Fans of novelist Charmaine Wilkerson have been eagerly awaiting the follow-up to her 2022 debut, Black Cake, and it is finally here. Unfortunately, Wilkerson’s thorough research and stellar writing are overpowered this time by a labyrinthian plotline that includes too many characters going in way too many different directions.
Good Dirt centers on a well-to-do Black family, the Freemans, who have made their home on the coast of New England. The family’s prized possession is a 20-gallon stoneware jar they call “Old Mo,” which was made by an enslaved ancestor. As the novel opens, 10-year-old Ebony “Ebby” Freeman watches masked men break into their home and shoot her 15-year-old brother to death, shattering both the jar and life as she and her family knew it.
We next meet Ebby as she suffers a second trauma — being abandoned on her wedding day. She escapes to France to try to recover from the romantic betrayal and her deeper childhood trauma. Wilkerson spends the remainder of the novel alternating between Ebby’s modern storyline and the story of Old Mo and its links to the Freeman family. We travel back to Africa, meet the enslaved master craftsman who first threw the pot, and join ancestors on merchant ships and the Underground Railroad. Meanwhile, there are main characters and side characters with so many backstories and front stories, that it all just feels overstuffed and overwhelming.
By the time we get to the secret phrase carved at the bottom of the stoneware jar — which the author teases relentlessly through the novel — it can’t help but seem anticlimactic. A tighter focus would have served this story well.
