Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Kind of Freedom
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
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STATE: CA
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http://inkwellmanagement.com/client/margaret-wilkerson-sexton * http://www.counterpointpress.com/authors/margaret-wilkerson-sexton/ * https://www.massreview.org/node/805
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017028642 |
| HEADING: | Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson |
| 670 | __ |a A kind of freedom, 2017: |b ECIP t.p. (Margaret Wilkerson Sexton) |
PERSONAL
Born in New Orleans, LA.
EDUCATION:Attended Dartmouth College and University of California, Berkeley.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Lombard Fellowship; National Book Award longlist, for A Kind of Freedom; also nominated for Pushcart Prize.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including Grey Sparrow Journal, Lenny Letter, Massachusetts Review, New York Times Book Review, and Oprah.com.
SIDELIGHTS
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s debut is A Kind of Freedom, which was longlisted for the National Book Award upon its publication. The book tells the story of a multigenerational African American family that loses ground—socially and economically—over the course of eight decades and three generations. “One of the ideals of the American dream is that circumstances should improve over generations. That’s how the son of poor immigrants can become an attorney or a doctor,” declared Rachel León in the Chicago Review of Books. “But things don’t always follow this trajectory. In Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s new multigenerational novel … the daughter of a prominent doctor becomes the grandmother of an incarcerated young man.”
The novel begins with the story of Evelyn, daughter of a respected African American doctor, who falls in love with a janitor who wants to become a doctor himself. The couple, said Chere Coen, writing in the News Star, “give birth to two daughters, one who becomes a successful lawyer and Jackie, who marries a man destined to fall victim to drugs. Jackie’s son, T.C., grows up lured with the easy money of providing drugs to the community, and he enjoys growing his own special blend of pot. When his girlfriend gives birth to a son, he feels the pull of being someone his son will admire, despite the hand being dealt him as a man of color.” “Ingeniously, Sexton tells Evelyn’s story, then Jackie’s, then T.C.’s, then cycles back to Evelyn, and so on,” opined R.O. Kwon on the SFGate website, “zigzagging from the past to the future, and back again, until the different eras almost feel like one relentless present day,” . In turn, Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. become parents; in turn, their own dreams thwarted, they each look forward to a better life for their children, aspirations that the book, with its hopscotch timeline, has already diminished, even revoked.”
A Kind of Freedom is set in New Orleans, Sexton’s home town and one of the few cities in the country where a story of African American decline from respectability to incarceration would be plausible. “Some of the nuances,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “are particular to New Orleans–which has a distinct and complicated history with regard to race–but Sexton’s choice of this unique setting is effective, too.” “New Orleans is the first place I ever lived so even though I moved when I was twelve, I had already soaked up all the city’s details,” Sexton told Katherine Keenan in the Massachusetts Review. “I know the nuanced way people talk to each other; the way they dance; the way they look even. New Orleans is independently one of the culturally richest cities in the world but for me it is also the site of my formative years so my most meaningful memories are rooted there.” “Though I’m from there, I still needed to do extensive research,” Sexton told Marian Kaufman on the Bayou website. “I read a lot about the effects of World War II, the particulars of the Jim Crow South, Hurricane Katrina’s effect on the geography of the city, and how the city’s landscape shifted over time. I talked to people too, family members, friends. Much of my research on T.C.’s character was anecdotal.” The author “is a native of the Crescent City,” stated Jesse McCarthy in the New York Times Book Review, “and one of the pleasures of this novel is its feel for the particulars of local language, texture and taste: a jar of pickled pig lips, a family crawfish boil … as well as the shame of bringing a date to the movies when you had to sit in what was then (in more polite circles) referred to as ‘the Negro balcony.'”
Reviewers have noted that Sexton’s novel has a lot of relevance for twentieth-century America. “A Kind of Freedom, sadly, just confirms what many in the US already know,” observed a Hysterical Hamster reviewer, “that in large parts of America–New Orleans being the exemplar in this book–systemic racism over a number of generations has meant that even when people of colour achieve a limited sort of success the system will continue to discriminate and undercut them.” “Sexton’s narrative,” declared a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “navigates complex topics with an adroit sensitivity that lends sympathy to each character’s realistic, if occasionally self-destructive, motivations.” A Kind of Freedom “disavows any notion that prejudice is history,” wrote Booklist reviewer Emily Dziuban: “perhaps changed in form, it is still passed along … generations.” “Toward the end of the book,” related Melanie Bishop in the New York Journal of Books, “Sexton brings us back to the opening detail of Renard’s uneven hem, which, despite someone trying to fix it, still looks off to Evelyn. Sewn into that off-kilter hem is all her doubt about her choice, about their future, but only a few paragraphs later, Sexton gives us an ending that soars with hope. Given the recent happenings in Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s hard to imagine a more relevant release date for this lovely, important book. This is a book for our time.” “Wikerson creates a series of robust and memorable characters with distinct voices and all too human desires,” concluded Jane Ciabattari on the Book Critics website. “Despite the struggles, A Kind of Freedom glimmers with hope.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Emily Dziuban, review of A Kind of Freedom, p. 19.
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2017, review of A Kind of Freedom.
Massachusetts Review, June 30, 2017, Katherine Keenan, “10 Questions for Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.”
New York Times Book Review, September 5, 2017, Jesse McCarthy, review of A Kind of Freedom, p. 15.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of A Kind of Freedom, p. 27.
ONLINE
Bayou, https://bayoumagazine.org (March 23, 2018), review of A Kind of Freedom
Book Critics, http://bookcritics.org/ (November 4, 2017), Leonard Prize, review of A Kind of Freedom.
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (August 23, 2017), Rachel L. León, review of A Kind of Freedom.
Counterpoint Press Website, http://www.counterpointpress.com/ (April 18, 2018), author profile.
Hysterical Hamster, http://mondyboy.com/ (October 29, 2017), review of A Kind of Freedom.
Inkwell Management, http://inkwellmanagement.com/ (April 18, 2018), author profile.
News Star, https://www.thenewsstar.com/ (August 19, 2017), Chere Coen, review of A Kind of Freedom.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 18, 2018), Melanie Bishop, review of A Kind of Freedom.
SFGate, https://www.sfgate.com/ (September 7, 2017), R.O. Kwon, review of A Kind of Freedom.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
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ABA Indies Introduce Top 10 Debut
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton was born in New Orleans, LA, received her BA in Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and her JD from UC Berkeley School of Law. Her stories have been published in Grey Sparrow Journal, Limestone Journal and Broad! Magazine, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A Kind of Freedom (Counterpoint Press) is her debut novel.
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Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Born and raised in New Orleans, MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. She was a recipient of the Lombard Fellowship and spent a year in the Dominican Republic working for a civil rights organization and writing. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New York Times Book Review, Oprah.com, Lenny Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, and other publications. She lives in the Bay Area, California, with her family.
Born and raised in New Orleans, MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON She is the author of:
A Kind of Freedom: A Novel
Bio
Born and raised in New Orleans, MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. She was a recipient of the Lombard Fellowship and spent a year in the Dominican Republic working for a civil rights organization and writing. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New York Times Book Review, Oprah.com, Lenny Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, and other publications. She lives in the Bay Area, California, with her family.
NPR: Interview
Susan Larson, The Reading Life | 8/14/17
0:00 / 12:14
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NPR: Interview
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KQED: Interview
ADDITIONAL iNTERVIEWS
THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW | Print
OTHERPPL | Audio
A Kind of Freedom
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p19. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
A Kind of Freedom.
By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.
Aug. 2017.256p. Counterpoint, $26 (9781619029224).
Evelyn, Jackie, and T. C. are complex and authentic generations of a New Orleans family. The novel's title captures reality for all three: free people trying to exercise free will while the webbing of race and class prevents them from finding free opportunity. In the 1940s, Evelyn's family is among the most successful African Americans in town, and her love for Renard, son of a janitor, causes them legitimate concern. In the 1980s, Jackie, Evelyn's daughter and herself a new mom, attempts to reconcile with her husband, Terry, whose crack addiction was born in part by his less-than status among his white peers. In the 2010s, Jackie's son, T. C., is released from prison and must find a way to provide for his own newborn son. Sexton's characters share the traits of kindness and struggle, and her first novel disavows any notion that prejudice is history: perhaps changed in form, it is still passed along with the generations. This novel sparked a competition among literary agents, and for good reason. This family is worth every minute of a reader's time. --Emily Dziuban
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "A Kind of Freedom." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 19. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862690/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=e50d0ad4. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862690
1 of 5 3/22/18, 11:04 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson: A KIND OF FREEDOM
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson A KIND OF FREEDOM Counterpoint (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 8 ISBN: 978-1-61902-922-4
A multigenerational exploration of systemic racism in America.Evelyn is 22 and studying to be a nurse. Her family is well-known in New Orleans' 7th Ward. Her mother is a beautiful Creole woman. Her father's distinctly African features are offset by the fact that he's a doctor. It's 1944, and Evelyn, her family, and her peers are unabashed in their colorism. Evelyn and her sister, Ruby, assess men and other women by the lightness of their skin and the natural straightness of their hair. Among other Negroes--the preferred term in this time and place--Evelyn's appearance and relative wealth shield her from some of the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South. But what privilege she enjoys becomes an impediment when she falls in love with a man with no money and no family. Over the course of the novel, Sexton follows Evelyn, her daughter, Jackie, and her grandson, T.C., as they negotiate the realities of race and class in the United States. Jackie loses her husband--and her solidly middle-class life--to the crack epidemic of the 1980s. T.C. starts dealing weed after the world he knows is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Some of the dilemmas these characters face would have been--and will be--recognizable to many African-Americans. For example, Evelyn's beau (and, eventually, her husband) doesn't want to risk his life fighting for a country in which he is not a full citizen. And, even though Jackie knows the devastating impact of crack firsthand, she also recognizes that the war on drugs has a disproportionate impact on black people. Some of the nuances are particular to New Orleans--which has a distinct and complicated history with regard to race--but Sexton's choice of this unique setting is effective, too. There aren't many places in the country where three generations can take an African- American family from life in an established, upper-middle-class enclave to a hand-to-mouth existence in public housing. Sexton's debut novel shows us that hard work does not guarantee success and that progress doesn't always move in a straight line. A well-crafted--and altogether timely--first novel.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson: A KIND OF FREEDOM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329236/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=a475c50a. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
2 of 5 3/22/18, 11:04 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329236
3 of 5 3/22/18, 11:04 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
A Kind of Freedom
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p27+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* A Kind of Freedom
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. Counterpoint
(P6W, dist.), $26 (256p) ISBN 978-1-61902922-4
Set in Sexton's native New Orleans, this emotionally wrenching, character-rich debut spans three generations in a city deeply impacted by segregation, economic inequality, and racial tensions. It begins with a 1940s romance between Evelyn, the eldest daughter in a relatively well-off Creole family, and Renard, the son of a janitor, whose dreams are bigger than his station in life can hold. Their daughter, Jackie, becomes a mother in the Reagan-era 1980s, struggling through the economic downturn that derails her husband's promising career and starts him on a tumultuous path of addiction and empty promises. Their grandson, T.C., lives through the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, watching it transform his city--and himself--into something unfamiliar. Yet when his ambitions falter, he braces himself with the need to be present in his newborn son's life in the way his father never was. Sexton's narrative navigates complex topics with an adroit sensitivity that lends sympathy to each character's realistic, if occasionally self-destructive, motivations. Being able to capture 70 years of New Orleans history and the emotional changes in one family in such a short book is a testament to Sexton's powers of descriptive restraint. In this fine debut, each generation comes with new possibilities and deferred dreams blossoming with the hope that this time, finally, those dreams may come to fruition. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Kind of Freedom." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 27+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538295/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=84698ba0. Accessed 23 Mar. 2018.
4 of 5 3/22/18, 11:04 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495538295
5 of 5 3/22/18, 11:04 PM
10 Questions for Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
June 30, 2017 - By Katherine Keenan
“Say, white girl,” Liana could hear the brown-skinned girl behind her whispering in the middle of Pre-algebra. She knew she was calling for her, even though Liana wasn’t white. At the old school, everybody knew Liana’s daddy was Creole, that her mother was light-skinned black. Also, at her old school, there had been other girls like her, girls whose hair touched their butts and swung back and forth when they jumped rope. But when her daddy moved out, her mama had to transfer her to Eleanor McMain Magnet, and she was the lightest girl here by a long shot.”
--from “White Girl,” which appears in the Summer 2017 issue (Volume 58, Issue 2)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written.
The first piece I ever wrote was a poem. I was in the 4th grade at a Catholic school so I suspect the piece was of a spiritual nature. I remember reading it to my father when I was done, and he reacted like it was award-winning work. I believed him and decided I would become a writer. Years later I read the poem, which he saved, and realized how very age appropriate and basic it was. But I think he saw a flicker of something in it that seemed special and worth encouraging.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I could only hope that the historical and social insights of Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones; the intricate character development of Elizabeth Strout; and the lyricism of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid have somehow been incorporated into my own work.
What other professions have you worked in?
I worked as a lawyer for a few years and actually really liked the work itself but not the specific environment I was in. If it weren’t for the latter issue, I’d probably still be doing it because I loved the mental precision and rigor the field required.
What inspired you to write this piece?
I have a cousin whom I always admired. She is African American but has extremely fair skin. I am dark-skinned, and I was so infected with colorism as a child I assumed because she had lighter skin that her life was perfect. Years later, she told me she hated her skin color, that her blackness was always being challenged, and even that she hoped her children would be darker so that they wouldn’t have to go through what she’d gone through. It was hard for me to imagine someone bemoaning a quality I thought would have made life easier so I wanted to delve into what it might feel like to think of light skin as a burden.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
New Orleans is the first place I ever lived so even though I moved when I was 12, I had already soaked up all the city’s details: the first phone numbers I memorized were “504” numbers; I still know the television stations; I know how to cook the food; I know the nuanced way people talk to each other; the way they dance; the way they look even. New Orleans is independently one of the culturally richest cities in the world but for me it is also the site of my formative years so my most meaningful memories are rooted there.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I like to listen to Lauryn Hill when I’m in the thick of a writing project, particularly her first album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill because it embodies the creative spirit of someone who’s just coming out and who’s still raw and innocent but who’s opinionated and prolific.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Not really. I write on my unmade bed when my children are at school.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My husband can tell when something is a story and when it’s not so Ialways show him my work first so I don’t waste too much time on something that’s not textured enough to hold a reader’s attention.
What are you working on currently?
I’m anticipating the debut of A Kind of Freedom, my first novel, which will be released by Counterpoint Press on August 15th. And I’m working on another novel which tells the story of three African American kids at a boarding school whose lives veer apart when one of them is kicked out but who come together again in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement when one of their sons is racially profiled.
What are you reading right now?
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid and No One is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts.
Purchase our current issue (Volume 58, Issue 2) here to read Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s piece “White Girl”.
MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON received her BA in Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and her JD from UC Berkeley School of Law. Her first novel, A Kind of Freedom, will be published by Counterpoint Press in August 2017. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Grey Sparrow Journal, Broad! Magazine, and Limestone Journal, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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Volume 59, Issue 1
FRONT COVER by Amy Johnquest, Percy Lightfoot, Star Pupil, Trent School, 2017. ALTERED CABINET CARD, CASEIN, ACRYLIC. Courtesy of the artist.
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‘A Kind of Freedom’ Follows Three Generations of a Black Family in New Orleans
By JESSE McCARTHYSEPT. 5, 2017
Photo
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton Credit Ben Krantz
A KIND OF FREEDOM
By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
230 pp. Counterpoint. $26.
The subject of the black family and its relationship to racial progress in America has never been neutral. Historians, social scientists and armchair critics from all quarters have led fractious debates defending or condemning it. These polemics all too often overshadow the very human experience they purport to understand, reducing to caricature full and entangled lives.
In her luminous and remarkably assured first novel, “A Kind of Freedom,” Margaret Wilkerson Sexton cuts through this haze to shine an unflinching but compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans who try to make the best choices they can in a world defined at every turn by constraint, peril and disappointment — a world in which, as one of her characters puts it, you quickly “learned the hard way that life could drag disgrace out of you.”
For a debut novelist to take up such charged material is daring; to succeed in lending free-standing life to her characters without yielding an inch to sentimentality — or its ugly twin, pathology — announces her as a writer of uncommon nerve and talent.
In “A Kind of Freedom,” Sexton pursues a family’s history in a downward spiral, with three alternating plot lines that echo one another along the way. The novel opens in 1944, with the budding love of Evelyn, a daughter of a well-to-do family (her mother is Creole, her father a black doctor who has raised himself to respectability), and Renard, a young man from a poor Twelfth Ward neighborhood who works menial jobs at a restaurant but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship, though ardent, reveals the strictures of a class- and color-riven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.
Forty years later, Evelyn’s daughter Jackie is a struggling single mother in 1980s New Orleans who is in love with her child’s father but afraid he will succumb to his crack addiction. Eventually, we get to know Jackie’s son, T.C., in 2010, a young man at a turning point in his life. Through T.C.’s eyes, Sexton portrays a post-Katrina New Orleans where the smell of mold still lingers and opportunities for fast cash in the streets abound, as do the chances of getting shot or arrested.
Photo
Sexton is a native of the Crescent City, and one of the pleasures of this novel is its feel for the particulars of local language, texture and taste: a jar of pickled pig lips, a family crawfish boil, the turn of an old Creole phrase, the sound of Lil Wayne on Q93 FM, as well as the shame of bringing a date to the movies when you had to sit in what was then (in more polite circles) referred to as “the Negro balcony.”
All this can bring to mind Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” but where Ward is Faulknerian in her rhetorical sweep, Sexton maintains a cool, detached naturalism more reminiscent of Tayari Jones in “Leaving Atlanta.” Whether writing of black girlhood, the quotidian fears and hopes of mothering, or the lure of street life, she places her characters in the path of momentous choices while making it clear they have little to hope for. At the end of the day, it is mainly women like Jackie, “teetering between her narrow options,” who are left to pick up the pieces and wonder at their ability to cope. “What happened to the face of a broken woman?” Evelyn asks herself as she watches over her sleeping sister. “Did it turn to convey the loss or did it conspire with her heart to hide it?”
“A Kind of Freedom” attends to the marks left on a family where its links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. The force of this naturalistic vision is disquieting; it is also moving. One could say that it has the disenchanting optimism of the blues. Though her style differs sharply from Zora Neale Hurston’s sassy lyricism, Sexton looks upon her characters much as Janie views her life in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” — “like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone.”
Jesse McCarthy has written for The Point, n+1 and The Nation, among other publications.
A version of this review appears in print on September 10, 2017, on Page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Disenchanting Optimism. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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‘A Kind of Freedom,’ by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
By R.O. Kwon Published 12:11 pm, Thursday, September 7, 2017
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton Photo: Ben Krantz
Photo: Ben Krantz
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton precedes her moving debut novel, “A Kind of Freedom,” with a title-providing quotation from Edwards P. Jones’ “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” It consists of a single long sentence, layered with significance: “They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had been born with — the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.”
This epigraph shadows Sexton’s multigenerational novel, perhaps especially in its most hopeful, opening pages. “A Kind of Freedom” begins with Evelyn, who, as the oldest child of Louisiana’s first black physician, has grown up in relatively prosperous circumstances. She lives in a “fancy house” with “baskets of fresh watered ferns adorning its porch, the pansies and petunias on either side of the long, winding driveway.” Her father, she knows, has a good life — “most Negro men they knew tipped their hats at him on the way to church; everybody called him sir” — but she also knows he wants still more for his children, particularly for Evelyn. She’s the most like him: studious, determined and at the top of her nursing-school class.
This is New Orleans in 1944, though, and Evelyn’s father is conscious of how easily that more could elude his child. When she starts dating Renard, who’s also studying medicine, but has no money, her father’s afraid of what the union will bring Evelyn, the effect it might have on her future. “He’s a low-class man,” he says. “Not middle, middle I could take, I could do something with it, but low.” He’s promised himself, he adds, that Evelyn won’t have to fight her way through life. “It’s already hard enough,” he says. “I won’t make it harder, I can’t. I promised myself that.”
But it’s not a promise he can keep on Evelyn’s behalf, and, before long, he runs up against the limits of his ability to continue protecting his child. She’s in love, and thinks him harsh, his logic unfounded. Then, through no fault of his own, Renard runs out of money for his studies. He has to drop out; once he’s no longer enrolled in school, he’s drafted for World War II; missing him, Evelyn loses the ability to focus on books, and has to leave nursing school. Without the medical degrees they’d planned to secure, the couple’s material hopes decline, and the rest of “A Kind of Freedom” tracks how these reduced expectations affect them, as well as ensuing generations.
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And while it’s true that to parent is also to contend with the limits of one’s ability to protect a child, not all parents have to dread the effects of systemic racism directed against their offspring. In “A Kind of Freedom,” Sexton details some of the many ways racism adds to the difficulties faced by Evelyn and Renard, then their children, Jackie and Sybil, then Jackie’s son, T.C., and then T.C.’s infant son, Malik. Most obviously pernicious are the Jim Crow laws dividing 1940s New Orleans, and though those laws are eventually abolished, the racial injustice, of course, persists. The white police officer who extorts money from Renard in 1944 is comparable to the white officers who, decades later, in 1986, brutalize a young black man on Jackie’s street, to the police who stop T.C., then arrest him for marijuana possession in 2010 — “right around election time,” his grandmother observes.
The inequities go on and on, a point powerfully emphasized by the novel’s structure, which splits “A Kind of Freedom” into short sections centered on Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. Ingeniously, Sexton tells Evelyn’s story, then Jackie’s, then T.C.’s, then cycles back to Evelyn, and so on, zigzagging from the past to the future, and back again, until the different eras almost feel like one relentless present day. In turn, Evelyn, Jackie and T.C. become parents; in turn, their own dreams thwarted, they each look forward to a better life for their children, aspirations that the book, with its hopscotch timeline, has already diminished, even revoked.
When Renard is drafted, he tells Evelyn, “I wonder if this is our ticket to full manhood in this country. Maybe if not for me, for my child.” Between 1944 and 2010 — and 2017 — so much changes, though not enough, and the past is anything but past.
R.O. Kwon’s first novel, “Heroics,” is forthcoming from Riverhead in the summer of 2018. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Email: books@sfchronicle.com.
A Kind of Freedom
By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
(Counterpoint; 230 pages; $26)
New Orleans Transforms a Black Family in ‘A Kind of Freedom’
On Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's debut novel.
by Rachel León
August 23, 2017
9781619029224_acee8One of the ideals of the American dream is that circumstances should improve over generations. That’s how the son of poor immigrants can become an attorney or a doctor. But things don’t always follow this trajectory. In Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s new multigenerational novel set in New Orleans, A Kind of Freedom, the daughter of a prominent doctor becomes the grandmother of an incarcerated young man.
This generational arc is largely related to systemic racism, but to simplify this novel as an exploration of such minimizes Wilkerson’s incredible achievement. Rather, A Kind of Freedom is a portrait of a family and a richly layered exploration of their sufferings.
It’s 1944 and Evelyn and her sister Ruby are the daughters of the first African-American doctor in New Orleans. Evelyn falls for Renard, the son of a janitor, and bringing him to meet her parents is nerve-wracking for them both:
“…I ain’t had to talk to nobody but my sisters for the most of my life. What yo daddy gon’ think of me?” He looked down at his shoes and motioned toward them. “I tried to polish ’em today, but wasn’t no use. Only so much you can shine shit.”
Though both Evelyn and Renard believe the dinner goes well, Evelyn later learns about her father’s true feelings for her boyfriend. Ultimately she must choose between love and her high society life of privilege.
Thirty-eight years later, Evelyn and Renard’s daughter Jackie is struggling to provide for her infant son T.C. while her absent husband Terry battles his drug addiction. Terry’s fall into crack cocaine in the eighties is one of the first nods toward systemic racism. His addiction keeps him away, but when Terry returns, Jackie is faced with whether or not to give him another chance.
Post-Hurricane Katrina, T.C. is twenty-eight when he is incarcerated for a drug charge. His story opens on the day he is released from jail:
He was getting out today though, and maybe that meant something. It wasn’t his first time in, but it was hard to count the weekend stint for stealing a bicycle on Bourbon Street. He didn’t even mention that incident to his boys; it wasn’t enough to earn him any street cred. Not that he sold drugs to impress anyone. No, he started smoking his second semester in college after his injury, and he found he could actually afford to buy in bulk by supplying his neighbors and friends.
These three tales are woven together and each segment of the story informs the next. But what is most remarkable about the tapestry of these stories is the way each person’s section is written a little differently from the last, like varying fabrics. Evelyn’s chapters and T.C.’s are written so distinctly that at times it feels like a completely different person wrote them. Wilkerson Sexton’s ability to change the style of writing to fit the time period is one of the most impressive aspects of the novel.
Equally notable is how vividly each character is portrayed. Not only do each of the characters feel relatable, but they’re so fully realized that they stay with you long after finishing the story. That this multigenerational novel is a mere 228 pages and still manages to create such lifelike characters is an impressive feat.
The opening and closing chapters feature Renard and Evelyn, with their relationship used as a frame for the story of their descendants. The story could’ve closed with T.C., but instead Wilkerson Sexton sealed his story with his grandparents’ love, which was a beautiful choice. Despite dealing with issues like crack cocaine, lack of access to affordable college, incarceration from the criminalization of marijuana, and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, A Kind of Freedom is ultimately a deft portrait of a family and the way they suffer over generations. This remarkable debut marks Margaret Wilkerson Sexton as a writer worth watching.
FICTION
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Counterpoint Press
Published August 15, 2017
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TagsA Kind of Freedom • Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
A Kind of Freedom: A Novel
Image of A Kind of Freedom: A Novel
Author(s):
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Release Date:
August 14, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Counterpoint
Pages:
256
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Melanie Bishop
“Given the recent happenings in Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s hard to imagine a more relevant release date for this lovely, important book. This is a book for our time.”
It’s hard to believe that A Kind of Freedom is Sexton’s first novel. This ambitious book looks at three generations of a family in New Orleans: set in the mid-forties with Evelyn and Renard; the mid-eighties with Jackie and Terry; and 2010, post-Katrina, with T. C. and Alicia. While all three stories are deserving and compelling, the Evelyn and Renard love story feels the most crucial, as it leads to all the others.
When Evelyn first observes Renard, finding him attractive, her sister Ruby deems him inadequate because one of his pants legs is slightly shorter than the other. This notion of unevenness, or of lack, or of any random wrong, runs throughout the book. By referring to this man in the opening scene several times as “the uneven man,” Sexton initiates a tone for the entire novel, in which characters are swimming upstream, fighting for basic rights, struggling against the internalized prejudices of their parents, measuring, always measuring.
With each repetition of “the uneven man,” Sexton asserts that Renard’s socio-economic status is tantamount to disability. He’s uneven. And it’s not a thing that can be fixed with a needle and thread.
When Evelyn’s sister Ruby says, about the man Evelyn is drawn to, “Too brown for most people . . .” we see gradations of racism. Evelyn and Ruby are Creole, and as the daughters of a doctor, they live in a part of New Orleans that Renard’s family would never be able to afford. Every character is aware of these differences and the obstacles they create. Before she’s even had a single date with Renard, Evelyn worries about how she will convince her mother and father that he’s a good man, worthy of her heart.
Readers are immediately on this man’s team; Sexton writes in such a way that makes us yearn for Evelyn and Renard to be together: “It wasn’t what he was saying, but the way he was parceling out his story, like a mother would cut meat for a child, that made Evelyn’s heart feel fragile.”
“Since that day was a Friday, she had to go the whole weekend without seeing him again. That was fine because she had memorized him.”
“From then on, Evelyn woke up each day with a renewed tolerance for the world; the feeling she’d been searching for her whole life had been missing because she hadn’t met Renard, and now that he was here, she could grasp the higher octave of joy her solitude precluded.”
The outcomes in this book unfold as inevitably as does a pregnancy. By reaching into the futures of these characters, into subsequent generations, it’s like Sexton provides readers with a crystal ball: This is what will happen. And by ending the story back in 1945, Sexton brings readers back to the moment before it is all set in motion. Evelyn’s pregnancy equals both potential (her girl will be a doctor!) and burden (something to hide under a wedding dress).
By ending with Renard and Evelyn’s story, Sexton implies that every struggle, every heartbreak, every kept or broken promise in the lives of these people, is embedded or encoded in this single act—this marriage. Readers glimpse at futures the characters don’t yet know. One might wonder at first why the author didn’t go with a straightforward chronological narrative, but closer examination reveals this structure to add such subtlety and purpose—this whole story being a peek inside Evelyn’s womb, its own crystal ball, where all that is to come awaits.
From the Jackie and Terry section:“. . . whatever pain had driven him out had managed to touch her, too, and she didn’t have crack to deliver her from it… She poured her coffee, sat down on the sofa and stared ahead at the TV screen. The Price is Right had just started; someone was betting on a two-seater sofa, a nice leather one Jackie knew she could dress up with pillows and throws from Macy’s, but the woman on the show was betting too much, $999 when a sofa that size, nice as it was, wouldn’t go for more than $500. Jackie wanted to intercede, cry out Don’t set your sights too high, girl, it won’t hold, but she just sat in silence.”
Each of the three sections in this multigenerational novel might be interpreted as warnings against and the repercussions of setting one’s sights too high. Beautiful writing.
When T. C. gets out of prison just in time to see his son born, the situation feels redemptive, like a fresh start. There’s even the possibility of a real job in his aunt’s law firm, a way to get out of growing weed. In the glow and deep love of the moment, T. C. kisses his son’s closed eyelids and says: “This is your mama. And I’m your daddy, and we love you. We gon’ always be here for you, you hear? No matter what.”
A few days later, as T. C. and his friend Tiger are getting their crop ready to sell, T. C. mentions his plans and dreams. Tiger delivers a sobering speech about reality—how things can look one way in the morning, and how they look different later in the day: “You feelin’ yourself, you got the whole day ahead of you, but let’s see what you sayin’ tonight, the world weighing on your shoulder. Shit look different in the twilight, don’t it?” The vow T. C. makes to his infant son Malik—how his mama and daddy will always be there for him—is spoken in the morning of a life. But when twilight falls on that child’s life, that grown kid, where is that parent? That promised love?
Toward the end of the book, Sexton brings us back to the opening detail of Renard’s uneven hem, which, despite someone trying to fix it, still looks off to Evelyn. Sewn into that off-kilter hem is all her doubt about her choice, about their future, but only a few paragraphs later, Sexton gives us an ending that soars with hope.
Given the recent happenings in Charlottesville, Virginia, it’s hard to imagine a more relevant release date for this lovely, important book. This is a book for our time.
Melanie Bishop spent 22 years teaching writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona, where she was also founder of the national literary magazine, Alligator Juniper, and served as fiction/nonfiction editor for 17 years. In Prescott, she writes fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays, and has a coaching/editing/retreat business called Lexi Services. My So-Called Ruined Life is her first published novel.
Leonard Prize Reviews: ‘A Kind of Freedom’ by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
by Jane Ciabattari | Nov-04-2017
In November, National Book Critics Circle members will begin nominating and voting for the John Leonard award for the first book in any genre that has been published in the US in 2017. In the run-up to the first round of voting, we'll be posting a series of #NBCCLeonard reviews on promising first books.
The John Leonard Prize is our annual award based on member nominations and chosen by a panel of member volunteers. Named for the longtime critic and NBCC co-founder, John Leonard, the prize is awarded for the best first book in any genre. Previous winners include: Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014), Kristin Valdez Quade’s Night at the Fiestas (2015), and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016).
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. Reviewed by Jane Ciabattari and adapted from her "Between the Lines" column for BBC Culture.
New Orleans, from World War Two through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is the backdrop for Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s powerful and timely first novel, which traces the complex downward spiral of a black family over three generations. Evelyn, a Creole debutante, falls for Renard, from a lower-class family, in 1944, still a time of Jim Crow segregation. Her family objects, but as Renard heads to war, their bond is set. In the 1980s their daughter Jackie struggles to raise her son after her once promising husband Terry loses his pharmacist job and begins using crack cocaine. His struggles with rehab leave her in despair. By 2010, their son TC is released from Orleans Parish Prison after a stint for drug possession, eager to redeem himself but surrounded by temptation. Wikerson creates a series of robust and memorable characters with distinct voices and all too human desires. Despite the struggles, A Kind of Freedom glimmers with hope.
New Orleans native Margaret Sexton scripts heart-wrenching novel 'A Kind of Freedom'
Chere Coen, Louisiana Books Published 1:43 p.m. CT Aug. 19, 2017 | Updated 3:03 p.m. CT Aug. 19, 2017
636136041805250025-Chere-Coen-mug.jpg
(Photo: Louisiana Books)
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Three New Orleans generations make up Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s heart-wrenching novel, “A Kind of Freedom,” each suffering through desires, ambitions and brutal limitations.
Evelyn grows up in a middle-class Creole family during World War II, her father a doctor and a pillar among the African American community. She falls for Renard, a man of lesser upbringing but one who also desires to become a doctor. Evelyn must choose between her privileged upbringing and the man she loves, a man struggling to achieve success among gross discrimination in both the military and the city of his youth.
Evelyn and Renard give birth to two daughters, one who becomes a successful lawyer and Jackie, who marries a man destined to fall victim to drugs. Jackie’s son, T.C., grows up lured with the easy money of providing drugs to the community, and he enjoys growing his own special blend of pot. When his girlfriend gives birth to a son, he feels the pull of being someone his son will admire, despite the hand being dealt him as a man of color.
Sexton, who grew up in New Orleans but now lives in the Bay Area of California, tears at your heart with this multi-generational tale in which readers hope for the best for this family but know society’s limitations and empty promises will drag them down.
And yet, hope remains. Or maybe the possibility of hope.
“Maybe Malik would know him to be a warrior, someone who turned the odds on their head,” T.C. imagines when he sees his newborn son. “Maybe he would see him as just a good man, and, yeah, he’d made some mistakes, but he loved his family, he was there for his son.”
Publisher’s Weekly gave “A Kind of Freedom” a starred review, writing, “In this fine debut, each generation comes with new possibilities and deferred dreams blossoming with the hope that this time, finally, those dreams may come to fruition.”
Sexton studied creative writing at Dartmouth and law at UC Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Lombard fellowship in which she spent a year working for civil rights in the Dominican Republic. She will sign copies of “A Kind of Freedom” at 6 p.m. Saturday at Octavia Books of New Orleans.
New releases
David Cappello, a business writer who lives in New Orleans, will discuss his new book, “The People’s Grocer: John G. Schwegmann, New Orleans, and the Making of the Modern Retail Worlds” at 7 p.m. Thursday at the East Bank Regional Library in Metairie. The book is a business-based biography of Schwegmann, founder of a New Orleans’ supermarket chain. His 1951 Supreme Court victory over “fair trade” laws played a key role in legalizing discount pricing. Cappello is a business writer, musician, poet and playwright in New Orleans.
New York Times bestselling author Erica Spindler of New Orleans has published “The Other Girl,” a new thriller about a ritualist murder of a college professor that sends a small town cop back into the trauma she thought she’d put behind her. Publisher’s Weekly calls the Louisiana-based story, “Explosive.”
Poet Laureate
Jack Bedell, professor of the Humanities at Southeastern Louisiana University, has been chosen to be the next Louisiana poet laureate. He is the author of seven books, including “Call and Response” (with Darrell Bourque, 2010), “Come Rain, Come Shine” (2006), “What Passes for Love” (2001) and “Bone-Hollow, True: New & Selected Poems” (2013).
Book events
The Friends of the Terrebonne Parish Library will host its Inventory Reduction Book Sale from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. today at the Main Library in Houma. For more information, visit http://mytpl.org.
Geek’d Con, a comic con-style event that brings together stars of film, television, music, wrestling, video games, comics and more, concludes today at the Shreveport Convention Center. For event details, including a link to purchase tickets, visit www.GeekdCon.com.
Marcus Descant, owner of The Urban Naturalist, will offer tips on fall gardening, at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the East Regional Library in Lafayette. Participants will bring home an herb or vegetable plant to get their garden started.
Liah Penn, author of two mystery/fantasies; Colleen Mooney, author of a series of cozy mysteries; and Nancy Bourgeois, author of “Murder Behind the Mask,” will discuss and sign copies of their books at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the East Bank Regional Library in Metairie. This event is free and open to the public. Penn is author of “Pure Death and Pure Justice,” Mooney author of “Rescued by a Kiss,” “Dead and Breakfast” and “Drive Thru Murder.”
Tony Goyette, a licensed hearing specialist, will discuss the importance of hearing health at 7 p.m. Thursday at the East Bank Regional Library in Metairie
Terrence and Constance Price created Moe Melanin LLC to provide positive images of black men and women for young African-American children. Wochit
CHERE COEN: Geek'd Con, comic con-style event headed to Shreveport
Cheré Coen is the author of “Forest Hill, Louisiana: A Bloom Town History,” “Haunted Lafayette, Louisiana” and “Exploring Cajun Country.” She writes Louisiana romances and mysteries under the pen name of Cherie Claire. Write her at cherecoen@gmail.com.
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A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.
Posted by Mondyboy | Oct 29, 2017 | Book Reviews | 0
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.
tl;dr
A strong debut novel that considers the question of race over three generations.
Opening Remarks
A Kind of Freedom with its jazzy cover, is a debut novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. It was longlisted for the National Book Award.
KNEE JERK OBSERVATIONS
Like Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, A Kind of Freedom is a multi-generational novel. Unlike Pachinko it’s half the size. I do appreciate brevity in my fiction.
The multi-generational aspect of the novel is split between three narrative strands sets at different points in time. So while Pachinko was an entirely linear story unfolding over five decades, A Kind Of Freedom moves forward and then backward in time. It’s a far more interesting approach and I’m interested to see how Sexton plays with it, whether she uses the structure to foreshadow future events and whether she asks the reader to join some of the dots between the different time periods.
On reflection the novel’s non linear structure isn’t about tricksy plot twists but rather creating a sense of the inevitable.
The first chapter, set in Louisiana in 1944, is a sweet love story punctuated by shocking moments of racism:
Our three narrative strands are as follows: Evelyn, 1944 – she’s in her early twenties living in Louisiana and she’s just met the love of her life Renard. Skip fourty-two years and we move to Jackie, Evelyn and Renards’ second daughter. Jackie is in her early 30s. She’s raising her newborn son on her own until one day the love of her life and the boy’s father, Michael, comes home saying he’s been clean from drugs for two months. Finally we jump another twenty-four years to 2010 where we meet T.C. Jackie and Michael’s now grown-up son. When we first meet twenty-four year old T.C. he’s being released from prison. It appears he sells drug on the streets.
This scene involving an interrupted blowjob, a knife wielding boyfriend and a Mama armed with a Glock isn’t just awesome (and a tad funny) it shows off Sexton’s range as a writer. She can do the innocent, sweet love story, the tired emotional drained wife dealing with her husband and his addiction to meth and then this set-piece – blowjobs, knives and Glocks.
This is the always the point in the movie where everything that follows goes to shit:
And, surprise, surprise it does all fall apart moments after this scene. Yes, it’s predictable but only because T.C. faces a system that seems hell-bent on putting him back in jail. (Although, as I note below, Sexton makes a point of levelling blame on boys like T.C. who seem reluctant to take responsibility).
The Gist of it
I initially compared A Kind Of Freedom to Pachinko but in reality the book has a much closer tie to Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. I didn’t plan to read them back to back, it’s just how things turned out as I continue to make my way through the National Book Award longlist.
Both novels deal with the question of race in America by (a) drawing a direct link between the past and the present day and (b) exploring this fraught question from the perspective of three generations of the one family. Overall, I think Sing, Unburied, Sing is the richer novel in terms of theme and plot, but A Kind of Freedom is not far behind. Splitting the story across three time periods creates a sense of fatalism and yet also makes for gripping reading. The sections dealing with T.C. – the son of Jackie – and his talent for growing primo bud could have been a season of The Wire or some other must-watch-TV by David Simon. I also found myself connecting with Evelyn and her family more than I did with River, JoJo and Leonie (from Sing, Unburied, Sing). When I shed a tear at the end of A Kind Of Freedom I didn’t feel manipulated, Sexton had earned that reaction. When it comes to race I think Sing, Unburied, Sing is the more profound and nuanced novel. A Kind Of Freedom, sadly, just confirms what many in the US already know, that in large parts of America – New Orleans being the exemplar in this book – systemic racism over a number of generations has meant that even when people of colour achieve a limited sort of success the system will continue to discriminate and undercut them. Sexton doesn’t level all the blame at Government or white people she also points the finger at people like T.C. and his father Michael who have let their families down by not taking responsibility for their actions – although to be fair to T.C. by the end of the book he is trying to rectify that.
This is a fantastic debut novel and I’m a little gutted that it didn’t make the final five for the National Book Award.
Interview with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
MSW photoBy Marian Kaufman
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, (Counterpoint Press, 2017) was published to wide acclaim. The novel follows the interwoven paths of three members of the same New Orleans family in 1944, 1986 and 2010 as they each struggle to claim their own definition of family and success. A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection, Sexton’s standout debut went on to become a 2017 National Book Award Longlist Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of 2017. Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth and law at UC Berkeley. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New York Times Book Review, Oprah.com, Lenny Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Grey Sparrow Journal and others. She lives with her family in the Bay Area of San Francisco .
We spoke to Sexton about using setting to form narrative, the significance of hope in the reading experience, and what has shaped her most as a writer.
Your debut novel A Kind of Freedom follows three characters from different generations of a New Orleans family. You intersperse each of their timelines set in 1944, 1986 and 2010 in a way that informs your readers of other characters’ trajectories at pivotal moments in the plot. How did you create this structure and what effect did you intend for it to have on your readers?
Before I knew what the individual plot points of each storyline would be, I knew the book would end with the grandparents’ wedding. I considered writing each narrative in a block instead of alternating between them, and even then I would have put the chronologically oldest story last. An editor told me the stories worked better interwoven though, and I came to agree with that. My intention with the structure was to create a false sense of hope for readers. In many cases the reader should know how major aspects of the story turn out because they are privy to future generations’ perspectives so early on, but still there’s hope despite itself, and I thought that experience might demonstrate on a visceral level what it would feel like to be in the circumstances that inhibit my characters’ lives.
Your reader could draw a map of New Orleans solely from reading A Kind of Freedom. Neighborhoods and street names are integral parts of the story, and you include an incredible amount of physical detail. What did your research process look like? Did you know from the beginning you wanted to set the novel in New Orleans or did it come to you later?
I always knew I wanted to set the novel in New Orleans. I’m from there, and I know the city better than I know any other part of the world. Also, there aren’t too many other cities where the economic and social decline of an African American family would have been credible. Though I’m from there, I still needed to do extensive research. I read a lot about the effects of World War II, the particulars of the Jim Crow South, Hurricane Katrina’s effect on the geography of the city, and how the city’s landscape shifted over time. I talked to people too, family members, friends. Much of my research on T.C.’s character was anecdotal. I have cousins who are that character’s age and who live similar lifestyles, and talking with them about their language and experiences contributed indispensably to the book’s authenticity.
Who or what has shaped you as a writer most? An experience, a place, another writer?
I would say the experience of writing my first novel, which was never published, but which I worked on for four years, transformed the quality of my work and really solidified my resilience, dedication, and commitment as an artist. Through that four-year period, I played around with various forms, perspectives, and styles. I read, I went to conferences, I worked with editors, and, though that was an unbearably frustrating period, I wouldn’t trade it for anything because all the revisions and rejections were teaching me how to tell a story, not only that but how to be patient and wait for the right story to come along.
What are you working on now?
I’m hesitant to talk too much about it because it’s ever changing, but it will explore themes of assimilation, mother-daughter bonds, and relationships between black and white women. Like A Kind of Freedom, it will also be multigenerational.