Good Dirt

by Charmaine Wilkerson

Soh tried to slow time. Savor the moment. She breathed deeply, took in the scents of the

freshly mowed grass, the potted flowers along the stone path, the good dirt.

Ebby pushes her other hand into the silt of the riverbank in an effort to raise her body fully out of the water. The smell of the mud on her clothes as she staggers makes Ebby think of the musk of clay behind Granny Freeman’s house. Her dad’s mom would like the soil around here. Good dirt, she would say.

She closed her eyes, now, and held on to memories of home, murmuring what she could recall to her unborn child. The energy of the raw clay under her fingers. The tickle of warm dust on her feet. The voice of her child’s father, Mansa. She would give her child his name if they survived this voyage. Mansa, she said, speaking to the center of her body as her baby stretched and turned inside her. Mansa.

Later, the man who purchased Kandia would insist on calling her newborn child Moses. This was not so important, thought Kandia. The sound was close enough. And she would know her son by any name. She could smell the clay and iron in his skin. She and her child had been stolen from the place she called home, the people she called family, but on the morning that her son was born she decided that no, she would not allow them to be stolen from themselves.