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Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated A Kind of Freedom: A Novel in Books

Nov 6, 2017 (Updated Nov 6, 2017)

A book rooted in hope and endurance

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's beautiful debut novel explores four generations of a family, from the time of segregation to mass incarceration.

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.