ࡱ> [ bjbjZYZY .h83b83bm+ ***8bt$*!DDDb!d!d!d!d!d!d!$#G&f!DDDDD!4!Db!Db!`&~RN!!0!&&&DDDDDDD!!DDD!DDDD&DDDDDDDDD B : Everybodys Street and Being Black in Appalachia: The Prose and Poetry of Crystal Wilkinson By Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt ϳԹUniversitys Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities If you consider what poet and fiction writer Crystal Wilkinson has said is most important to her as a writer and artistthe resiliency of Black people in America, the power of personal stories, radical feminism, the ways of women and how they sometimes demean and hurt each other (Vaswani 23), mental illness, the body, rites of passage, and experimental narrative structure, which she calls the last frontier in storytelling, eclipsing plotthen you will know a writer of rare talent and imagination who will invade your thoughts and whisk you away to the realms of your own imagination as you travel through her fictional world. Wilkinson is a complex and fascinating artist, profound in her thinking, deep in her feeling, a writer who is able to tell the stories of her people while at the same time transcend race and region to tell all our stories. She is a country person who longed to leave the country, she is the daughter of a mother who struggled with mental illness who has pondered whether perhaps insanity might be the sanest state of mind or the most creative, and she honors and portrays the older country ways and traditions even as she calls for a radical re-visioning of community and gender relationships. She is a poet who in some sense traded poetic craft for fiction, even as she imbues each line of fiction with exquisite poetry. Crystal Wilkinson is an uncommon person and writer, who brings us her stories at a slow, methodical, and artful pace and with a patient look, like the last oozings hour by hour, as Keats would write of the cider press in autumn (To Autumn lines 20-21). A Place to Call Home Born in Hamilton, Ohio, Wilkinson grew up on a mountain farm in the hill country of eastern Kentucky. She writes in Back Talk from Appalachia, Confronting Stereotypes about being country: Creeks, one-room churches, outhouses, gravel roads, old men whittling at Hills Grocery down in Needmore, daisies, Big Boy tomatoes, and buttercups. It was all mine. It is the makeup of my spirit. Country is as much a part of me as my full lips, my wide hips, my dreadlocks, my high cheekbones (186). In 1962, at six weeks old, Crystal was taken to live on her grandparents 64-acre farm in Indian Creek, Kentucky. By the time she was a year old, her mother had experienced her second breakdown (her first was two years before Crystal was born), and she left Crystal with her grandparents, Christine and Silas Enoch Nuckie Wilkinson, for treatment in Eastern State Mental Hospital (Strange Fruit Your Imagination Bears 135). Raised by her grandparents, Crystal found a loving and supportive home in Indian Creek. Her grandfather Silas was a tobacco farmer, working a farm that had been in his family since slave times, while Christine worked in the homes of many of the school teachers of the area. The Wilkinsons were the only Black family in an Appalachian community where both were highly respected (Grooves in the Record Interview 110), and though neither had the opportunity to more than a grade school education, they valued education and encouraged the imaginative and creative expression of their grandchild. Crystal was a quiet, reflective child, seeing her mother only occasionally. Wilkinson remembers those visits of her mother to the farm as awkward, with mother and daughter sitting in the living room or at the kitchen table just staring at each other, then at the walls or the floor (Strange Fruit 140). Still, Crystal had a deep longing to connect with her mother. She recalls her habit of going into the yard, climbing to the top of one of the knobs that surrounded the farm, and searching far across the hills to see her mother, some four counties away in the city, where she imagined her mother looking out of her window of Ward 6 at the mental institution equally longing for her daughter (137). The Wilkinsons didnt talk much about mental illness. Wilkinson writes of this period of her life: Black women dont speak their pain. Black women dont speak of madness. The Wilkinson women [didnt] talk about anything but the children and meals that need to be prepared, the cleaning, the shirts to be starched and ironed (Strange Fruit 137). Yet she felt she would always be the crazy womans daughter, no matter what fruit her imagination bore (136). She remembers a profound sense of abandonment as a child, though when she would see her mother, she always felt her to be a regal vision in her black high heels, form-fitting dresses, her hair pulled elegantly back from her face and her lips dark red when she would return to the creek for holidays (138). There would always be a longing for her mother despite the fact that it was her grandmother who saw her off to school, held her when she was sick, who was steady and sturdy. As she grew older, she and her mother formed a kind of sisterly bond of friendship which she treasured. Her mother was lovely and fragile, but not to be counted on (138). Yet, it was her mother whom she called to tell when she was pregnant as a second semester freshman, and it was her mother who came to stay with her after her son was born, though she recalls her nervous, trembling hands as if she were holding a baby for the first time. When Wilkinson took her son from her mother, she whispered to him a promise to be a better motherthen thinking her mother might have heard the whisper, with one arm around her child and one around her mother, she hugged herboth crying, her mother she thought for joy and Wilkinson for guilt and wishing her grandmother were there to smooth that moment away like a wrinkle in a sheet (141). Your grandmother wouldnt let me have you, her mother once told her, because . . . because I was sick (142). She sometimes believed that perhaps her mother loved her too much, that her love was so powerful, cloaked in fear and pain, almost to the point of smothering. When Wilkinsons grandparents died, she remembers an awful sense of guilt, as she didnt want to have loved them more than she did her mother, but [she] did (142). The complex feelings toward her mother are expressed in The Visit. Wilkinson remembers that a visit from Mama, was like Christmas on Sundays when you came to the creek, your arms always heavy with dolls, tea sets . . . your eyes searching my face for a daughters smile, scanning me with a mothers familiarity to find the inches Id grown. You seemed a foreigner to me some sweet dignitary returning from holiday all dressed to the nines. But you were my mama . . . We played house, under the stare of Grannys eye kissed on the lips held hands like we thought mothers and daughters should but neither of us knew for sure. . . . And when you left, I love you so good, you would say. Your hugs were tight, so tight they took my breath away. I clung to you in those times thinking I could grow heavy in your arms like a gift. Wilkinsons fundamental identity and roots come from her childhood spent with her grandparents Christine and Silas on their Indian Creek tobacco farm. In an interview with Neela Vaswani, she called herself an African-American-country-woman, who has discovered the empowerment of celebrating [her] ruralness instead of hiding it and using her own understanding of her roots as a way to combat stereotypes about African American rural identities (6). Those early rural experiences and images never left her consciousness, and she shares this memory in her poem Terrain. She writes that she is geographically rural and country, though she says, . . . my taste buds have exiled themselves from fried green tomatoes and rhubarb for goats milk and pine nuts. Still I am haunted by home (14). When she returns to the creek, she feels like a homing black bird destined to always return. There, she thinks of herself as a plain brown bag, oak and twig, mud pies and gut wrenching gospel in the throats of old tobacco brown men. Going home is like taking a toe-dive in all the rivers seeking the whole of herself; she scouts virtual African terrain trying to sift through ancestral memories, but still [she is] called back home through hymns sung by stout black women in large hats and flowered dresses (14). For Wilkinson, in her fiction and in her personal life, all roads lead me back across the waters of blood and breast milk, from ocean, to river, to the lake, to the creek, to branch and stream, back to the sweet rain, to the cold water in the glass I drink when I thirst to know where I belong (Terrain14). In a poignant series of poems that she labels her Water Witch collection, Wilkinson uses the voice of her grandfather Silas. The Water Witch on Reading allows the speaker to re-vision what it means to be educated: Oh, I cipher pretty good and cant no white man cheat me on my crops or on my change at the feed store. . . . Im the one they come to when they want their well witched and nigh everybody asks me how many snows we gonna have come winter . . . I can read a map, can read a mans eyes and see if hes truthful. I can level a girder by sight. I can read the tremble in a cows gut, a mans footprints in the mud. I can read a mans heart . . . . . . I can read the corners of Christines red mouth and tell if shes mad at me. Only thing I cant read is words. (Poetry) In Water Witch on Invasion the speaker is vexed at white boys who have invaded his space, Smelling / their selves thinking they can do it cause Im colored / cause Im old, or just cause. When they get too close, thats when I poke that old 22 up toward the trees / and let it rip three times. Protecting ones own and forbearing to be a victim keeps the hounds at bay, still its serious business / to step foot on a mans land but sometimes / when I hear their feet traveling away from me / like spooked cattle in the dark, I cant help but to laugh. That intrepidity and sense of gusto drives Silas onward as a Black man and is his true salvation, as the speaker suggests in The Water Witch on Salvation (Poetry). Here the grandfather runs after his horse, old Trigger, who takes off with his grandbaby in the wagon. When he shouts Hah up now! the horse stops, and he discerns a decided parallel between the beast who is his servant and himself, a Black man: . . . Old Trigger stopped, stood still and straight, real proud, cutting his black eyes at me like he was saying You old sonebitch, I showed you. . . . We left the wagon, walked the horse back to the barn, then the girl breaks my grip and runs; she runs, she runs through the pasture, up the hill as if nothing happened at all. Not a tear a one, nare one sign of being scared. The nip in the morning made me think of old hog killing times, made me think of Old man Pat, whod rather see the fresh chittlins rot on the ground, than me take em home to feed my younguns. I felt old Triggers breath on my hand, warm and stank. I pat his flank and were back to being friends. The hurtin in my knee comes back on me like a toothache, made me wonder if any beast living could ever be tamed. (Poetry) Wilkinson has often thought of herself as an old soul, suspecting that growing up with older but supportive and encouraging grandparents gave her that perspective. She remembers Christine taking her into the forest with her little notebook in hand, pointing out the different trees and their leaves for her to draw and memorize, just as she would memorize bible verses in vacation Bible school. Wilkinson has talked about how she has passed down the cooking ways that came from her grandmother, to her own children, so that even they are somewhat removed from their own generation growing up in Lexington. She remembers Silas and Christine being very strict and very religious Baptiststhose lively sermons a bit scary to a young child; but for the most part, [Wilkinson recalls] it was just the goodness of spirit, that this is how you are supposed to act in the world (Grooves in the Record 110). Of her grandparents, Wilkinson said, They were just good people, really down to earth people (Grooves in the Record 110). Wilkinson has shared a story that reveals much about her grandparents and how they negotiated with dignity whatever racial divides they encountered in Casey County, Kentucky. Not long after their death, Wilkinson was invited back to the mostly white Indian Creek community for Heritage Day. She was overwhelmed with the gratitude and praise heaped upon Silas and Christine. One after another, young and old would come up to her to tell stories of the wisdom, neighborliness and quiet help received from the Wilkinsons: What was remarkable, Wilkinson said, was my grandmother had an eighth-grade education, my grandfather had a third-grade education, and I was speaking to students that were in community college . . . . (Brewer 110). One would tell her, I remember Nuckie and Christine. Another would assert, My parents said to be sure to tell you that they remembered Nuckie and Christine and what good people they were (110). Wilkinson concludes, My family was the only black family there and so to have that passed along . . . and to be remembered as so good and so wise was remarkable (110). When Silas and Christine passed, their six children gathered to divide their belongings, sell the farm, and go through and discard all the stuff Christine had packed away. Wilkinson told her interviewers in Grooves in the Record that it saddened her that she didnt have anything her grandmother had written, but Christine had kept a box filled with Crystals writingher poems, her notebooks, her wildflower journal (Brewer 111). Wilkinson has said many times that she still very much believes in ancestors and the strength of ancestors, and it is clear from her storytelling that she has drawn upon her country upbringing, but she wasnt always so appreciative of being country. In an essay for Oxford American called Dig If You Will the Picture, Wilkinson talks about being sixteen, Black, country and full of sexual energy (1). She had attempted to glean her style from magazines, music, television, and the popular culture that seemed a world away from Indian Creek, Kentucky. Her life, as is often the case with teens, became full of secrets. She talks about BB, the head deacon of her church, whose hands brushed against her breasts as she rang the church bell. When he began to seek her out, she hid from him to avoid his touch. Riding the bus to school in 1979, White boys extended their hands into the aisle when she boarded the bus in the morning: One grabbed a right breast. Another grabbed a left buttock. Another grabbed my crotch as she tried to use her books as a shield. One White boy called her ugly black bitch, while other White girls and boys laughed. She had only one goal: [My] rural life in Kentucky felt like a prison. I wanted to get off the creek. After she turned seventeen, she went off to college, and by the end of the year, she had been raped twice, once by a stranger and once by someone she knew. On the night she had sex with her boyfriend willingly, she told him she was a virgin. It was the first time I had given consent to be touched, she later wrote (Dig If You Will 3). While her experience was sadly not uncommon for young women on a university campus (one in five experiences rape), it was hurtful and demeaning (National Sexual Violence Resources Center). In an interview with Silas House, Wilkinson shared other experiences of being objectified and rendered an outsider while at the universityin large part, for the way she spoke and for her country ways. When asked by House how she felt about being judged by the way she spoke, Wilkinson responded: Ive become a code-switcher at times. I love the magic in your voice and how you stick to it no matter what . . . , but I find myself being a chameleon (House 66). The university, the ragging of friends, the secret humiliations, and her own shyness encouraged her to efface the country parts of herselfher dialect, her country manners, and actions. In her essay On Being Country, One Affrilachian Womans Return Home, Wilkinson writes about heading off to Eastern Kentucky University in 1979, at such a young age: I considered my country life behind me. I had practiced all summer long on my new voice. Now seventeen, I was extremely careful to tiptoe around everything that could possibly be identified as country (184). But try as she might to obliterate this fundamental essence of herself, people would still ask her, Where are you from? She felt herself a black version of Ellie Mae Clampett or Daisy Duke (185). She decided to major in journalism and took speech classes: I made every effort, she writes, to remove all that was country. Soon my is were curved in all the right places and I blended into the homogeneity (185). Finally, she writes she had done iterased it all (185). Only when she went back home to visit Silas and Christine, did she allow her jaw to loosen, [her] tongue to rest in its normal state. She would see her family and the land that she had loved with the unimpinged freedom and clarity she had as a child. She would go home to spend her time gathering hickory nuts or picking blackberries (185). She found herself writing poetry and short fiction again, wallowing in the things she had always done, wading in creek waters, shoot[ing] the breeze with the farmers who sat at the corner store, shuck[ing] corn in a big white tub in the backyard. However most important she felt free to allow [her] tongue and her pen to slip back home (185). She writes that this land had been in our family since the time of slavery, and she had reached the point in her life where she wanted to hear her grandparents telling our history in their beautiful country voices . . . . A county twanga melodic use of language that is distinctively woodburning stove, come in and sit a spell, a patchwork quilt, summer swimming hole, [and] sweet iced tea (186). Indian creek gave Wilkinson access to a place and a language that told her you are always welcome here, and it was a place to call home (On Being County 186). Becoming a Writer Wilkinson graduated from Eastern Kentucky University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism in 1985, going on to earn an MFA from Spalding University in 2003. In between, from 1989-1995, she worked as a public information officer and community relations manager for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, where she edited an environmental newsletter. It was around this time that she attended the Kentucky Women Writers Conference; and as she shared with Neela Vaswani, she was awestruck (3). That year there was a pretty radical slant to the conference, she recalls. The workshop leaders included Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldua, among others. Wilkinson remembers: My daughters were six years old and sat with me at the feet of these women and it was the first time I realized that women with children and women who had work to do and women who were like me were writers (3). For Wilkinson, the experience lit afire her dream to become a writer. She told Vaswani that her confidence blossomed and with that came such an overwhelming belief that I could do this (3). This was also the first time she understood the power of sisterhood and the extreme power of black women . . . . It was a spiritual awakening. Allison praised her writing and hooks, who later would become a colleague at Berea, encouraged her. These women and their books, Wilkinson said, saved my life. And I mean that literally. I was a single mother of these small children, I was newly out of a physical, mental and spiritually abusive relationship . . . but these women and these books literally saved [me] . . . from circumstances, from him, from myself (Vaswani 4). It was also during this time that she cultivated the most important association and friendships to shape her writingthe Affrilachian Poets, becoming one of their founding members, along with Nikki Finney, Kelly Norman Ellis, Richardo Nazario y Colon, and Frank X Walker, who was serving at the time as assistant director at the Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Center from 1985-1995. Frank X had disparaged the dictionary definition of Appalachian which specifically defined the term as white people indigenous to the region of Appalachia, so he coined the word Affrilachian which quickly caught hold in the public imagination and certainly helped define the region as more diverse than popular culture had assumed. As these Lexington based Affrilachian poets met together, wrote, and inspired one another, they redefined what it meant to be Appalachian and gave a sense of identity to people often marginalized and othered in the region. Wilkinson said this in her Grooves in the Record interview about her association with these dynamic young poets: With the Affrilachian Poets, specifically, to talk with Kelly Norman Ellis about her grandfathers farm in Mississippi and his little grocery store wed share common memories (118). But beyond the common and personal experiences, there was a sense that she was part of something that had longevity and impact, particularly as it redefined the region and helped to combat stereotypes (119). Wilkinson had felt neither wholly Appalachian nor African Americanher roots were distinctive, she believedand now she had a name for who she was: Affrilachian. As Wilkinson became increasingly involved in public service in Lexington, specifically with the Roots and Heritage Festival where she helped to coordinate literary readings, she began to devote more of her time to her writing and identifying herself as a writer. From 1997-2001, she taught at the Kentucky Governors School for the Arts, working with high school juniors and seniors and serving as chair of the creative writing department. Then with the completion of her MFA in 2003, she remembers feeling what she calls MFA hangover (Were All Consequence of Something 3). While she enjoyed her program at Spalding University, she eventually began to understand that she was concentrating so hard on going from natural storyteller to craft master that she found herself writing fiction that felt contrived. This was when she rediscovered the writing of Gayle Jones, whose work she had first read at the university as an undergraduate (3). When she immersed herself in Jones writingauthor of Corregidora, the White Rat collection, and National Book Award nominees The Healing and Mosquitoshe began to embrace a first person narrative, a strategy she had shied away from as it lent itself to confusing the narrator with the author; and as she continues in Shit, Were All Consequences of Something, a 2018 Oxford American essay, I immersed myself in her work and (re) discovered the history of my own blood and regained plausibility in my stories (4). She explains: It was Joness pure freedom to work within the vernacular that convinced me that my work could be both literary and true to the traditions of my culture (4). By this point, Wilkinson had published her first story collection Blackberries, Blackberries. Re-reading Jones not only gave Wilkinson permission to center a story on a protagonist who lives in a black, rural community, but it was even more empowering to know that I could let the characters tell the story in their own beautiful voices (4). She also discovered something else about her own writingthat is, she was not interested in any kind of linear plot. Jones Corregidora, the story of a nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both a characters grandmother and her mother, was told from memories and informed deeply from the oral tradition. Reading Jones also helped Wilkinson process her own dual experience as an African American and as an Appalachian. Wilkinson began to understand that she, like Jones, was an amalgam of personal memory, historical memory, and imagination; and the act of bringing these singular characters to life was drawing from the oral storytelling traditions of both Black and Appalachian communities. Making Black Appalachian vernacular the core of her writing would be an act that was essentially political: How much more political, revolutionary really, she questioned, can you be than to give a country black woman the freedom to tell her own story, from her own mouth, from her own tongue as though she is talking to her own people when much of the world refuses to acknowledge that she even exists? (4-6). Wilkinson had discovered through Gayl Jones that she could use dialect and voice as literary tools, as weapons, as conduits to the ancestors . . . [to reveal] ordinary people like herself (Vaswani 7). A Matter of Style: Blackberries, Blackberries, Water Street, and The Birds of Opulence In a conversation with Neela Vaswani, Wilkinson repeated a mantra that she picked up from novelist A. J. Verdellthat structure is the last frontier (4). Since Wilkinson has admitted that she really doesnt care about plot, what then would be central in her storytelling? I am much more interested in why a character does what she does than what she does next. I am driven by the why and not the what next (7). However, as Virginia Woolf discovered, those books are hard to sella fact of publishing that Wilkinson is well-aware of. She told Vaswani that she has learned to listen to the book and [has tried] to let the form arise naturally. She recalls that when she began The Birds of Opulence, the manuscript was more traditional in size, but once she began to listen to the story, she also started paying attention to sentences like [she] would in a poem. Compression and fragmentation then are important to her, and the writers that inspire her tend to use these tools: Maxine Hong, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Toomer, and Sherwood Anderson, among others. Wilkinson told Vaswani that memory is not linear (Vaswani 12), and she is confident that the story will show itself to her, if she just has the patience to listen. Like Silas House, she spends more time thinking than writing and that too is okay, she says. Its all leading somewhere. . . . So I practice patience and move forward (Vaswani 13). She notes as well that all her books are connected, either by place or character, often both. Once she decided to let go of industry expectations and just let the books be (Vaswani 8), then the Browns, the Goodes, the Carters, and the array of families and characters in Blackberries, Blackberries, Water Street, and The Birds of Opulence came to life, inhabiting one volume, then another, and sometimes all three at once. Blackberries, Blackberries came straight from the oral tradition and Wilkinsons full acceptance of who she wasAffrilachianthat is, an amalgam of country, African American, and a writer tied to a place and a people in both time and tradition. What becomes discernible in Wilkinsons first book, and absolutely clear in those that followed, is the stories reliance on one another in order to say something larger as she shared with Vaswani (8). Thus rather than a linear progression, the structure is layered or what she will call by the time she finishes The Birds of Opulence a mosaic. Standing back, reading for those connecting characters, themes, and images, the full story, perhaps even a different story from what one expects, will reveal itself. The kind of patience Wilkinson learned in order to write such a book, a careful reader will also learn in order to appreciate the full value of her narrative. Such a creative process does not bring the large presses knocking on ones door. Wilkinson told Vaswani that she has come to appreciate the smaller presses, specifically Toby Press, which first published Blackberries, Blackberries, and then Kentucky UP. However, there is a singular advantage in that the small press takes the time to cultivate the writer/publisher relationship and has more tolerance for experimental narrative styles. Wilkinson told Vaswani that her nominations for the Hurston/Wright Award and the Orange Prize for Water Street [as well as] . . . the Ernest Gaines Award for Excellence for The Birds of Opulence really speak to these presses being willing to distribute and market the books (Vaswani 9). Blackberries, Blackberries (2000) was awarded the 2001 Best Debut Fiction Award by Todays Librarian, the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature, PBS Kentucky Educational TV Book Club Pick, and others. A look at Wilkinsons poem bloodroot provides the best preface for understanding what the author is trying to do in these stories: It was only yesterday when we three cinnamon dipped girls . . . built leaf huts gossiped in grass kitchens our hands placed where hips would grow cardboard living rooms chattered where pretended menfolk waited on blackberry mud pies imaginary husbands came home smelling of tobacco, hay and sweat and were served sweet iced tea plucked from the air our mamas called to us out screen doors while we played against the shady side of the popular tree we daydreamed in purple Indian Creek skies hoping that motherhood would swoop down riding on the backs of bluejays & horizon-kissed feathers would float newborns into the fleshy round of our bellies praying that spiraling pine needles caught in the wind would somehow land between our legs and make us bleed As Wilkinson writes in the introduction to Blackberries, Blackberries, Being a woman was something that I longed for. I remember sitting quietly watching [my grandmother, my mother] . . . I watched how these beautiful women wore their countryness, wore their womanness. How they interacted with men, children and each other. I wanted to learn all the ways of womenfolk, to capture all the secrets. What I didnt know then was that a womans life . . . [was] never plain and simple (3-4). These stories, Wilkinson tells us, come from black lives and from country livesBlack and juicy, just like a blackberry (4). If we look again at the major themes and ideas of Wilkinsons fictionthe resiliency and strength of Black people in America, loneliness, the power of personal stories and family, the ways of women and sometimes how they demean or betray each other, and experimental narrative structurewe will find all these ideas explored to some degree in Blackberries, Blackberries. On the surface, for example, a story like Music for Meriah appears a tale of loneliness and longing, with Meriah Clays hungering for experience beyond the confines of a clinging mother and a narrowly circumscribed life. That longing is focused on the jazz pianist Osmond, whom Meriah becomes enthralled listening to. But the pull of kinship and complexity of family becomes the rhythms that stay with her in the end. Sitting with her mother, her fathers old jazz albums on the record player, Meriah listens to the in and out of her mamas breath as it danced through her daddys music and did not even think of leaving (18). The Awakening, however, presents a character devoted to family and kinship, Autumn Marie Hicks, who has an epiphany of another sort. Autumn Marie would spend every late Sunday afternoon sitting on a stool in her mamas kitchen, being a little girl again. But now her mama was dead. And she had grown quite tired of being everybodys something. She was Clancys wife. The kids mama, but her own nothing (20). Where Meriah sacrifices her sense of self for family, Autumn Marie is literally baptized into her own selfhood, after determining no longer to be everybodys everything. In Hushed, Naoma, whose voice is muted by a disapproving family, finds connection and sexual expression with Clifton, a literal mute. Their relationship is founded on secret meetings and mutual pleasure in the forest, a relationship which Naomas family does not sanction: Mama says she can see the whore coming out in Naoma (23)a very different family reaction from Womens Secrets where there is an understanding for such longing in young Black girls. On the other hand, Black women, like Fannie (Mr), sacrifice their lives and their family to care for White familieswhile Black women, like Joan, feel betrayed by other Black women seduced by the pleasure they find from philandering husbands, as in the story Need. The brilliance in this latter story is the tension found not only in the confrontation between wife Joan and lover Florine, but in the juxtaposition of the chatty, civilized friendliness of the waiter serving them as they have their life-altering confrontation and their lunch at Glorias Cafe. Watching these women is understanding that no aspect of their lives is at all plain and simple (Blackberries, Blackberries 4). If the lives of women are central in Blackberries, Blackberries, the men who love them are no less important and always connected. Wilkinsons penetrating characterizations are relentless as she focuses on both sexes. Bruce, or Butch as he is affectionately called in Girl Talk, is the brother, son, and grandson of a bevy of females in a story, which despite its title, is wonderfully, ironically, and happily narrated by Butch. Butch is one of Wilkinsons enlightened male characters who listens to and enjoys the girl talk around him, accepting the wisdom of it. Feeling a tug on his sleeve one afternoon as he shoots the breeze and plays ball with his buddies, he turns his attention to his little sister Hattie Lee, who wants him to walk her home. As he waves good-bye to his boys, he thinks they ought to visit their mamas kitchens more often. Then theyd know about these things (33). And these things are the substance of the stories in Blackberries, Blackberries. However, for every one of the Butches or Ashers (Tipping the Scales) in the community, there were a plethora of Chocolate Divines, such as Leon Slade, a handsome, debonair ladies man, whose manta is he is no settling man (38). Hooking up with the vibrant June is only a bleep in his radar, searching, as he is, to pleasure the ladies. The core of the ladies in Blackberries, Blackberries, though, are women like the speaker in Waiting on the Reaper, women who live their lives with grit and dignity, who bear lifes sadness and tend to their families, who are respected by both Black and White folks equally, and who belie the label Mule which Zora Neal Hurston wrote about and old man Wesley, the licentious White farmer, is happy to prey upon if he can (Mules). The most inspiring of these beautiful Black women, who never show themselves as mules, is Oline in Deviled Eggs. Oline and Emmitt T. are raising Addie Bea, working their farm, and getting on with most everyone equally, even the White women whose houses Oline cleans. When summers come, Addie Bea must accompany her mother to the White ladies homes. Miss Lula, a particular irritation for Addie Bea, calls her a little nigra girl and expects her to sit and play silently as her mother works. When lunchtime comes, Miss Lula says she will share a meal with Addie Bea so that Oline will not have to stop and can finish her work. As Miss Lula woofs down an aromatic steak, new potatoes, and green beans for herself, she puts before Addie Bea cold, soft-boiled eggs, as tasteless and bland as Miss Lulas lack of hospitality and understanding of the lives of women like Oline who work for her. Addie Bea politely takes the hard-to-swallow eggs and stifles her irritation at listening to her mother yes mam and no mam her employer. When Emmitt T. drops by to drive them back to the farm and asks, What we gonna have for supper tonight? Oline, not unaware of the thoughtless, racist insult to her daughter, tells Addie Bea and Emmitt T. that shell have a fine supper for them, accompanied by a big mess of deviled eggs (106)as spicy and tasty as Miss Lulus soft-boiled eggs are bland and tasteless, though the thought of any kind of eggs doesnt sit so well with Addie Bea. Wilkinsons introduction to Water Street, Welcome to Water Street, is an explicit invitation to the reader to join each narrative as an engaged listener to the first person point of view stories in this second group of interrelated tales or what she calls a story cycle (Vaswani 6). Of her Water Street characters, she says: We are almost Southern but not northern at all. . . . We are not quite country. Not city at all (1-2). Inspired by her summers with cousins and relatives in Stanford, Kentucky, Wilkinson writes: In the summer you will see our cinnamon sons, our dusty daughters . . . with our sweet iced tea glasses turned up and our bellies full of saucy baby-back ribs, collards or kale fresh from our gardens, roasted corn on the cob or homemade potato salad. Well even share some if you like. We are that kind of people (1). Speaking with Neela Vaswani about the structure of Water Street, Wilkinson notes that the book could easily have been sold as a straight-up novel and that it follows the tradition of Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio or Elizabeth Strouts Olive Kitteridge. She says that after she began to write the stories and saw their interconnection, she became enthralled with the idea of how each story would rely on the other to say something larger (8). Wilkinson closes her introduction and invitation to the reader, saying, On Water Street, every person has at least two stories to tell. One story that the light of day shines on; the other that lives only in the pitch black of night, the kind of story carried beneath the breastbone, near the heart, for safekeeping (3). Marianne Worthington, writing in the Kentucky UP edition afterword, sees another important dynamic to the volume: Water Street is a book of stories that is latched together not only by community and family and geography but also by narrative impulse (Afterword 176). And it is that impulse, tethered to the power of storytelling, that gives the book its own unique power. The very first story in the book, My Girl Mona, is a tour de force in storytelling, as the stream-of-consciousness narrative unfolds for the reader. Wilkinson has two stories working simultaneously, one of Yolandas talking to her therapist about her best friend Mona as she tries to resolve her panic attacks and the other of Yolandas talking to Mona as she relates her conversation with the therapist. The two narratives intertwine and go back and forth in Yolandas mind and in the readers. Yolanda repeats to the doctor a kind of refrain for the story, You know what Im saying? (7) and You know what I mean? (8), a refrain for our lives where nothing is crystal clear as we attempt to makes sense of reality, appearance, and the daily happenings that impact our liveswith the betrayals, the secrets, the hurts emanating from the racial divide and complexity of our daily existence. Yolanda bounces from past to present, from one loved one to another, trying to find some clarity, some explanation for the pain she feels and the betrayal she has suffered; and as the doctor assures her of the progress she is making, the control she is gaining, she, and we, know that she can do little more than wait with hope for what comes next (16). Piece by piece, the mosaic of Water Street inhabitants lives unfold, giving us glimpses into their world and our own. Junior, whom Yolanda marries, tries to make sense of the racial dynamics of Stanford and how it has impacted his life. In Water Street, 1979, we learn that he has become a teacher and that racism continues to follow and perplex him, as much as when as a teen he tries to fathom why his mother would befriend Lois Carter, married to a Black man and the only White person to narrate in the book. His teen assertion to his mama that Black folks need to stick together! (20), belies the crush he has on Julie MacIntosh, his affair later in life with a White woman Bonnie, and the hurt suffered by Yolanda when he tells her. While Stanford is still strictly segregated, it is his own father who orchestrates the attempt to save the MacIntoshs valuables when the town floods. Seeing the family photographs spread out in his fathers garage where the MacIntoshes have stored their belongings, Junior ponders how like his own family this White family is. These racial connections, taboos, secrets, and regrets run throughout the book, culminating in the two remarkable stories: one by Lois Carter, Sixteen Confessions of Lois Carter, where Lois confesses her perplexity and the minefields of living between the two races; and Respite, her Black mother-in-law Pearlines story as she rests with son and daughter-in-law after a stay in the hospital for high blood pressure. Both stories are filled with profound and raw glimpses into the close-up living quarters of White and Black people. While Lois Carter loves her family and sees as much of herself in her grandchildren as she does of her husband Roscoe, she says at the end of her sixteen confessions, I have spent what seems like a lifetime holding my tongue (133). On the other hand, her mother-in-law Pearline has done the same while disdaining the health habits, as well as cultural and culinary perplexities of her White daughter-in-laws household and sticking adamantly to her own ways. Wilkinsons critique of patriarchy is one of the most interesting aspects of Water Streeta Patriarchy that shapes the actions and lives of both men and women. The pent-up and repressed sexuality of Reverend Townsend (An Ordinary Man) is juxtaposed against the supra-masculine personas of men like Mouse (Between Men) and his father. The masculine mystique that sends Mouses daddy Gene to a bootlegger and to the beds of women other than his wife Maxine, also drives Mouse: Mama begged me . . . not be like my father but I think Im his twin. Its hard to know for sure. Sometimes I think Im just like him (Between Men 72). As mothers are want to do with their treasured sons, Maxine puts so much of herself into her only son Mouse that Gene cannot help but feel jealous. The family mantra, Spoil their sons and raise their daughters fits too explicitly (Spoiled 107), and just when she and Gene might turn to each other as Mouse approaches manhood, Gene takes to the streets with his habits, and Maxine is left knowing full well that despite her love, sons do not return that investment of care and sadly she has no daughters. Yolandas brother Kee Kee has similar regrets on his wedding day concerning the macho code, thinking only of the child that is his somewhere and the girl Ina he had once loved, both now gone (The Girl of My Dreams). Tony and Candy overhear their parents arguing and learn that one of them is not their fathers child (The Fight). Figuring out who that father is becomes their obsession. And free-spirited Mona, who tries to adopt the macho code for herself and breaks the heart of her best friend Yolanda as she dallies with her boyfriend Junior and seduces her brother Kee Kee, finds her dalliances as hollow and as cold as a gynecological examination (Man Crazy 157-58)with both sex and medicine controlled by a Patriarchy that sees no benefits of gender equality and looks at women as objects, as other, as little more than housekeepers and sex partners . . . and always the sole care-givers of both the very old and young. For all of the intrigues and secrets that lurk behind the closed doors on Water Street, it is the disparity between the ideal and the reality that hurts the most. When Leona finally meets her father Leonard Eldridge after a young lifetime of wondering who he is, the reality of the well-to-do, middle aged man, who welcomes her into his family for a summer holiday, only serves to show her the reality of who she actually is and the disparity between herself and her half-siblings. When she returns home to Water Street after a visit she cuts short, she refuses to talk to him: I wanted my real father back, she says, the one I had gotten used to not knowing (Before I Met My Father 174). Leona will trade the hurtful reality she finds for the ideal that she had conjuredand waiting in the wings is the lure of love, as she follows in her mothers footsteps likely to bring to the community another unwanted child. Her father was lost to her forever, and she would never be able to stretch [her] fingers long enough or far enough to pull him back (174). The mosaic of stories that became The Birds of Opulence, winner of the 2016 Ernest Gaines Fellowship for Literary Excellence and the 2016 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Literature, continues to follow many of these same families portrayed in Water Street, but in this volume the Goodes, Browns, and Clarks have moved to a place of prominence in what is essentially a bildungsroman or coming of age story. Likewise, the setting has become the imaginary Black town of Opulence, and the theme of madness or mental anguish anchors most of the stories. Opulence, we are told in The Homeplace chapter, was founded in 1878 by a freed slave from Virginia, Old Man Hezekiah, who paid $156.00 dollars an acre for the land; and despite the negative name christened by ignorant White people for the Black township, Hezekiah insists on calling his town Opulence and makes a twenty-foot sign in defiance of the racist slang. When asked about the theme of madness in The Birds of Opulence, Wilkinson responded in an interview: Ive been talking about the subject of mental illness my entire writing life. My mother was schizophrenic . . . . I remember my grandmother being afraid of her especially when it came to protecting me, but I remember thinking How do we know that she isnt the most brilliant of us all? What if she simply sees things that we do not see? (Vaswani 9). Wilkinson goes on in the interview to say, Im actually haunted by the varieties of ways there are to be human in this world; and the varieties of ways in which there are to live, to think (Vaswani 9). The theme of madness also fits poignantly with the idea of being an outsider, and this idea allows Wilkinson to give one us of her most interesting characters, Joe Brown, husband of the mad Lucy and the character who has the last word in the story. I have an obsession with the notion of the outsider, Wilkinson has said, largely because she has always felt herself to be an outsidergeographically, racially and even psychologically and Ive always treasured my otherness (Vaswani 10). She says this about Joe Brown: Joe as a character, as a symbol does transcend the rural tropes and I think for me he represents how love can transcend blood, geography, everything. Joes ability to let go of himself so purely, so wholly so that he can belong is a remarkable characteristic. Wilkinson notes that he lets go of judgment of any urge to make people around him into something or someone else (Vaswani 10). And this quality is the true power of belonging (10). In early drafts of the book, Wilkinson has said that Joes presence was more marginalized; then one day I just saw him in all his vibrancy and allowed him to step forward and the book shifted in some amazing ways . . . how powerful it was to see him give up his power as an outsider to really blend in and belong [in this world of women] (10). As one of the caretakers in The Birds of Opulence, Joe is both tender and loving. He stands as testimony to Black resiliency and also to Wilkinsons stand against all the traps of Patriarchy with its false norms and expectations. Wilkinson calls herself a pretty radical feminist with radical thinking and beliefs, and her writing has tried to reveal how Patriarchy hinders enlightenment or consciousness in rural black communities. Joe was a character that stepped forth and presented himself to me in these very vivid ways . . . [in] the ways that he lives in this world as a man (Vaswani 11). Wilkinson adds, Coming to Opulence saved him. It softened him, and the character of Joe Brown has allowed Wilkinson to focus on natures capacity to heal black people (11). If Joe, like Meriah in Blackberries, Blackberries, is a model for the quintessential caretaker, Wilkinson points out that there is a fundamental difference in their sacrifice: Joe has a choice (Vaswani 11). He is a man living in a household of women, run by women, dominated by women, but he steps forward, even if he doesnt have to by the norms of society, to care for Lucy (a character and a name that has become synonymous with the archetypal mad but inspiring Romantic muse, with its double etymology of illumination or enlightenment as well as lunacy). Putting Joe at the center of the novel was strategic as well as inspired, since we are allboth men and womenequally responsible for our brothers and sisters. If ever there were a book as organically structured and as exquisitely narrated as The Birds of Opulence, it would be hard to find. The title makes clear this is a story primarily about the women, in particular the four Goode/Brown women: Mama Minnie Mae, Granny Tookie, Lucy, and Yolanda. They are the birds of Opulence, along with others. Thus this symbol is large, multifaceted, rich and as varied as the colorful characters that inspire it. In its simplest symbolic meaning, these are women off the beaten track, odd, unusual or likely to raise an eyebrow or some ire. They are also the treasured, wise, and sometimes magical women of Opulence, the beautiful women singing in the church choir with their colorful hats, dressed to the nines. However, the symbol can be a harbinger of death, as we see in the chapter The Crow in the House that foreshadows Tookies death. Their stories are told, by and large, in stream-of-consciousness style, with no part more brilliantly rendered than the opening of the novel, as Yolanda narrates, in part from the womb, her own birth: I was there, quiet as a bird, curled like a question mark, waiting. Mama Minnie thumped Mamas belly as if it were a melon, then pushed gently, pressure I could feel from inside. Shes a good size, Mama Minnie said to all her girls: Mama, Granny Tookie, and even me (Birds 4). At the end of the day, when Yolanda is born out in the field where the women have gone to work, and Granny Tookie is hauling them back home in the Plymouth, there is the sound of Old Man Luciens dog back on the scent of the possum she has been chasing throughout the day; and despite all the good omens for this community of women, there are secrets and a sometimes sinister world beyond home that reveals a womans life is never plain and simple (Blackberries Blackberries 4). To a great degree, the book is the story of Yolanda Brown and Mona Clarks coming of age, and the dangers that await them that constitute the complexity of country womens, or for that matter, all womens lives. Certainly, the girls lives have not been idealicYolandas mothers postpartum depression and ensuing mental illness has cast a shadow over her young life, and Monas rebelliousness and her own Mamas misery make their world tenuous and tense; but for most part, home is safe, and at least for Yolanda and her big brother Kee Kee, the patience of Joe Brown and the watchfulness of Tookie and Mama Minnie Mae lighten the burdens of growing up. It is when the girls are twelve, on the cusp of bodies changing from little girls to women, that a more sinister world intrudes, and for Mona, there is a gleam of light and a way to perceived power in the process. On an October day, they stray onto the Simpson property, and their White classmate Obie Simpson catches them. Obie is a coarse, rail of a boy whom they know vaguely from school. The White boy pins down Mona and attempts to rape her, and as the awkward adolescent fumbles at Monas and his own clothing, for a split second Mona sees a weakness rising in Obies face, a slight vulnerable instant [where] . . . she recognizes something iniquitous. She becomes curious about this new thing, this certain kind of weakness she has not known that men and boys have until now (70-71). Mona slips out of Obies awkward grasp and she and Yolanda run away, but Mona doesnt forget the look on his face, that weakness in the tiny amber circle of his green eye. He almost got me, she whispers to Yolanda when the two recycle the story (71). Mona has found a path to power that will drive her life and her sexuality and put a wedge between her and her childhood friend . . . and become the seed for Yolandas insecurities and hurt. With the exception of Joe Brown, the men of OpulenceObie Simpson, Marshall Ross, Bruce Harrison, Mouse, and Kee Kee as wellare creatures molded by Patriarchal expectations of macho and thoughtless manliness. Though Kee Kee and Bruce Harrison are haunted by their indiscretions that impact the lives of the children they spawn and the women they deceive or disappoint, the damage they cause is palpable. Perhaps none is so poignant as Tookies experience as a 13-year-old girl seduced by Bruce who lures her into a field and tells her it wont hurt and nothing will happen, both of which she discovers are lies. Good, upstanding woman in Opulence that she is, Mama Minnie is furious, and she beats Tookie with a fury: She kept beating and beating, trying to beat Tookie back into good . . . Tookie a mound of whipped flesh with big old sad eyes (84). Her brothers Butter and June try to stop Mama Minnie. Becoming pregnant, Tookie is only thirteen and ignorant of what has happened to her body. When her water breaks while she is in the bathroom, Mama Minnie leaves her there in a heap of suffering for nearly nine hours before the baby came, then Minnie Mae tying the cord and cleaning up the baby herself [put Lucy] in Tookies thirteen-year-old arms. It was only then that her mother touched her forehead and pushed back her hair. . . . Tookie basked in the solace of her mothers hand (134). Many years later, Tookie asks Mama Minnie whyd you beat me like that? Minnie Mae has no real answer to Tookies why, but only says, Whats done is gone (132). But of course, whats done is never completely gone, and Tookies life and perhaps Lucys as well and even Yolanda are affected by the beating in some degree. After Lucys suicide and after all three women are gone, Joe Brown decides to visit the homeplace, now sold by Minnie Maes sons. Joe had bent his will and his ways to the ways of these women, he had loved and protected them, he had felt himself a Goode more than Mama Minnie Maes own boys, who had long left the farm for the city and had little interest in the land that their mother and father had worked and made to flourish. Joe felt there was nothing he couldnt fix but he was helpless against those things that twisted Lucys mind (191). His life now would be bland and circumscribed with these beautiful birds of Opulence gone. Joe drives out to the field where Lucy was born, now in the hands of land developers. He plants roses for the women and is surprised when workers tell him to get off the property he had worked so many years. He watches for a bit as a giant caterpillar dozer digs up the field to put in a pond. Later at Sam Eatons store, a farmer, Turner, comes in to share the story of them men digging up Miss Minnies place for a pond and left their bulldozer parked there where there was an underground spring, only to find when they returned the following Monday after a rain, the earth had swallowed the machine and all they could see is the tip top of the seat of that dozer (198). As Turner slaps his thigh and the others roar with laughter, someone says, Miss Minnies people done comeback and gave them folks a piece of their minds (198). Joe Brown laughs the loudest and deep down he will know it to be true. Miss Minnie and Tookie and even his sweet Lucy, all them women who held up the world were out there that day working that dozer (198). What is remarkable about these stories of country living and Affrilachian folks is how free from censure they are, how many different first person points of view they are told from, and how everyone has a chance to speak his piece or have her say. While the characters flit from their past memories to present time, the storytelling is richly informed from an oral tradition that recalls the front porch or the kitchen table, or perhaps a roaring fire in a castle hall. These stories may come from the imagination of Crystal Wilkinson, but they have the aura of truth and power of ones own family legends, stories about region and race that transcend region or race. They are poignant, full, and portray a time and place that we can all recognize, beyond ethnic or cultural differences. Ultimately, these are stories about what it means to be human. Works Cited Brewer, Ashley, etal. Grooves in the Record: An Interview with Crystal Wilkinson. Appalachian Journal 39 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011): 108-125. House, Silas. Interview: Crystal Wilkinson. Appalachian Heritage 44 (Spring 2016): 57-69. National Sexual Violence Resources Center. Online. Vaswani, Neela. An Interviewee with Crystal Wilkinson. KWELI. Online. Wilkinson, Crystal. On Being Country: One Affrilachian Womans Return Home. Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Lexington: UK Press, 1999. 184-86. _______________. The Birds of Opulence. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2016. _______________. Blackberries, Blackberries. NY: Amazon Encore, 2000. _______________. Dig If You Will the Picture. Oxford American 95 (Winter 2016). Online. _______________. Shit, Were All Consequences of Something. Oxford American 100 (Spring 2018). Online. _______________. Terrain. Appalachian Heritage 46 (Fall 2018): 14. _______________. Poetry of Crystal Wilkinson. AHWIR: In Her Own Words Link. Online. _______________. Strange Fruit Your Imagination Bears. Walk till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations o on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. Eds. Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray. Athens: Ohio UP, 2015. 135-42. _______________. Water Street. NY: Amazon Encore, 2002. Worthington, Marianne. Afterword. Water Street. Lexington: Kentucky UP, 2002. 175-81.      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Sylvia ShurbuttSylvia ShurbuttOh+'00@  ( 4 @LT\dlSylvia ShurbuttNormalSylvia Shurbutt2Microsoft Office Word@@^@^`% G>VT$m M  !1.@"Calibri---  2 0 1  2 0    0''  2 `0    0''@Times New Roman--- V2 w20 Everybodys Street and Being Black in Appalachia:              #2 w0    I2 )0 The Prose and Poetry of Crystal Wilkinson            2 t0   @Times New Roman--- 2 @u0 By Dr. Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt    :2 40    2 0    (2 0 ϳԹUniversity  U2 ;10 s Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities      2 l0     2 0    2 `f0 If you consider what poet and fiction writer Crystal Wilkinson has said is most important to her as a        %2 (`0 writer and artist   2 (0   2 (0 the resiliency  2 (%0   22 (-0 of Black people in America   /2 (0 , the power of personal   %2 (y0 stories, radical   (2 A`0 feminism, the ways     2 A0 of  2 A0 women    2 A0   2 A 0 and how they   2 Ar0   2 Ax 0 sometimes    2 A0   L2 A+0 demean and hurt each other (Vaswani 23),      22 [`0 mental illness, the body,  @2 [#0 rites of passage, and experimental   52 [0 narrative structure, which s  (2 [m0 he calls the last   2 t` 0 frontier in  2 t 0 storytelling  2 t0 ,  2 t0   2 t 0 eclipsing  2 t$0    2 t*0 p 2 t10 lot  2 t?0  &2 tN0 then you will know    2 t0   2 t 0 a writer of   2 t0 rare  2 t.0 talent  #2 tT0 and imagination   2 t0 who   2 ` 0 will invad  12 0 e your thoughts and whisk   2 ?0   2 F 0 you away   2 0 to  >2 "0 the realms of your own imagination     2 x0    2 0 as you travel   2 `0 through  2 0   2 0 her  2 0   "2 0 fictional world   2 0 .  2 0   ^2  70 Wilkinson is a complex and fascinating artist, profound   2 S0   ,2 X0 in her thinking, deep   #2 `0 in her feeling,  2  0 a writer   %2 0 who is able to te  >2 N"0 ll the stories of her people while   2 0   ;2  0 at the same time transcend race     (2 `0 and region to tell  "2 0 all our stories 2 0 .  2 / 0 She is a   2 e0  2 k0 country  2 0   2 0   X2 30 person who longed to leave the country, she is the    22 `0 daughter of a mother who s   O2 -0 truggled with mental illness who has pondered     2 0   2 0 whether  .2 N0 perhaps insanity might    42 `0 be the sanest state of mind   2 0   )2 0 or the most creative  2 0 ,  2 0 and  X2 30 she honors and portrays the older country ways and    2 %` 0 traditions  2 %0   :2 %0 even as she calls for a radical  2 %V0   2 %\0 re  2 %h0 - 52 %m0 visioning of community and g  (2 %0 ender relationships 2 %0 . She  2 %0   2 %0 is a   2 >` 0 poet who   2 > 0 in some sense   2 >0   h2 >>0 traded poetic craft for fiction, even as she imbues each line   2 >{ 0 of fiction  2 >0 with   |2 X`K0 exquisite poetry. Crystal Wilkinson is an uncommon person and writer, who      /2 X90 brings us her stories at  2 X0   2 X0 a   ,2 q`0 slow, methodical, and    2 qV0 artful pace and with a patient look, like the last oozings hour by hour, as Keats     h2 `>0 would write of the cider press in autumn (To Autumn lines 20        2 0 - 2 0 21).   2 0   @Times New Roman--- )2 `0 A Place to Call Home       2 0   ---  2 `0  0 J2 *0 Born in Hamilton, Ohio, Wilkinson grew up      22 0 on a mountain farm in the    2 K0 hill  2 a0 countr 2  0 y of eastern  @Times New Roman---------  2 `0 Kentucky. She   2 0   2  0 writes in --- V2 20 Back Talk from Appalachia, Confronting Stereotypes    ---  2 I0   2 M 0 about being  2 0    2 0  2 0 country 2 0 :   2 ` 0 Creeks, one    2 0 - 2 T0 room churches, outhouses, gravel roads, old men whittling at Hills Grocery down in         P2 &`.0 Needmore, daisies, Big Boy tomatoes, and butte      b2 &:0 rcups. It was all mine. It is the makeup of my spirit.       2 ?`b0 Country is as much a part of me as my full lips, my wide hips, my dreadlocks, my high cheekbones          2 X`0 (186).  42 X0 In 1962, at six weeks old,   2 X/ 0 Crystal was   2 X{0 taken  2 X0 to  2 X0   2 X0 live on  2 X0   #2 X0 her grandparents  2 X@0   2 XE0   2 XJ0 64  2 XX0 - "2 X]0 acre farm in In  2 X0 dian   "2 q`0 Creek, Kentucky    2 q0 . 2 q0   2 qP0 By the time she was a year old, her mother had experienced her second breakdown       2 q0    2 `M0 (her first was two years before Crystal was born), and she left Crystal with        &2 00 her grandparents,  2  0 Christine   2 ` 0 and Silas  2 0    2 0 Enoch Nuckie    2 0   2  0 Wilkinson  2 90 ,  2 <0   %2 A0 for treatment in   2  0 Eastern State   2 0   2 0 Mental  82 #0 Hospital (Strange Fruit Your   "System"'X--  00//..L՜.+,0` hp  )ϳԹUniversity L Vaswani, Neela. An Interviewee with Crystal Wilkinson. KWELI. Online. 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