Good Dirt

Content Warning: This section includes discussion of graphic violence, racism, physical abuse, death, sexual content, sexual violence, and death by suicide.

Back in 2019, Ebby goes into the village to have breakfast and sees a man who interests her. She recalls a dispute that she had once with Henry and reflects on the sense that “the emotional injuries with which she still lived were beginning to weigh on him” (123). The waitress calls the new man Robert. Ebby reminds herself to hold the moment.

Ebby goes home with Robert and has sex with him. She feels that she is “trying to disappear from herself” (127).

Ebby doesn’t want to be pulled back into her past, and she wonders if writing down the family’s Old Mo stories might help. She hears a hoopoe bird calling and wonders if it is an omen of some kind. Henry knocks on the door.