Since the start of the pandemic, she has been quarantining with her mother and sisters in a woodsy suburb in central Massachusetts. “That idea of being the first and the only was a big piece of our experience,” Kaitlyn Greenidge said. Growing up in mostly white, wealthy suburbs around Boston, raised by a single mother who struggled to support the family on her social worker’s salary, all three felt pressure to succeed in rarefied fields where they often felt like exceptions. Her other sister, Kirsten Greenidge, is an Obie Award-winning playwright and a theatre professor at Boston University. Her sister Kerri Greenidge is a historian who specialises in African American and African diasporic histories, literature and politics. Greenidge comes from a family of exceptional women herself. “Part of what I wanted to explore is, what’s the emotional and psychological toll of being an exception, of being exceptional, and also, what about the people who just want to have a regular life and find freedom and achievement in being able to live in peace with their family - which is what Libertie wants?” “So much of Black history is focused on exceptional people,” Greenidge said in a video interview earlier this month. She became the model for Libertie, the kind of historical figure who is rarely celebrated: someone who simply wants to survive and thrive, not to be the first or the only one of anything. As she researched the family, she found herself drawn to the doctor’s wayward daughter, Anna. Greenidge based her book partly on Susan Smith McKinney Steward, who in the 1870s was the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York state.

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Libertie a novel by kaitlyn greenidge