![]() ![]() The two Freeman daughters, Charlotte and Callie, both know sign language and often sign to each other rather than speaking. ![]() ![]() The book begins, then, as a story about communication. The two stories converge on thematic and emotional levels and raise some serious questions about not just the language we have (or don’t have) about race in America, but the aspects of race we haven’t yet put words to. The story moves back and forth between the Freemans’ story - switching perspectives from family member to family member - and the sordid history of the Toneybee Institute that hires them. We Love You, Charlie Freeman centers around the Freemans, a black family that agrees to teach sign language to a chimpanzee (the titular Charlie) at an institute located in a predominantly white town in Western Massachusetts. Greenidge’s debut novel, on one of its many levels, seeks to address this lack in our language around race. In her essay, “Harmony and Discord”, she notes that her experience left her feeling there was “something wrong with how Americans talked about race.” To Greenidge, our language around race was either “obsessed with progress” and “did not allow for tangents or for misfits or for bitterness”, or it focused around “a version of black history that only cared about the pain, the degradation, the terror”. ![]() Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, spent ten years as a tour guide at various sites for African American history. ![]()
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