Freedom is the ability to do or say anything that they want or feel when they want to and how they want to without anyone holding them back. Freedom can also be the ability to express oneself, to choose where one wants to live, how late one wants to get home, where one wishes to attend school and even if one if living without an addiction or being enslaved. Since the time of the writing of the constitution, it was said and believed that all people were created as equal beings. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Thomas Jefferson on freedom). In the “Good Lord Bird,” by James McBride, we meet two characters, one who is a beautiful mulatto woman, who works as a whore, yet still has many more benefits than other slaves- Pie, and another one who considered a non-attractive black woman and is treated as a slave- Sibonia. Freedom of mind is one of the most important factors to being free. If you believe in your mind that you are free, nothing could ever hold you back from feeling such a way, which is what makes Sibonia the more free character because of the way she thinks of herself as being free.

            Pie is a beautiful mulatto woman who has more benefits than a slave does. She is not even considered a slave. She lives in the slave owners’ house, has her own room and bedding, gets to dress up how ever she likes and is not physically abused in any manner. Her actual job title is being a whore, meaning she sleeps with men in order to make money; “She was a mulatto woman. Skin as brown as a deer’s hide, with high cheekbones and big brown dewy eyes as big as silver dollars… she wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas” (McBride 144). Because of her beauty, Pie received more benefits than anyone else- mainly Sibonia. The way she dressed appealed to most men, which made them want to be with her, but even though she was a whore, Pie was still all about staying keeping her class, which took away from her ability to feel and obtain true freedom.

            Freedom of the mind is one of the most important steps in actually being free, and Pie, the woman who had more rights than anyone else, did not feel that way. While all enslaved women worked in the fields, Pie was able to stay in the slave owner’s house and avoid all field work because of her mulatto color. She was more free (physically) than any other person (except the white folks) because of her ranking, and she would not lose that. Still, however, she wasn’t exactly free in her own mind. Even though she didn’t have to work the way the other slaves did, Pie never experienced what true freedom really was. She got depressed doing what she was doing after a while because she knew in her heart that it wasn’t true freedom that she was feeling. In her mind, she was still trapped and there was not one way that she could feel real freedom.

            In contrast to Pie, Sibona is a completely different human being. She is an African American slave who is not considered to be attractive but is much more liked by the slaves than Pie is. She is kept in the pen where the animals stay and is not allowed to make eye contact with white folks when they speak to her. She is known around the land to be a little bit crazy yet still tell things the way they are: “Sibonia, standing there holding a dripping mud ball in her hand, then did something strange. She glanced at the hotel door, saw it was still closed, then said to Libby in a plain voice, ‘This child is troubled’” (McBride 163). Nobody had ever even thought of the things that Sibonia had done, including holding and throwing mud balls across the fields.

            The freedom of mind is the true meaning and feeling of freedom, which Sibonia shows by doing things that she is not supposed to do. She is not supposed to look at white folks in the eye when being spoken to, but she does anyway. She also tries to start slave rebellions in attempting to get herself and her people free, which results in being beaten without mercy, although she does not care much about the consequences of her actions. Sibonia acts like a crazed woman, when really she is just acting free because she truly feels that she is free. In her own mind, there is nothing wrong with what she does because to her, she is actually free- free to say what she wants, to do what she wants, and to go about her situation as a slave however she chooses to.

            In conclusion, freedom is the ability to do, say and act however one wants to, whenever they choose, and without anyone telling them otherwise. It can mean choosing education and where to live, or being free from an addiction or illness. In the “Good Lord Bird” by James McBride, Sibona is more free than Pie is because in her mind, Sibonia thinks she is actually free, causing her to act as if she were. Nothing holds her back from acting a certain way. She does not think of the consequences that she will face because freedom has no consequences. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Sibonia wanted to go out and get her own freedom and not have it handed to her, which allowed her to be the most free person that she ever could be in her mind.