But as she grows up, she rebels against the pressure to live up to her mother’s expectations-to live the life her mother has mapped out for her as a partner in her medical practice. Coming of age in a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, Libertie is in awe of her formidable mother and the work she accomplishes as a doctor and a stop on the underground railroad. Kathy Sampson-a widow who is raising her daughter Libertie. Greenidge sets her novel before, during, but primarily after the Civil War and Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward who in 1869 became the first Black female doctor in New York and then co-founded of a hospital for women in Brooklyn. An historical novel, Libertie is inspired in part by the true story of Dr.

We’re celebrating Juneteenth with a conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge about her novel Libertie. Jo Reed: That is novelist and 2016 NEA Literature Fellow Kaitlyn Greenidge and this Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed Kaitlyn Greenidge: It is so fascinating to me, and I will never be able to understand how people who were literally one or two years out of enslavement did these extraordinary things, of setting up whole towns, hospitals, schools, newspapers, mutual aid societies, parties, just everything, you know? And when we were talking sort of earlier about that question of trauma, people who had lived through amounts of trauma that are indescribable, not really understandable to most of us alive today, still had the wherewithal to sort of build these things, it's absolutely extraordinary.

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