—CAROL CASSELLA, author of Oxygen, Healer, and Gemini
“In A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton delivers a fresh and unflinching portrait of African American life and establishes herself as a new and much-needed voice in literature. Vividly imagined and boldly told, A Kind of Freedom is a book for our time. A fierce and courageous debut.”
—NATALIE BASZILE, author of Queen Sugar
“Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom is a brilliant mosaic of an African American family and a love song to New Orleans. Her characters are all of us, America’s family, written with deep insight and devastating honesty but also with grace and beauty. Wilkerson’s stunning debut illuminates the journey of sisters and the generations they bear, the hope they have for the future, and the future still strived for, still deferred, giving us all of this in razor-edged prose that cuts to the quick.
—DANA JOHNSON, author of
In the Not Quite Dark and Elsewhere, California
“Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom is an elegant, captivating, and generous debut novel. I’m still thinking about how our choices are indelibly influenced by our familial histories, whether we’re aware or not, and how the present connects to the past, especially regarding the societal weight of race and class. Through the interweaving of narratives within a family in New Orleans, particularly a matrilineal generation of sisters—from 1944 to the ’80s and beyond—Wilkerson Sexton demonstrates the complex web of fate, and how the demands and risks of human longing can be pitted against practicality and upward mobility, muddying the very definitions of success when it comes to survival and love. Our lives are intertwined, Wilkerson Sexton reveals, and despite our best selves and our most loving intentions, heartbreak is often inevitable. With seemingly effortless subtlety and command, Wilkerson Sexton delivers. A Kind of Freedom is multifaceted and beautiful.”
—VICTORIA PATTERSON, author of This Vacant Paradise
and The Little Brother
“I give thanks to Margaret Wilkerson Sexton for her remarkable sense of a family’s life, from early in its morning to day’s end. She interweaves generations of parent-child relations to reveal, with sharp insight, how promise and possibility can sometimes yield to circumstances shaped by the limits to freedom.”
—LAURET SAVOY, author of Trace
Copyright © 2017 by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
First Counterpoint hardcover edition: 2017
First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:
Names: Sexton, Margaret Wilkerson.
Title: A kind of freedom : a novel / Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017015331 | ISBN 9781619029224 | eISBN 9781640090026
Subjects: LCSH: African American families—Louisiana—New Orleans—Fiction. | African Americans—Louisiana—New Orleans—Fiction. | New Orleans (La.)—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.E9838 K56 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015331
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-103-0
Cover designed by Zoe Norvell
Book designed by Tabitha Lahr
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother, who also cheered
Still running with bare feet, I ain’t got nothing but my soul. Freedom is the ultimate goal. Life and death is small on the whole, in many ways. I’m awfully bitter these days ’cause the only parents God gave me, they were slaves, and it crippled me.
—TALIB KWELI, “Four Women”
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.
—EDWARD P. JONES, All Aunt Hagar’s Children
Evelyn
Winter 1944
Later, Evelyn would look back and remember that she wasn’t the one who noticed Renard first. No, it was her sister, Ruby, who caught the too-short right hem of his suit pants in her side view. Ruby was thicker than Evelyn, not fat by a long shot, but thick in a way that prevented her from ever feeling comfortable eating. Her favorite food was red beans and rice, and Monday was hard on her. Their mother would boil a big pot and feel relieved, two pounds plenty to feed the family for at least three days, but Ruby felt taunted by the surplus. She’d cut in and out of the kitchen the beginning of the week, sneaking deep bowls of rice and applying as little gravy as she could to maintain the flavor but not alert her family to her excess. Then on Thursday, she’d examine the consequences. It would start in the morning on the way in to school. Ruby attended vocational school and Evelyn attended Dillard University, but their campuses were only a few blocks apart, and they walked the majority of the way together.
“My thighs are touching,” Ruby would say, as if they just started touching the minute before.
“You can’t see it though,” Evelyn would assure her, her own legs so far apart another leg could fit between them.
“Who are you fooling with ‘you can’t see it’? Anybody with eyes could see it. You don’t even need to have eyes; you just need ears, and you could hear my thighs swishing together.”
“You can’t hear anything so soft,” Evelyn would go on, and she’d spend the rest of the day wading through that topic. Just when she’d think she got to flat land, Ruby would pull her back into the murk with a question about her behind. Matters would improve a little on Friday, but Ruby would maintain an edge around her even then, and everyone near her felt the prick. Today was a Friday.
“His pants legs are uneven,” Ruby said about the new boy standing on North Claiborne and Esplanade wearing a brown wool suit, a grey V-neck sweater beneath the jacket. He stood next to Andrew, whom all the girls fawned over at the debutante ball last season. Evelyn’s own escort had been second in charm; he had even silenced her nerves by pointing out his friends’ waltzing mishaps, but despite her mother’s urgings, she hadn’t accepted his visit, and a week later when his interest