A Kind of Freedom

Cemetery, New Orleans, 1984 (Feiden)

A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

A work of historical fiction bound by space but not by time, A Kind of Freedom stories three generations of a New Orleanian family. Beginning with the 1944 meeting and budding romance of comfortably-situated Evelyn and no-name Renard, the novel then tracks forward to 1986, where their daughter Jackie is raising her son, T.C., mostly alone as she navigates a tenuous relationship with his father, Terry, who is addicted to crack. When the novel next moves forward in time to 2010, it is now-grown T.C. who is in the spotlight: just released from jail after a marijuana possession conviction, T.C.’s return home entails Jackie’s poor mental health, the impending birth of his own baby, and the economic pull of growing and dealing marijuana in a post-Katrina New Orleans where rebuilding and new financial opportunity are largely available only to white people.

Completing this cycle from Evelyn to T.C., from 1944 to 2010, two more times, A Kind of Freedom does a subtle and effective job of combining various racist political realities from history with a compelling narrative. Without ever feeling didactic or heavy-handed, Sexton manages, by the novel’s end, to address colorism and classism within the black community; racism within the US armed forces; the crack epidemic; the invisibilization of mental illness within the black community; mass incarceration; police violence; and the racism, writ large, of the United States. These complex and enveloping social diseases manifest in such a way that the reader feels them. Invisibilized mental illness is apparent in how T.C.’s family talks around his mother’s unwashed dishes and shut-in tendencies. Racism within the US military is heavy in Renard’s confession to his beloved Evelyn, upon his return from a tour in WWII, of abuse at the hands of white “fellow” soldiers. The crack epidemic is there with us as we read about Jackie, watching the clock all through the night, waiting and waiting for Terry to return home.

Sexton’s decision to maintain the novel’s New Orleans setting throughout the breadth of its 60+ year course is striking. In the 1944 sections of the novel, New Orleans is distinctive, almost a character in and of itself. The shops and street names, communities and cultures are vividly described. But by 1986 the glimmer and vivacity of the city has faded: the reader catches glimpses of billboards, a walk around the park, a run-down housing development, but none of the personality evident earlier. After Katrina, in 2010, it is the smell of mold and shiver of trauma that most clearly run through the setting: eerie Escalades on empty blocks, dead grass where FEMA trailers sat, greasy meals at Popeyes—and the haunting sense that there are white people elsewhere, in an almost parallel, rebuilt city, enjoying themselves.

This grim progression highlights the changing fortunes of the novel’s central family, as well as the motifs—both negative and positive—that recur throughout the years: while the police are threateningly present in 1944, 1986, and 2010 alike, for example, the strength of family is present, too. It is no stranger who brings T.C.’s baby to visit him in prison, but rather Jackie, his own mother. She tells him that Evelyn is sending a cake in the mail and that T.C. must be sure to call his grandmother when he receives it. Family here is strength, if not deliverance—for within the “kind of freedom” that these three generations exist, there is only so far even the utmost strength can go in delivering oneself.

Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to: racism and hate-motivated violence, harassment by police, incarceration, drug use and addiction.