Bookish Community Book Club: Good Dirt

We're going old school with the discussion questions on this one! Oh, and there's a little love note from Kendra, too.

Bookish Community Book Club Loves,

I sat down to write a nifty little essay on Good Dirt–a book which I wholly enjoyed, by the way–and all my thoughts ground to a standstill. At first, I thought it was because I read the book at the very beginning of April. And I tore through it. So my recollection for specific details isn’t what it could be (and, yes, I realize I could have written right after finishing the book–but ADHD & procrastination & life). And then I thought it was that pesky ADHD procrastination bit again–why write something before a deadline is breathing down my neck & lighting a fire under my ass? But then I got quieter, more reflective, and I realized the problem: to write about Good Dirt is necessarily to write about race in America. And that was giving me pause.

In order to feel comfortable writing about Good Dirt, I need to position myself in the larger context: 

• I am a white, cis-woman. As such, I’ve always lived with privilege. And, as a white person in America, I am not exempt from breathing in the insidious racism that is in the air in this country. I have worked–and continue to work–to confront my own racism. But I know that I will always have work to do.

• As a white woman, I can never fully understand Black experience in America. But I can constantly listen. I think reading Good Dirt is a form of listening. When I comment on race in America, I am commenting based on what I have seen and heard–in classrooms, from Black friends, in activist spaces, in Bookish. But I will never have enough knowledge to speak on the Black experience–because it is not mine. I want Black voices to do that, which is one of the reasons I chose Good Dirt for this book club.

• I am fallible. And am working hard to be correctable. I think that’s the only way to learn to be a co-conspirator in America. I don’t believe in cancel culture. But I do believe in people with more knowledge or experience offering correction/guidance. Talking about race means taking a chance. Really, really trying to understand. And maybe getting it wrong anyway. I don’t think there’s shame in that–as long as we remain correctable. 

Bookish is about amplifying marginalized voices. We are fully about reading diverse books and celebrating representation. And I want this space to be a place where we build community, seek to understand experiences other than our own, and approach each book with curiosity, asking what we can take away that enriches who we are & how we see the world.

Love,

Kendra 

---

The format of this Bookish Community Book Club is built around discussion questions from Bookclubs.com. Because there was so much happening in this book that I really didn’t know where to start! So, I’ll answer 4 questions. And I’ll drop the rest of the questions (the ones that I didn’t pick) at the bottom of the post. You can a) answer a question that I answered–in response to my answer or just a fresh take of your own, b) answer a totally different question, or c) just tell us what you thought of the book as a whole (or a specific aspect of the book). 

You can’t do this wrong. Promise. We just really want to hear from you!

The Freemans are wealthy, but Black, and live in a predominantly white neighborhood. Henry is of an entirely different social sphere. Discuss the roles of class and race in the narrative.

Class and race featured predominantly in Good Dirt. But, honestly, they feature prominently in all of American life. The underlying (racist) narrative in America is that Black folks are poor. Even though we can look around and see plenty of evidence to the contrary. So I loved that Good Dirt focuses on a Black family that not only has substantial wealth, but also is also highly educated, imbued with more social graces than most folks will ever have, and are esteemed in the high society world they move about and live in. 

And yet, despite being able to trace their lineage back for generations in New England, the Freemans are still held at a slight remove. Henry’s mother, a monied white woman ever protective of her son and their family standing, is staunchly opposed to Henry marrying Ebby–because Ebby is black. Although she’d surely never own that racism was the source of her objection–but that’s the thing about race in America: Henry’s mother doesn’t have to state her opposition; it’s just understood.

And then there is the lingering uncertainty around Baz’s death–the air of a question that follows the Freemans about. Even though Baz was a child. Even though he was murdered in his own home. There’s just enough speculation that the Freemans somehow brought this tragedy on themselves, that their blackness somehow instigated this crime, the murder of their son. None of these questions would linger if the Freemans were white. Their class status cannot protect them from the assumptions brought on by their race. 

I knew this: in America, race supersedes class. But, lord, the ways Charmaine Wilkerson could drive that fact home over and over again. With the teenagers speeding by on the highway with their KKK sign that ran (ultimately) robbed Ed of his safe sense of place and drove him away from his hometown, the town that his family had settled in generations before. And the way that Ebby has to remind Henry that her father is famous, in part, simply because he’s a black engineer with multiple patents, and people find that surprising–even though African American achievement  has “always been there, holding society up at every level.”  

The Freemans also use their access to wealth, property, and status to elevate other members of the Black community–like when Granny Freeman insists on a Black photographer to capture photographs of the family and Old Mo. The Blisses maintain their historic home–a home that has technically grown much too large for empty nesters – in part because they understand they know how important their “heritage, education, and social refinement” is to the larger understanding of what the Black community has contributed to American culture, a quiet move to fight the narratives that feed the “surprise” white people seem to display when they encounter a black doctor, lawyer, engineer, inventor. Their home is a public nod to Black excellence–and that remains valuable to both the Blisses and the Freemans.

How do the different characters deal with grief and trauma? Reflect on this quote from the novel: “Perhaps the only way to cope with loss or guilt is to name it and defy its potential to destroy you.” Does this ring true for you?

Ebby’s storyline grabbed at my heart from the beginning. The trauma she experienced as she watched her brother die trying to protect their beloved family heirloom–an heirloom that anchored their story as a family and as part of American history, the loss of Old Mo, and the responsibility she felt for her brother’s death… it all just felt so heavy. So insurmountable. I think for a while, it was those things for Ebby. A suffocating loss that she carried with her constantly. 

And Henry, well Henry was completely inept at dealing with her trauma. Which I found infuriating. There is a level of responsibility that Henry had in dating Ebby that he failed at miserably. He didn’t seem to be able to openly acknowledge that, in their upper echelon, Ebby would always be an object of interest. She would always be intriguing and “other”--even if the majority of her life experiences and opportunities paralleled her white counterparts. Her brother’s death further put her in the center of the public gaze. Henry wanted so badly to write off her trauma–for her to move past it so they could just get on with the business of living their lives–that he couldn’t acknowledge that Ebby’s trauma wasn’t something that could be silenced or discarded. She would have to work through it. Grief is like that. Trauma is like that. They’ve got their own timetable–and they cannot be rushed. Henry’s job was to support Ebby in her working through grief and trauma. And when he realized–really late in the game–that he couldn’t do that, he simply disappeared. 

There’s an adage in Alcoholics Anonymous that I think about all the time: You are only as sick as your secrets. The guilt that Ebby and her father felt related to Baz’s death–guilt that could have been assuaged (and ultimately was upon being spoken outloud)--drove them further into their own spirals, away from the people they loved. For Ebby, the guilt held her back from processing the trauma; it kept her in a nightmare loop reliving her brother’s death instead of living freely with her brother’s memory. Once there were no more secrets, once they named the guilt and trauma, they were able to lean further into each other, not out of fear but in community and love. 

Talk about the legacy of the Freemans' jar, which plays such an important role in the story. What does inheritance mean in the context of slavery and the history of Black Americans? What is the emotional impact of the jar landing in a museum?

Here’s a confession: I usually avoid historical fiction. But I really liked Good Dirt for two primary reasons: I think the writing is spectacular, nuanced and reflective, but easy to trip right through; and the premise of the novel is clever: centering the story on a clay jar, made by an enslaved ancestor, a jar that ultimately is destroyed by greed–and then is given back to the public at large through incredible generosity.  

Whoa.

The legacy of Old Mo acknowledges the importance of ancestral roots and of storytelling. Just like the perseverance of the jar–a clay jar created by an enslaved man, carried into the world by a man escaping slavery, and then used as a vessel to help others escaping slavery and handed down from generation to generation–the Freeman family persevered, carrying their story forth with them.

America has a toxic relationship with history much of the time. Slavery is a stain on America. And it seems like the impulse is to try to skip to the next chapter–as if each part of the story isn’t integral. Good Dirt makes us sit with the multi-layered experiences of the enslaved: love, fear, loss, suffering, pleasure, pain. And Old Mo—carried forth with love and a truth that could have cost an enslaved person their lives—is a symbol of the history of African Americans, from before ever touching the soil of North America to now. Old Mo is the truth of African American history: THE MIND CANNOT BE CHAINED.

In sharing Old Mo—an act of generosity that feels almost unfathomable to me—the Freemans claim African American history as American history. The two cannot be separated:

“The story of the jar is not only the story of the Freeman family, or of African Americans. These stories are part of the complex fabric of this country. History, too often, has been told from only certain perspectives. That is not good enough. History is a collective phenomenon. It can only be told through a chorus of voices. And that chorus must make room for new voices over time.”

That is ultimately how we heal our collective trauma and grief as Americans. To acknowledge history as a collective phenomenon, always looking to make room for new voices and to rectify old harms in new ways. 

Wilkerson throws some twists into this story. Did you see any of them coming? Which caught you most off guard?

Y’all! What about when Henry disappeared, and Avery and Ebby thought he might have murdered a girl?! Because maybe they really never knew him at all?! It was very much a man or bear moment–and clearly they would have both chosen the bear.

Photo by Leila Boujnane on Unsplash

---

Now it’s your turn. I really do want to know what y’all think of the books we read. So, feel free to address one of the questions I answered above, take on one of the questions below, or just branch out in your own direction!

• The story is told from multiple points of view across multiple timelines. Did you enjoy how the narrative was structured? What did it add to the story? Whose point of view did you most enjoy reading? Whose could you have done without? What was the impact of the historical sections?

• How much does our history, and what has happened to us, define our future and who we are? How do different characters in the novel grapple with this tension? In particular, how does Baz's death and her role in it haunt Ebby as an adult?

• After her wedding is called off, Ebby flees to France. France has long been a beacon for Black Americans, including James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker and more. What do you think Ebby was hoping to find in France, and how might it relate to why previous generations expatriated?

• What do you think will happen to the characters after the novel ends? Whose future story would you most want to follow?