By Jessie Tu
A novel with a love story at its core.
FICTION
Good Dirt
Charmaine Wilkerson
Penguin, $34.99
In the opening pages of Charmaine Wilkerson’s exquisite sophomore novel Good Dirt, two domestic scenes are rendered in heartbreaking clarity – the first, of a family portrait being taken around a 174-year-old treasured heirloom; the second, shortly after, a harrowing home invasion robbery which leaves a 15-year-old boy murdered and the heirloom destroyed.
Enduring the legacy of the crime and all the viral curiosity that follows her into her adulthood is the youngest child, Ebony Freeman, who witnessed her brother’s death as a 10-year-old.
Along with her parents, both of whom are black, she has been forced to be “organised and disciplined” in her grief, while exhaustingly trying to run away from the label: “Little black girl who had survived a suburban tragedy”.
Now, in her 29th year, she is ready to put the past behind her by marrying a rising star of an old banking family. Henry Pepper is photogenic and affluent, an “outgoing charmer” (read: deceitful). When he leaves her standing alone at the altar on their wedding day, Ebony decides to give herself a serious sojourn. Three months in a small village in France should do the trick, right?
But as is universally acknowledged, the further we dash from our problems, the faster (and meaner) they encroach upon our consciousness. In France, Ebony’s memories of her brother’s death resurface as she attempts to write down the stories associated with the family heirloom, familiarly named “Old Mo”, a 20-gallon ceramic stoneware jar that was produced by her ancestors who worked as enslaved craftsmen in South Carolina. The jar has been in the family for six generations.
Charmaine Wilkerson’s second novel is a taut multi-generational saga.Credit: Getty Images
“The jar is a reminder of how your children came to be Freemans,” Ebony’s mother reminds her. Throughout Ebony’s childhood, the story of the potter who built the jar was a source of education, cultural pride and entertainment for the family. But her brother’s murder hangs over her. She cannot dissociate the jar’s destruction with her brother’s death – “still trying to outrun the shockwaves from the blast”.
Things get more sticky when Henry shows up to the bed and breakfast Ebony is charged with caretaking, accompanied by a new girlfriend. In our most beloved sensational stories, things like this are allowed to happen! Will Ebony forgive her former husband-to-be? Or will she pursue another romance, one with a French widower, whose mutual understanding of loss might prove a more reliable companion?
Running parallel to Ebony’s storyline is the tale of how the jar came to arrive in her father’s hands. Wilkerson aptly traces the legacy of kidnapped slaves who were forced to produce pottery on a mass scale, and the enduring (and often forgotten) men who crewed the ships sailing to and from American ports.
Good Dirt is a taut and entertaining multi-generational saga, weaving past and familial ties in short chapters, always with a blazing sense of the present. The ostensible subject Wilkerson seems to want to tackle is the ways in which personal trauma, family lore and history can shape an individual’s sense of themselves, and their place in the world. But the novel’s sustaining appeal comes from witnessing Ebony learn to love again. The novel is really a love story at its core – the love between Ebony and her parents, and the love she’s trying to let go of for Henry. Wilkerson manages to coax even the darkest scenes in the family’s past with a genial sensibility. It’s an impressive feat, and reminded me of the singular ecstasy of inhaling a well-written book.
In her newfound love with Robert, perhaps Ebony can let go of the “world of hurt that pushes against their skin like water against the walls of a dam”, and forge a new future equipped with the strength of her own retelling of the jar stories. After all, “to tell your story was to experience a kind of freedom … [for] words had the power to hold memory”.
Jessie Tu is the author of the novels A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing and The Honeyeater (Allen 7 Unwin) and a journalist at Women’s Agenda.
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