belated awarenesses of her family’s structure and her own emotional and sexual needs. Charlie Freeman is primarily set in the years I was a teenager, so I also warmed to the descriptions of the outfits teenagers wear when they want to slip into new personas. Teenage description remains a weakness of mine! I just love it! The second diegetic timeframe in Charlie Freeman is the late 1920s, and develops some really complicated ideas about coercion and consent in and around sexual life, so I was really intrigued by the description of Libertie’s plot, which focuses on the eponymous heroine’s teenaged and young adult years in 1860s Kings County, New York. Like Nymphadora in Charlie Freeman, Libertie was written by a historical mind, with a particularly vividly rendered dailiness, especially in the working life of Libertie’s mother, a physician with a special interest in homeopathy. This is the kind of detail I really enjoy, one that boils down extensive research into a few well-chosen Latin names or lists of symptoms.

One of the most compelling aspects of these two novels is Greenidge’s investment in examining psychologically dense problems – how a queer woman might relate to a family in the 1990s, how temperament conditions one’s life as much as intelligence or capacity, how the heady mixture of naiveté and sexual desire prompt people to do things they might otherwise not do. At the end of Libertie, when the protagonist is newly pregnant and has discovered a revolting secret kept by her husband’s family, Greenidge boils down the difficulty of describing mental states: “I was not sure where this thing called a will came from. Mama had it. Emmanuel [her husband] had it. Even mad Ella [her sister in law], in her obsession, had a will. But I did not. Would it come when whatever was in me was born? Or did I have a little more time to develop one, before this something else was here?” (280). The challenge – of finding oneself – often feels like a banal one, especially in those terms: how can we “find” ourselves? But here, by placing the attention to a rapidly changing body alongside the merest glimmer of self- concept, Greenidge draws attention to the way our psyches do come into being: not through rapid revelations or cataclysms of understanding, but by testing ourselves, lightly, sort of awkwardly, against the people around us. Of course, in this moment, Libertie, the character, has left her mother and her mother’s ambitions for her in Kings County and travelled to Haiti with a man she barely knows as her husband. In most stories, this plotline alone would count as a will: but Greenidge knows the mind better than most. As Libertie’s pregnancy moves forward, we get another powerful description of the relationship between embodiment and psychic self-development: “Within a month of the time in the graveyard, I felt [the fetus]. The women in Mama’s care had always described it as a flutter, but this felt more like a determined, persistent churning. As if a current was gathering inside me. […] By the end of the month, the wave was steady and predictable. I imagined the child there, as faceless as the skin of the ocean, as formless as a wave” (283). “As faceless as the skin of the ocean:” is the child a body without a will, or a will without a body? I think, perhaps, Greenidge gets to the utterly bizarre experience of pregnancy and childbirth in one discrete image here: there is a will to life nestled within Libertie’s womb, a will that is at present absorbed in and by her body, not yet separate or separable from hers. But the movements, after quickening, remind you that, no matter how much you think pregnancy is happening to you, it’s happening to two of you: there is a body there, inside you, and your will – the will to move forward, to walk or run, to breathe the air around you – is what keeps it alive.