Charmaine Wilkerson ’82 believes there are two reasons why people move to Italy: to study art history or because they are in love. “Well, what I will say is I’m not an art historian,” she said with a smile from her home in Rome.
Those who have read Wilkerson’s books — 2022’s New York Times bestseller-turned-Hulu-series Black Cake and the newly released Good Dirt — may have gathered that there is another reason why Wilkerson has lived between Italy and the United States for the past two decades. It is because the former broadcast journalist and Barnard alumna finds a strong connection between where a person is and who they are.
“I like the idea of thinking about how our identities and our narratives about ourselves and our ideas of the world may shift or remain the same wherever we go,” said Wilkerson, who was born in New York City and spent much of her childhood in Kingston, Jamaica, before returning to Manhattan. “I am fascinated by shifting ideas of home, family, and self.”
This relationship between place and personhood is central to Wilkerson’s newest work. Good Dirt tells the story of Ebby Freeman, a woman whose life changed at 10 years of age, when tragedy took not only a loved one but also her family’s most precious heirloom, a large clay jar made by an enslaved potter. The book weaves through time and place to tell the story not just of Ebby but also of the jar. Through this object, we learn about Ebby’s lineage from West Africa to Barbados to South Carolina to Connecticut. It is also by retelling the history of the jar that Ebby is able to heal from the tragedy that befell her and her parents.
Good Dirt is Wilkerson’s attempt to answer a question she has sat with since her time as a journalist. Recalling the many moments when she found herself walking into a stranger’s home “on the worst day of their life,” she asked herself, How will they manage? “But as I grew older,” she says, “I came to understand that we do manage. Every time something terrible happens to an individual or to a community, I ask what is it that allows us to thrive despite unspeakable pain? And one day, into my head popped this little girl, Ebby Freeman, and it was the worst day of her life. But very quickly, my imagination jumped to the future. What would she be like? How would she manage? What would be her secret to living a life graced by love and even joys?”
A Writer at Work
This desire to tell stories dates back to Wilkerson’s years at Barnard. She entered the College in 1978 at just 16 years old, choosing the school not only because it was in her neighborhood but because, she says, “Barnard, to me, was mythic.” A linguistics major who was on the track and cross country teams, she says the school bestowed many gifts on her. “I think the best thing about going to Barnard is being taken for granted — meaning it is taken for granted that I will have many interests and that I will excel,” says Wilkerson. “I felt as though I’d landed in a place where I could find a way to be me, whatever that meant.”
What it meant for Wilkerson was learning that journalism could be a form of storytelling. “I discovered the Columbia University radio station, realized that telling stories on the radio and writing news stories was another way to write a story about our world,” she recalls. And so after graduation, she headed across the country for Stanford University’s graduate program in communication.
As a reporter, she worked throughout California and Connecticut covering the news on television. Wilkerson believes it was a “wonderful way to be steeped in one’s community.” Yet throughout her career, there was the desire to write fiction. About 10 years ago, she says, she began to publish flash fiction and short stories. In 2018, she started writing what would become her debut novel, Black Cake. When a family member asked Wilkerson to share her mother’s rum cake recipe, it led to the realizations that the recipe had the “potential to become a character and symbol in the story” and that culture can be transmitted through food.
Regardless of whether she is writing a short story or novel, there is one common factor in all of Wilkerson’s fiction, she says. “I go straight from the gut. A question comes to me, and I start to write. An emotion comes to me, I start to write. When I say I start to write, a character pops into my head, and I just follow that person.”
Her next project, still in its early stages, is a novel with themes that will be familiar to her readers, who include former President Barack Obama; he declared Black Cake one of his favorite books of 2022. It is a story set in multiple locations, and it involves food — but not cake, Wilkerson jokes. No matter how the story unfolds, it will be told with the richness of place, remembrance, and connection that touches all of Wilkerson’s work.
