“She is no stranger to keeping time by what she has lost.”
When I reviewed Charmaine Wilkerson’s novel, Black Cake, back in 2022, I remarked that it was a solid debut, but I wished the transitions between POVs and timelines had been smoother. Her sophomore novel, Good Dirt (Ballantine Books 2025), similarly jumps timelines and POVS; however, those clunky transitions are gone. I liked Black Cake a lot. I loved Good Dirt.
Good Dirt centers around a part of American history that I was wholly ignorant of, and that is not only the use of slave potters but the hidden literacy these slaves inscribed in their pots. It’s absolutely fascinating, and it gives us the most memorable character in the novel, “Old Mo,” a 19th century stoneware jar, crafted by an enslaved potter. The jar had been in the Freeman family for six generations and was a valuable and extremely cherished family heirloom. When Ebby Freeman is ten, robbers break into her home, killing her brother and shattering the jar. She watches Baz die, and her life is forever altered and scarred by this moment. When the novel opens, Ebby is preparing to marry a rich, white man that she loves. She intends to carry her brother’s picture down the aisle with her. She’s left at the altar, and the woman who was known for the trauma she’d been a victim to as a child is back in the media spotlight as the jilted fiancée of the Henry Pepper. She escapes to France to confront her ghosts and lick her wounds.
This is very much Ebby’s story of healing from her childhood trauma and her broken heart, but it is also a novel of generational trauma, resilience, and good dirt. Wilkerson dances across a timeline with ease, taking us to Kandia in 1803, a pottery woman, who is stolen from her people and carried to another land, her husband’s baby growing inside. Decades of stolen lives, stolen stories, stolen moments, forced labor, forced relations, and forced acquiescence follows. Good Dirt traverses that landscape in a delicate yet unyielding way – the story is just beautifully crafted.
I don’t want to spoil this one. Much like Black Cake, part of the magic is watching it take shape, like a stoneware jar under the hands of a talented artisan.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 