Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie begins with a resurrection.
“I saw my mother raise a man from the dead,” the book’s eponymous protagonist Libertie Sampson—a free Black girl living in the 1860s—remarks in the novel’s opening line. Sitting at the intersection of freedom struggle in the Americas, Libertie is born to a freewoman and a fugitive, defined on both sides of her family tree by the legacy of slavery near and far.