Breakaway Books

Authored by Charmaine Wilkerson; Published January 2025; Historical Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️

Good Dirt was beautiful: the story of a special woman—or perhaps really about a special jar?—and how it was molded through decades, even centuries of American history.

Good Dirt is the story of Ebony Freeman and her family, a prominent New England clan that is proud of their history in the US. As Ebony recovers from being jilted on her wedding day by her fiance, who was unable to cope with her continuing grief about the death of her brother, she escapes to France—only to find her ex-fiance once more. She finds herself thinking more and more about the historic familial pottery jar that has been passed down in her family for generations, created by an enslaved ancestor and ultimately broken on the day of her brother’s death.

The death of Baz, Ebby’s brother, hangs over the entire novel, and in a lot of ways, the novel is an exploration of grief. Ebby’s continued traumatic responses, the guilt of survival suffered by the whole family—it felt like an accurate depiction of how grief stays with a family, especially when it’s not talked about. These feelings are complicated by the fact that, as a rare black family in their neighborhood, their race is often trotted out as a kind of explanation for the shooting. The casual racism that is exhibited by other New England families throughout the novel is depressing, to say the least, but also depressingly accurate. Even financial prosperity cannot save the Freeman family from big horrors and micro-aggressions.

What gives the novel depth is the glances back into the history of the jar, Old Mo. From the woman kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery in the US, to the first Freeman ancestor who learned pottery, to how Ebby’s parents got together and gave the jar a new home—generations of Freemans were repeatedly forced to show their resilience through tragedy, and their strength is a marvel. Even the jar comes adorned with their strength, the phrase “the mind cannot be chained” etched into the bottom and proven out over and over again throughout the novel. Moments of seriousness and tragedy are balanced out by Ebby’s nearly-comedic-only-because-it-didn’t-happen-to-me attempts to run away only to find her ex-fiance in rural France, new girlfriend in tow. 

Good Dirt, for all its grief, zoomed by—it was just too good to put down.