Ebby Freeman and Janie Crawford as Women Who Freed Others Without Disappearing.

A little before the Christmas rush, I finished reading Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson, and it felt like a present to myself, a present of knowing. While some readers may feel sympathy for Ebony “Ebby” Freeman, she left me feeling elevated, certain that she fully embodied the resource of Love, a love we are all created in and gifted from THE SOURCE.

On the surface, Good Dirt tells the story of a Massachusetts family mourning the loss of their beloved son and brother, Edward Basil “Baz” Freeman, who is gunned down during a home invasion. Ebby, five years his junior, is the sole eyewitness to the murder. Like many who survive sudden violence, she appears to carry guilt—both for having lived and for witnessing her brother’s final attempt to protect what he loved.

That Love takes form in the family heirloom known as “Old Mo,” a 20-gallon stoneware pot whose cultural significance is rooted in the family’s more than 200-year ancestral history in the United States. Baz dies trying to protect it, but Old Mo is more than an object—it is a record keeper. It holds memory, labor, survival, and devotion across generations.

It is Love, the intangible force, and Old Mo, its tangible witness, that sit at the center of this novel. In nearly every chapter, a character acts either out of Love or out of fear of standing in its immense presence.

Good Dirt is the perfect title because, like love itself, it is a resource of the earth. Good Dirt reminds us that something enduring, sustaining, and life-giving can be made from what appears, at first glance, to be nothing.

Love as the Ultimate Stolen Resource

In Good Dirt, Charmaine Wilkerson offers a deceptively quiet truth: love is the ultimate generative force. It creates people, objects, culture, memory, and continuity.

Generational love serves as the interpretive key that unlocks the themes in Good Dirt, echoing across literature and shaping cultural narratives. In this narrative, in particular, one thing I noticed throughout the story is the following:

Those who cannot produce love will steal what love produces; if possession fails, they will destroy the vessel that contains it.

This control does not stop at adversaries; it extends inward from parents to sons and daughters. Parents who put labor, bodies, and vocations into sanctioned systems of productivity. i.e., “do this, or I’ll disown you.” We find two characters who wrestle with this fate. Ebby accepts both into her life and frees them from their indentured servitude.

Ebby is the hero of this story, and her ability to love is her strength, her sustenance, and her freedom.

Until we recognize this pattern in our literary heroines, we will continue to misread women’s love as weakness, sacrifice, or loss rather than as ethical power.

Ebby Freeman: Love That Opens Gates but Does Not Follow

Ebby Freeman is not a romantic heroine. She is a living record. Ebby is a bearer of ancestral memory who learns how to steward love without allowing extraction.

Her journey begins in fracture: public violence, ancestral commodification, and personal rupture culminate when Henry abandons her at the altar.

And many misread this moment as humiliation or romantic failure. In truth, it reveals a more profound incompatibility: Henry cannot stand inside the full weight of Ebby’s inheritance—historical, racial, emotional—without retreating into safety. At the same time, Ebby remains unbroken, even in heartbreak, able to create and transform herself and others.

And the novel’s moral sophistication lies in what follows.

Henry and Avery, Henry’s latest partner, are both controlled descendants. Henry is forced away from photography (seeing, witnessing, truth-telling) into finance (abstraction, accumulation). Avery is diverted from psychology (interiority, healing) into law (containment, legitimacy).

Their respective parents have taught them that survival requires abandoning what they love. Ebby does not rescue them through possession but recognizes their true vocations without demanding allegiance, demonstrating her unpossessive love that fosters freedom.

Ebby’s legacy, her heritage, is the novel’s quiet thesis: ethical love liberates without colonizing the future.

Ebby does not follow them into those lives. She does not disappear. She remains intact, grounded, and whole. Her love moves like candlelight—shared, not consumed.

Ebby reminds me of another heroine who carries this ability to liberate others through truth and love.

Janie Crawford: Love That Refuses Diminishment

Janie Crawford’s journey in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is often framed as a search for love. In reality, it is a refusal to accept love that requires her diminishment.

Each of Janie’s marriages reveals a different mechanism of control:

• Logan Killicks offers security without regard for her interior life.
• Joe Starks offers status while silencing her voice.
• Tea Cake offers companionship—but also risk.

What unites Janie and Ebby is not romantic success, but relational discernment. Janie learns that the love that thrives on her shrinking is not love—it is extraction.

Like Ebby, Janie’s love frees others. Tea Cake becomes more alive through her, more playful, more fully himself. Yet Janie does not tether her identity to his survival. When circumstances require it, she chooses life without surrendering selfhood.

Janie returns alone, but not empty. She carries what matters inwardly. Her love, like Ebby’s, does not require possession to be meaningful.

Is This Your Takeaway?

At the core of Good Dirt is the novel’s ethical love-an approach that prioritizes liberation and respect over possession or control.

• Some humans cannot produce love, so they steal what love creates.
• If they cannot possess it, they destroy the vessel that contains it.
• They cannot control hearts and minds—but they will capture hands and bodies, including their own sons and daughters, forcing them to produce without love.

Those who possess love must share it like candlelight to light the world.

Ebby embodies this principle in motion. She interrupts control without becoming its opposite. Without demanding loyalty, repayment, or explanation, Ebby frees Henry and Avery from the inherited obligation of obedience.

She shows that love’s highest function is not attachment, but restoration.

Until we understand this, we will keep misreading women’s departures as failures, their solitude as loss, and their generosity as naïveté.

Their Eyes Were Watching God and Good Dirt were published 88 years apart, yet Janie told Pheobe to share her message:

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh themselves.”

Therefore, the message continues because the lesson is unfinished.

Until We Get It.

Ebby Freeman stands at the center of this lineage because she is contemporary, legible, and unresolved. She shows us that love does not always culminate in partnership—and that this is not tragedy.

Like Janie.

She demonstrates that the ethical use of love is to free others without disappearing, to restore vocation without commandeering futures, and to remain whole even when love moves on.

Until we get that, we must continue to tell the story.

And retell it.

In gratitude for the power of love.