Book Review: ‘Good Dirt,’ by Charmaine Wilkerson

GOOD DIRT, by Charmaine Wilkerson

“Good Dirt,” like Charmaine Wilkerson’s 2022 best-selling debut, “Black Cake,” is an engrossing epic that explores how intergenerational trauma shapes and complicates family legacies and bonds. At the heart of the novel is 29-year-old Ebony “Ebby” Freeman, the daughter of one of the few Black families in a wealthy New England enclave. She’s engaged to marry a white man, Henry Pepper, the “rising young star of an old banking family.” Ebby and her parents, Soh and Ed, hope her wedding will eclipse the tragedy that thrust her into the spotlight two decades earlier.

When Ebby was 10, she found her 14-year-old brother, Baz, dead on the floor of her father’s study, shot by intruders who were never caught. Lying next to his body were the shattered pieces of a family heirloom nicknamed “Old Mo”: a 20-gallon stoneware jar crafted by an enslaved potter in the mid-1800s. The crime remained unsolved and made headlines. A photograph of young Ebony in bloodied clothing won an international award, and the media has kept an eye on “the little Black girl who had survived a suburban tragedy” ever since. Grief-stricken, Soh and Ed have remained deeply protective of their only living child well into her adulthood.

Now, the media’s interest is revived when Ebby’s relationship with Henry ends in a devastating, and very public, fashion. Furious with Henry for having “shown the world that Ebony Freeman, try as she might, could not escape the mantle of misfortune that had settled over her,” Ebby flees Connecticut for the French countryside, where she hopes to “stay away for a good long while.” But when her troubles follow her there, Ebby finds a different kind of solace in writing her family’s history, based on the cherished stories about Old Mo her parents and grandparents told her and Baz as they were growing up.

Wilkerson deftly employs a broad chorus of perspectives throughout, with chapters told from the points of view of six generations in Ebby’s family, both enslaved and free; and others in the Freemans’ orbit. Even the treasured jar gets a turn.

We learn that Old Mo’s maker, Moses, carved the initials “MO” under the lip of the jar, presumably in reference to his owner, Martin Oldham, who owned a pottery and brickworks in South Carolina. Oldham looked the other way as the people he enslaved taught one another to read and write, at a time when their literacy was punishable by death. But Oldham is no savior; Moses is not spared slavery’s cruelty or brutality. Still, the Freemans read the “MO” as Moses’ “veiled reference to himself.”

Inspired by a hidden message Moses inscribed on the bottom of Old Mo, his fellow laborer Edward “Willis” Freeman (Ebby’s great-great-great-grandfather) carried the jar with him on his dangerous escape to freedom. In the home Willis later made with his wife and children in Massachusetts, Old Mo became a community repository for secret messages among free and enslaved people — and offered generations of Freemans the reassurance that “good could come of bad, that comfort could follow strife, that looking at their past could help to guide their future.”

In the canon of slavery narratives, which typically take place in agricultural settings, craftspeople are rarely the focus. And yet, as Wilkerson writes in an author’s note, “the mass production of pottery in the American South” was an area of labor that “regularly relied on both enslaved and free Black people.”

Wilkerson also forgoes the familiar in her characterizations of the two Black lineages in the novel: Both the Freemans and the Blisses (Ebby’s mother’s family) have owned land in Massachusetts since the 1600s, and include pioneers in their fields as “farmers, craftsmen, teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians and investors.” Unlike the Black bourgeoisie of Stephen L. Carter’s novel “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” or the real-life elites in Lawrence Otis Graham’s “Our Kind of People,” Ebby’s people derive their pride from resilience in the face of adversity, not in their exceptionalism or proximity to whiteness.

“This is what it means to be Isabella ‘Sojourner’ Bliss Freeman,” Wilkerson writes after Henry has jilted Ebby on their wedding day:

Daughter of one of New England’s oldest and wealthiest African American families. Top honors at both universities. Attorney and mother. Lifelong volunteer. Champion fund-raiser. Still the only Black woman in her neighborhood, after all these years, with all that this unfortunate statistic has entailed. Alas, Soh needs to be above slapping that superficial fool in his face, because there are people who are just waiting for a sign that a woman like Soh is beneath them.

Ebby likewise is keenly aware of how she’s perceived, the too-fine line between her private life and the public spectacle muddling her grief for both her brother and Henry: “Love leaves a memory in the heart,” she thinks, “even when your head tells you it shouldn’t.”

Wilkerson masterfully weaves these threads of love, loss and legacy through Old Mo’s journey as well as the ongoing mystery of Baz’s murder. The result is a thoroughly researched and beautifully imagined family saga, with a moving and hopeful ending.

GOOD DIRT | By Charmaine Wilkerson | Ballantine | 352 pp. | $30