This item doesn’t have any images yet.
2017 | Fiction & Poetry
Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society and when she falls for Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves.
In 1982, Evelyn’s daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband’s drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life. Jackie must decide if the promise of her husband is worth the near certainty he’ll leave again. Jackie’s son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He finds something hypnotic about training the seedlings, testing the levels, trimming the leaves, drying the buds. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm. But fresh out of a four-month stint for drug charges, T.C. decides to start over—until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal.
For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
(Author)
| Published by | Counterpoint Press |
Fiction social issues
Main Image Courtesy: http://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/a-kind-of-freedom-2/.
Background Image Courtesy: http://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/a-kind-of-freedom-2/.
Images And Data Courtesy Of: Counterpoint Press.
This content (including text, images, videos and other media) is published and used in accordance
with Fair Use.
| 9-10 |  |
|
100.0% (1) |
| 7-8 |  |
|
0.0% (0) |
| 5-6 |  |
|
0.0% (0) |
| 3-4 |  |
|
0.0% (0) |
| 1-2 |  |
|
0.0% (0) |
Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated
Nov 6, 2017 (Updated Nov 6, 2017)
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. It begins with the budding love of Evelyn, brought up in New Orleans and the daughter of a Creole mother and black doctor father. She is courted by Renard, a poor man who works menial jobs to get by but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship reveals the strictures of a class- and colour-driven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.
The second generation is about Jackie, a 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.
It's an unflinching portrayal, slightly detached and not overbearing in its rhetoric. It shows where links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. A moving read.
