Good Dirt

by Charmaine Wilkerson

Behind her, the pansies and asters are in bloom. The rest is all green against the black-blue of the Sound. This, too, she will remember. The beauty of that first home. How she thought she would never want to leave.

Love might not conquer all, they realized, especially in a marriage between a black woman and a white man. Even nowadays. But mostly, love still carried more weight than pretty much anything. And they were hopeful.

“The great strength of that jar,” Gramps Freeman said, “was that its true worth was underestimated. Just like the value of the enslaved man who had crafted it and signed it at a time when people in bondage were not allowed to read or write. Just like those first Freemans in Massachusetts, who moved all the way out here to hide from the slave catchers who were crossing state lines in search of people like them.” Gramps raised his brows and nodded silently in that way that he did when he wanted to be sure the kids were listening carefully. “Most of the trouble in this world boils down to one person not recognizing the worth of another,” Gramps said. “But sometimes, that can be an advantage.”

There was the moment before and there would be everything after. And in time, Ebby would come to understand her role as the surviving Freeman child. To be uncomplicated, to be successful, to stay alive. She has tried, but now she feels the only way to move forward is to find a place where she isn’t reminded constantly of what was taken from her.

At the first whiff of jet fuel seeping into the cabin, at the upward thrust of the plane, at the ping of the seatbelt sign as it blinks off, Ebby experiences a new sensation, like a cloak falling away from her shoulders and leaving behind a cool, silken something that can best be described as relief. Her plan to run away from home may not be a terribly original idea, but it feels like the smartest thing Ebby has done all year.

Surely, she is not the only person holding in a world of hurt that pushes against their skin like water against the walls of a dam.

It was as if the old jar, hitting the ground as it had all those years ago, had been like a bomb going off in the middle of her life, and she was still trying to outrun the shock waves from the blast.

Ebby registers the flutter in her chest, the tight feeling around her mouth, as the man turns and looks her way. By the time Ebby’s brain has absorbed the truth of it, that this stranger who reminds her of the man she nearly married is, indeed, the man who abandoned her last year on their wedding day, it is too late. Too late to run back

If Ebony was genuinely surprised that Henry had backed out of the marriage, then she must have been the only one. No matter how influential or admired Ebony’s family may have been, they were still black, and Henry’s mother was still the kind of mother for whom the Freemans would never have been good enough.

That the Freemans were African American was something that seemed to be mentioned in every news report, every article, and every social media post that Henry read about their personal tragedy. Nothing like the shooting had ever happened in their neighborhood before, each report would quote people as saying. It felt as though the writers were implying that the Freemans’ blackness had something to do with the violence that had been visited upon them, despite the fact that they lived in a wealthy enclave already brimming with temptation for anyone willing to hedge their bets against private security patrols.

Then Henry left her standing there on her own, on their wedding day. With one shitty move, Henry Pepper had shown the world that Ebony Freeman, try as she might, could not escape the mantle of misfortune that had settled over her.

Ebby noticed that no one had thought to describe her, as they did Henry, as coming from an old New England family. Henry’s family went back a ways, for sure, but so did Ebby’s. Ebby’s people on her mother’s side had been in Massachusetts since the 1600s. Some had been enslaved. Others had been born free or freed later. Most had purchased land.

But the Freemans were black. People saw their skin, not their history.

Be aware of a beautiful moment as it is happening. Take note of your life as you are living it.

I do believe there are times when it’s fine to use colloquial expressions. It depends on the context. It’s just that, at your age, you need to be sure to master the standard language first. Expand your vocabulary. Embrace the variety of words available to you. Make sure you can command the language in such a way that no one can ever doubt your ability to do so.”

“Listen to me. Always look up. You’re becoming a young man, now. A young, African American man. People are always going to look for excuses to question your capacity to do things. Fair or not. And then they will use that as a reason to take away the rest, all of those expressions, colloquial or cultural, that make language more interesting.”

Remember…speak better…” Baz joined in now. “…walk straighter, be smarter, be kinder.”

How much of yourself do you have to renounce in order to have the life you think you want?

These were people who would say they needed a copy editor to put the final touches on a book when, in reality, they needed someone to help rewrite much of their work. Part editor, part ghostwriter, part researcher. That’s what Ebby was. Ed knew Soh hoped Ebby would go back to school and study law. Or pick up another degree that felt more concrete, as Soh put it. But the beauty of Ebby’s work was that, like Ed’s, it was meant to feel invisible, though it did not lack substance. Ebby did not have Ed’s engineering degrees, but her work, like Ed’s, still involved a buoying-up of structures and systems that, if successful, went largely unnoticed. Like so much of the valuable work done in the world.

That familiar noise, of two children laughing together, made Ed smile as he watched them through a window. They were kicking the steps outside the mudroom, now, to knock the snow off their boots. Just the uff-uff sound of their shoes gave him the courage to plod through the molasses of his grief.

But his son is gone, and Ed needs to believe that their story, as a family, isn’t over yet. If Baz is the great loss of Ed’s life, then Ebby is his great unfinished work. His hope for the future.

there’s plenty that Soh doesn’t tell Ed. This is the only way she knows to be a woman in this world, by leaving much of who she is unsaid.

he looked at Ebby in a way that made Soh’s heart swell with hope. Still, Soh harbored a secret doubt. She worried that Henry might not have the backbone needed to go through life with her daughter. Henry had always been propped up by the social and financial scaffolding of the Pepper family and he had never faced a personal trauma like Ebby’s. Soh worried that Henry might be fine only until truly put to the test. And marriage, if nothing else, had a way of putting a person to the test.

At the very least, the Peppers should have shown up alone once they realized that he had run off without warning. Instead, it was left to Ed to telephone the Peppers that morning to find out why they were running so late. There were many families like Henry’s. People who had perfected the art of shying away from blame. They did not understand that as a result of Henry’s failure to accept his responsibility in this matter, the Freeman family, automatically, would be considered suspect. Because this was the subtext of every question that had been asked in the media since the afternoon that their son was killed, eighteen years earlier: What had the Freeman family done to bring this upon themselves? What had they done? This was the question that hung in the air above every black family that had ever run into misfortune.

Soh would never do such a thing. Because this is what it means to be Isabella “Sojourner” Bliss Freeman. Daughter of one of New England’s oldest and wealthiest African American families. Top honors at both universities. Attorney and mother. Lifelong volunteer. Champion fundraiser. Still the only black woman in her neighborhood, after all these years, with all that this unfortunate statistic has entailed. Alas, Soh needs to be above slapping that superficial fool in his face, because there are people who are just waiting for a sign that a woman like Soh is beneath them. There are people who still believe that her family and her pride are worth less than theirs. People who believe that her history is not their history, too.

People were wired to persevere. People were wired for hope. People might feel hurt, but they still liked to laugh. They might lose someone dear, but they still wanted to love.

Ebby reaches for her brother’s clock radio, now, and watches as the display flips from one minute to the next. She smiles at the thought of Baz’s soupy morning voice. Then she watches the display for one more minute. She is no stranger to keeping time by what she has lost.

At first, Henry was convinced it was best to keep his doubts from Ebby until he could figure out what to do. Then he felt guilty for not saying anything to her. And finally, he began to resent Ebby. Strange, wasn’t it? When faced with one’s moral wobbling, a person often looked about to cast blame elsewhere. That same week, at their rehearsal dinner, even as he stayed by Ebby’s side—holding her hand, joking with their respective parents—Henry was wondering why life with Ebby had to be so complicated to begin with.

And now she was planning to carry Baz’s photo down the aisle at their wedding. How sweet, Henry had told her, but actually, he disliked the idea. Why did her brother’s memory always have to be there in the middle of things?

Moses walked up to one of the men and watched, transfixed, as the potter dumped a wad of pale gray mud onto the plate before him. He then kicked at a wheel under the table with one leg. As the surface of the table spun, the man put his hands on the mass of clay. Moses watched as the mud kept changing. Until that moment, he’d thought that he understood the nature of dirt. He had worked in the fields, played with dirt clods, and pulled crayfish out of the mud. He understood that food grew out of the dirt, and that critters could live in the earth, and that dried mud could be formed into shapes, but until that day, he’d had no idea that the soil itself was a living thing that could grow so quickly.

Moses watched, now, as mounds of wet, filtered dirt were turned and pulled and grew into large jugs, jars, and platters. The arms of the turners working at the wheels seemed like extensions of the mud and the tools they were holding. All parts of the same whole. And now Moses felt it. How the sound of the wheel made his heart pound like a drum. How the smell of iron in the dirt filled his chest with both energy and a great sadness.

People liked to argue otherwise, but deep down, they understood that it was a challenge to level the economic playing field between white and black Americans when one group of people had inherited their wealth over generations by using the other group as forced or low-paid labor. So even a family like his would continue to be regarded with doubt.

Tucker told him he’d gone online and looked at the potential appeal of alkaline-glazed stoneware from historic Southern potteries. He’d stumbled onto a couple of articles on the history of these sought-after pieces. He’d had no idea that such pottery, innovative in its day and made with some of the best clay in the country, had been produced primarily by enslaved craftsmen. He hadn’t realized that so many practical devices and tools had been made with “slave labor,” as Tucker put it. “Who knew?” Tucker said. We knew, thought Ed.

That jar represented all those stories he could tell his children that most people never told about black folks in America.

Every moment in life is a confluence of events and you can’t see it all coming. You need to try not to, Ebby thinks. See it all. Otherwise, it leaves no room in your head to simply live.

Robert’s voice keeps coming back to Ebby. And the way his face warmed up when he spoke about his grandfather. The thought of him causes a twinge below her navel. She’s not going to stop thinking about him, is she? Well, that’s good. She needs to believe that she can be that distracted by someone new. That she won’t always feel this bad about Henry. And that one day, she might not mind falling for someone again.

When a woman like Betsey touched your arm, you could forget that another man owned you. The problem was, you might forget that another man owned the woman, too. Much later, Moses would conclude that he must have gone temporarily mad, to have blocked such a thing from his mind.

But what if it really was about something else? What if this is more than a bizarre coincidence? Is she a terrible person, to wonder whether her ex-fiancé could have anything to do with the crime? It feels ludicrous and, at the same time, perfectly reasonable in a world where someone you once believed in has turned out to be the kind of liar who could promise you a life together one minute and disappear on you the next. After that, what could she not believe?

Ebby’s life has been one of relative safety. Ebby has never been in a vehicle accident, never broken her arm or a tooth, never had her appendix taken out, never even been pickpocketed on a crowded city train. She has never been in a war zone. She is physically healthy and well educated. If you remove the unthinkable from Ebby’s life, if you excise just that one day in the year 2000 from the calendar, if you plug up the hole left in her life by her brother’s death, you see a fortunate woman, a life of privilege, a life to be grateful for.

In short, Henry is surprised. Henry is not accustomed to being surprised. Henry has always expected things to go his way. Because they usually do. It doesn’t hurt that he was born into a certain family, in a certain town, that he attended certain schools and benefited from a starting push into his profession from his father’s associates. He can admit this. It’s the truth. It’s also true that Henry works hard at his job, despite not being wild about it. And he’s pretty darned good at it, too. But, again, he is not surprised when things go well for him. Only when they don’t.

In each version of that myth, Avery thinks, the woman-creature who does not conform to the other person’s view of her ends up having to leave the relationship. Ends up being rejected for not living up to her lover’s view of her.

“There will always be men willing to steal the freedom of others if they think it will bring them an advantage,”

“How old are you, now?” he asked. “Fourteen years of age, sir,” said Willis. “Four-teen,” Frenchie said and gave a hoot. “What you have seen in your short life is only one small part of the truth. Don’t you forget that, young Willis. If you live long enough, you will find that the rest of the truth is out there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the bay.

Nothing excuses the fact that he didn’t call her on their wedding day. That he didn’t show up and face her like a man. Ebby grew up with little privacy, but she still craved it. When Henry ghosted her, knowing, full well, that the media would be following their nuptials, it was as if he had stripped off her clothes in public. He hadn’t even tried to protect her. She looks over at Avery. Doesn’t that set off alarm bells for her? Once again, she wonders what woman would want to be with Henry after knowing what he’s done.

Love leaves a memory in the heart, even when your head tells you it shouldn’t.

“That it goes beyond culture,” Avery says. “That it’s in our nature as humans. Our world is more sea than land. We came from the sea, we eat from the sea, we travel across the seas. We seek out the salt water to soothe our bodies and our worries. The sea is part of us. Whether we live at the shore or not. I believe this is what that Willis guy must have felt when he reached the port city for the first time. The moment he saw the bay and breathed in the coastal air, he may have recognized a part of himself that had been missing.”

Does Henry really believe that he is less accountable than another person would be in his position? Why is it that some people in this world feel so little responsibility toward others? How is it that the man she loved turned out to be one of those?

Despite all, Ebby still yearns for the Henry she was supposed to have married. Ebby understands that this man before her now is not that Henry. This is the Henry she is better off without. The one Hannah says she was fortunate not to have married. Ebby is sure that this Henry is a man she could never again kiss, never again hold.

I’ve known you since you were yea high, Henry. I think it’s time you got your butt over there.” “I don’t think that’s up to me, Harris. I don’t think Ed Freeman is going to want to see me.” “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Henry. This isn’t about what Ed Freeman wants. This is about what you should be doing. This is about you and how, for whatever reason, you were willing to let go of your fiancée there. You are the one who chose to handle things the way you did. Your dad would be pissed if he heard me saying this, but your parents let you get away with this. You think you can just pull a stunt like that wedding-day thing and still get to stay in your comfort zone?”

To understand that sometimes you can save yourself a lot of trouble by daring to have a difficult conversation.