Crystal Wilkinson
Wilkinson holding a photograph of her grandparents, Silas and Christine Wilkinson, who owned the farm in Casey County, Kentucky, where Crystal was raised.
“I had a lot of freedom,” Crystal Wilkinson says of her childhood on her grandparents’ farm in Indian Creek, Kentucky. “There was nowhere I couldn’t go.”
The farm, in Casey County, Kentucky, had been in the family since slavery. Early in the 20th Century, about half of the thirty or so houses in Indian Creek were owned by Wilkinson’s extended family. Yet during her childhood, the community was in decline, and few Black people remained. In the late 1990s, when Wilkinson’s grandparents died, the homeplace was sold to a white farmer. It’s a story that’s often repeated in the South: African American ancestral land sold to white buyers for next to nothing.
The loss was devastating for Wilkinson. “I’m looking for home, and it doesn’t exist, except in my memory. Whenever I write about a rural place, it’s always some version of Indian Creek. It’s like having a base coat when you’re painting: it’s always the first layer.”
Indian Creek is the base coat for many of the stories in Wilkinson’s first collection, Blackberries, Blackberries, and for her award-winning novel The Birds of Opulence. “I imagine that a lot of writers enter the bucolic with some reverence and joy, but mostly it’s painful to me,” Wilkinson says. “I don’t think the white people who live there now realize that it was more than just a place to live to us. And how hard it was for black people to live there.”
Listen to Crystal Wilkinson talk about how the burden of racism fell more heavily on her grandmother than it did on her grandfather.
Wilkinson at Wild Fig Coffee and Books in Lexington, Kentucky, which she founded with her partner, the poet and artist Ronald Davis.