Crystal Wilkinson
Flame - Fall 2007

Crystal Wilkinson’s short stories have been described as “story poems.” She is the author of two books, Blackberries, Blackberries (2000) and Water Street (2002), both published by Toby Press. Water Street was a long-list finalist for the prestigious Orange Prize and short-listed for a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award in fiction. Blackberries, Blackberries was named Best Debut Fiction by Today’s Librarian magazine. She has been published in the anthologies Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region (University of Kentucky Press, 1999); Gifts from Our Grandmothers (Crown Publishers, 2000); and Gumbo: Stories by Black Writers (Doubleday, Harlem Moon Press, 2002). Her work has also appeared in various literary journals, including Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, Southern Exposure, The Briar Cliff Review, LIT, Calyx, African Voices and the Indiana Review. She is a faculty member in Spalding University’s low-residency MFA writing program and is currently serving as visiting professor and writer in residence for Morehead State University. Wilkinson was the 2002 recipient of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature and is a member of a Lexington-based writing collective, The Affrilachian Poets.
 

Interview by Mwabi Murdock

             I met Crystal years ago at a gathering.  I was a new mother trying to find balance between family life and my creativity.  I was immediately drawn to Crystal not because of her big personality but her quiet power.  She handed me a postcard and said she had a book coming out.  Little did I know that that book was Blackberries, Blackberries an amazing collection of short stories about the South.  A second book of short stories called Water Street followed.  Crystal is currently putting finishing touches on her first novel Opulence and an anthology tentatively titled Down Home: Fiction from the New Black South.  We are good friends now and have seen each other through the birth of another son and watching our children grow and Crystal has remained as humble as she was that day years ago when we first met.  I recently met up with Crystal and we caught up. 

How did the decision to write short stories come about?

My love for the short story comes from the tradition of oral story telling. My grandparents always told me stories and also my love for poetry. I love all the short forms of literature and that is what I enjoy writing most.

Looking back, do you think you could have written a novel first or did you always know that you would release collections of short stories before the novel?

Actually it’s sort of the opposite. I never, ever, ever, ever, intended to write novels. I always thought I’d be a short story writer. I didn’t know how that worked in regard to publishing but I have never wanted to be anything other than a writer of short stories and poetry.

Writing about the South is obviously very important to you and is seen throughout your work. What is it about the South that appeals so much to you?

I guess if a writer writes what she knows, there are three things I’ve always been: fat, black and country (lol). I am simply drawn to the stories of Southern folk because I am one. I can certainly appreciate other landscapes but my imagination will always live in a rural area or a small town. Every time I sit down to write those characters and landscapes persist.

What message about the South is lacking in your opinion?

There is this notion that all black folks live in an urban south and I guess I sort of see it as my duty to keep representing the rural black folk. There are still plenty of rural folk out there you know.

Your two short story collections Blackberries, Blackberries (2000) and Water Street (2002) were well received. What was your experience after the release of the books?

I always thought that what it meant to be a writer was simply putting the words out there into the air and the book taking a life of its own. I didn’t realize until they were published that I would have to go along with them (smile). As a consummate shy, hermit woman, it has been really hard for me to put myself out there as far as promotion. It is easy for me to promote the work of others. I could support my boyfriend, Ron Davis, all day long. He’s a visual artist and a poet. And it’s nothing for me to say to someone else how great Ron would be for their program, their exhibit, their reading, etc. But it is still hard as hell for me to say positive things about my own work and to try and promote it. But oddly enough both books did fairly well on their own with or without my help. Which is how I think it should be. I know so many people who are so very great at promoting themselves but their actual writing is not equal to the buzz that surrounds them.

How has your life as author been since then?

Quiet really. I need to get the next book finished. I do lots and lots of speaking engagements but I am very excited about the third book and continue to try and finish it.

Speaking of the new book, you are working on your first novel Opulence that expands on a story (My Girl Mona) featured in Water Street. Why that particular story?

Well those women, Mona and Yolanda, have continued to haunt me. When I sat down to write the novel, it wasn’t my original intent to write about them again. But I realized that the characters that I was writing about was indeed these characters again. My first response was “Heifers, go on!” lol but then I realized that the story of these sisters and their friendship is often the story of a lot of us sisters. It’s about state of sistafriends and about how the ways in which we are brought up by society, our connect or disconnect from family and ultimately ancestral memory. I believe that much of who we become is out of our hands, not simply because of genetics but because of what is ingrained in us, what is destined for us via ancestral memory.

Was it “My Girl, Mona” a reader favorite?

Well a lot of people want to talk to me about that story but most don’t quite understand it. Some people think Yolanda has a split personality and that she is really Mona. She’s not really but she is like Yolanda’s right arm because they’ve been friends practically since birth. And it is a story that won an award (the Indiana Review’s Fiction Prize—long before I taught there) so I guess people are interested. I think the Indiana Review has me reading it on podcast up on their website.
[click here to listen]

Your writing easily succeeds at making the reader feel what the characters are feeling. Was that your intention or just a wonderful bonus?

Well thank you for saying that. I take that as a compliment, of course. You’ve always supported my work Mwabi and I thank you for that. To me my characters are real people so if I don’t make the reader feel what they are feeling then I haven’t done my job. I admire Gayl Jones so much and I guess she is the writer that I most attempt to emulate in that regard. She has always had the ability to make a reader feel as if they are inside the character, sometimes uncomfortably so but if a reader doesn’t feel some emotional attachment to the pulsing heart of the story and its characters then the writer hasn’t done her job.

Is it more important to you to be known as a female author or just an author? Does it matter?

Hmmm. Well I was on a panel with a rather famous southern white writer once who asked me how it feels to be considered a black writer. I know what he meant because he had been talking about his experience in the context of being a southern writer but he didn’t seem to realize that it wasn’t the same. Of course I said something rather smart alleck like “Well I would look awful strange going around saying I was a white male Swede writer wouldn’t I?” But to answer your question, it is equally important to me to be woman, black and rural. They are synonymous to who I am. I am all these things.

You are also a poet. Are there any plans to release a collection of poetry?  

I have a collection of poems—The Water Witch—which are to be published.

What is it about writing and being an author that just does ‘it’ for you?

Well, its sort of cliché but if I could have been anything other than a writer perhaps I would have been...This is my calling. When I’m writing at my best it’s akin to being in love. All is right with the world. I am living in a state of bliss. There is nothing like it except really being in love. The idea of being an ‘author’ is a different thing altogether, though. I enjoy that people read my books but I’m not hung up on celebrity in any way and that will never be something that turns me on.

Is there anything about you and your craft that you want readers to know that they might not already know?

Just look out for my next book. It’s coming eventually. I promise.

What is next for the wonderful Crystal Wilkinson?

Well my partner, Ron, and I are looking forward to being a part of a sort of arts renaissance in Kentucky. We are going to open up our home for art salons and discussions and readings and the like. And of course there is the next book, Opulence, and then the next and the next. I’m working on two novels simultaneously and I have an anthology coming out soon as well as the collection of poetry. It’s all hard work—trying to maintain being a professor, a supportive, loving partner, mothering, grandmothering—whew—but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you for doing this Mwabi. And thanks to Amanda for this fabulous journal.  

Flood

1962

The smell of squash is still with her. Five days after she has given birth and two hours after the storm slows to a good downpour, Lucy Goode Brown wakes to rain beating against the windowpane. She remembers the fuzzy green stems, the five-fingered leaves reaching out, but mostly she holds in her mind the yellow bodies curved, long-necked and graceful, their fullness heavy on the vines around her as she pushed the baby out.

Ten years later, this image will return to her again. She will be slicing squash in the kitchen and there will suddenly be clarity and even a little fear about the kind of woman she has become. She will always mourn some parts of her former self, the woman she thinks she used to be. She will only then be curving toward the kind of mother she wishes she could have been all along.

This afternoon, in her own bedroom, she is fully awake. In fact this is a new alertness, the kind she had before she was ever in a family way. She reaches down somewhat surprised that the taut mountain that had been the child’s is now wobbly and loose under her hand and back to being hers alone. She is aware of her hip bones now, the hollowness of her belly, the tightness of her engorged breasts. She rolls to Joe’s side of the bed. She misses that extra weight there in the front of her that kept her oddly off balance for all these months. Now, she feels a void underneath her navel, a riverbed drained. This burden of emptiness has descended upon her. This feeling, this particular sort of worthlessness, is being felt for the last time. Though she doesn’t know it at this moment, there will be no more children.

She stands, feels a gurgling between her legs and smells the rusty tang of her own blood. She hears our family moving about the house, the rain’s persistent tap-tapping. Her body is stiff, a little weakened. She shuffles across the room like a woman twice her age. She fully opens the window, which is already cracked a few inches and leans into the sill. A muddy pool of water forms at the end of the walk, growing wide, like a tiny brown pond. And even Lucy Goode Brown, a woman who will later consider herself too busy for daydreaming, is taken by the outdoors until the clamor of her own house grows as faint as secrets whispered into a cupped ear.

The neighbors are out on their porches, fanning themselves with cardboard flaps and newspaper. With the rain has come gnats and mosquitoes. The sound of skin slaps echoes two houses away. But they will all celebrate the gardens, their backyard tomatoes, and the second round of kale greens now holding water in their curly leaves. The zenias and begonias will perk up bright in pinks and reds and on up the road, across Mission Bridge, toward Diamond, the old farmers in the country are nodding with the quiet pleasure that a good rain brings. They have crossed their black arms; their chests are swollen with pride; their snowy heads held up high beneath the shelter of barns and porches. Some will stand fully in the rain and let it take them. The crops will green up again. In Diamond, the garden is glistening wet, the remaining squash turning their necks toward the sun.

Below Lucy’s window, a girl and a boy chase each other around in a circle up and down the road. The girl’s hair has gone home already, bushing out around her plaits. Lucy can’t quite make out whose child she is, one of the Jenkins girls, maybe. A woman with a coat over her head trudges down the hill. Lucy can’t see her face. It could be me, she thinks.  She imagines herself with Grandma Tookie’s beige raincoat over her head, unnoticed, walking up the hill in the downpour, across Mission Bridge away from town. An invisible Goode woman, imagine that. Her eyes tear up, spill out like thimble-sized oceans.

She hears the ruckus of evening again on the other side of her bedroom door—the end of supper, voices muted, chairs being scooted out.  Behind that door are clothes to wash, a white sudsy sink of dishes, children to feed, a husband to love, a mother to please, a grandmother to praise, but in these moments Lucy relishes being alone, though she recalls her time beneath the squash vines as a sort of loneliness. Her arms are damp from the open window. It’s nice and quiet and cool and she imagines herself in the water, splashing around like a muddy child, free, free. She takes it all in, then makes her way to the bed and slips back underneath the sheets.

Joe’s dresser drawer is cock-eyed, a few of his socks bunch up at the edge of the wood and hang over. A necktie, the red one with a blue zigzag like a lightning bolt, reflects itself in the metallic pool of the looking glass. There is a pile of work clothes is on the floor and Joe’s pajamas are thrown over the back of the chair in the corner. Lucy breathes in the moist air that settles around her, looks around at the mess and shakes her head.

She will scold Joe later when he is beside her in the bed. “Joe,” she’ll say. “Daddy,” she’ll say then stop and smile ...”Baby,” she’ll begin again, “with Kiki and this new one and Dinner on the Grounds coming up... and Mama and Mom Mae getting up in age...and Daddy . . . Sugar, could you just do a little bit for yourself?” And then she’ll place her fingers together like she’s just asking for something tiny, something small, just a pinch of something. And she’ll cut her eyes just right. “Joe...Will you?.. I’ll do the rest...Ain’t I always done the rest?” She won’t know what to say really, exactly how to say it. Then Joe will get that hard look on his face like he’s preparing for a quarrel and she’ll iron it out, smooth it all out with a light kiss on his collarbone right next to his Adam’s apple. That place right there like a little hill and valley where she likes to rest her lips. Her lips won’t be dry then. They’ll be the tiniest bit wet. And then he’ll know what she means. They can’t make love yet but that one kiss right there will tide him over, smooth everything out like an iron to a sheet. From behind her she’ll scoop his rough hands around her jiggle of a waist and he’ll press his heart to her back without a word, just satisfied sighs. She imagines that’s how they’ll sleep.

But that won’t be the way it needs to be said, Joe. I won’t say, Why can’t a grown ass man pick up his own damn britches. I don’t want to be picking up after you, with one more person to take care of, pretty as she is. We need a new baby like we need one more eye or toe or mouth, Joe. But I won’t say that either. I won’t say nothing. Remember when we got married? Came up to this room and didn’t come out for a week. Had your big old eyes right here for me to look into. That scar running clean through your eyebrow like my very own beacon. You was just mine. Two legs, two arms, one silly heart. That’s what we was. She laughs. Oh how that sounds. Now you scattered out all over, your head turned in every direction. Your heart? Don’t know where your heart is. You belong to the whole damn world. And don’t get me wrong, I would wash your dirty drawers till kingdom come if you could save me from this. This...drowning. Feel like I am in Mission Creek. Just ‘bout gone. Circle me back to that old feeling again, Baby. Just once, Daddy. And don’t think I wouldn’t do anything in the world for my babies cause I would. Mama and MomMae too… The tears well up again and Lucy falls, gully-washed into her own kind of grief.

While Lucy Goode Brown sleeps toward healing, Mom Mae comes in and changes the padding between her legs and tests her forehead for fever. “Bout time to feed that baby,” Mom Mae says and shakes Lucy’s arm a little to rouse her but Lucy sleeps on, her closed eyes darting back and forth in some dream. Mom Mae wipes drool from her granddaughter’s mouth and calls Tookie in to change the pillowcases which are sour with fever sweat.

“Fever’s most gone,” Mom Mae says and wipes a streak of dark thick blood from Lucy’s thigh before covering her back up.

Tookie replaces the top sheet and quickly places it back over Lucy. “Okay for Joe to stay tonight?” She smoothes the fresh pillow and places it under her daughter’s head.

“Yeah, long as he ain’t got no man notions.”

Tookie says nothing.

Lucy begins to stir in her sleep but doesn’t wake fully.

“In my time, we put em out of a woman’s bed least six weeks.”

“Um hunh,” Tookie says but thinks a husband belongs in the bed with his wife, even in times like this. “You think she looks all right?” She squeezes both of her daughter’s feet through the sheet before she leaves.

“Got a touch of the fever’s all,” Mom Mae says, “many a woman catch a fever when they birthing.”

In a dream, Lucy climbs a ridge following a path to a pond. Her plaits are freed out around her head like black rat snakes set loose. Her palms are splayed open, held skyward as if in praise. A gust of wind ripples across the water and the mysteries it holds are more important than any one thing Lucy can think of. She quells the urge to jump in, to swim to the other side just to see if she can. She remains at dusk, then through nightfall. She sits on the water’s edge and it is churning like a river at flood time and rising. At nightfall ants are crawling up her calves and there is a snail on her knee, a green frog nestled in the crook of her arm. She tries to get them off her but more come. It is after she grows resistant to the pinching bite of the mosquitoes, after it no longer seems unusual to have the frog there, after she becomes accustomed to the slimy trail the snail leaves as it climbs her thigh, and after the dance of the lightning bugs in her hair, after that, stillness settles in her. The water continues to chop but in the darkness her own churning stops and her attention is folded inside out. The night is black as pitch and though she can feel every living thing on her body, she is somewhere else really, floating above it all, close to the moon. She has almost finally lost herself. Good, good, she thinks. Good with a little girl’s glee. A barred owl hoots. Above her is an endless blanket of stars, a world larger and more glorious than herself. And yet even with this knowing there is still a tiny pulse of trepidation throbbing in the distance. Above her the very sky is shifting from blue black to deep purple somehow, changing with the night.

Lucy wakes, not knowing how long she has slept this time or that her mother and grandmother have been in and out of the room. The sheets are stale again with her sweat. She doesn’t remember her dream, not in any exact way, but her heart races like she’s afraid of something. She shifts her weight to the side. The day is nearly gone, a fleshy orange out the window, now, even though it is still raining.

Lucy hears the baby crying behind the closed door, the squall in her ear a sweet ache. Her breasts throb, then tingle, and she can already feel the milk straining through her crusted nipples. She frees herself from the bra and the milk comes first in slow drops, then faster, running down the rise of her belly and pouring into the crevice of her navel like a flood. She tries to stop it by bunching up the top sheet against her breast but her breast shift just a little and high streams of milk squirt into the air like tiny fountains. Lucy wills her body to stop but the milk keeps flowing. She cries.

Tookie raps at the door and then pushes it open with her elbow. “Somebody’s hungry,” she says and leans in to place the baby in Lucy arms but Lucy rolls over on her side and turns her back toward her mother and the child.

“Come on,” Tookie says, “Every living thing got to eat.” She bounces the baby against her own breast.

Lucy rolls over and Tookie holds the baby out in front of her, tries to place it in Lucy’s arms again.

Lucy pushes Tookie’s hands back in a sort of reverse tug of war until the baby is back against Tookie’s chest. “She’ll learn early then won’t she?”

“Learn what, Lucy? You ain’t making no sense.” Tookie brings the baby in close to her and bounces but everything living does have to eat so the baby begins to kick and the soft, almost pretty wail, lofts up and out against the walls of the room.

“Crazy,” Tookie says to the baby, bouncing to try and appease the child. “Good thing we got bottles boiled and ready cause your mama’s crazy.” And she opens the door and slips back into the hum of sanity outside this room.

Back in the comfort of darkness, Lucy places her left hand on her breasts where streams of clear blue milk still drip down her sides and her right hand down below where nobody should be touching this soon.

Right away it is clear to Mom Mae that the fever has come back on Lucy with a vengeance but the baby still needs to be fed. “Hold her feet,” she says to Tookie and pushes her full weight atop Lucy and holds her hands, even with her trying to kick and scream.

“We got bottles,” Tookie says but takes her place at the bottom of Lucy’s bed.

“Cow’s milk for cows,” Mom Mae says.

Wrestling with her granddaughter makes Mom Mae think of all the men she’s fought in her life. Brought on fighting Macon Dixon one year during hog killing time when she was twelve, wrestling him for her own sweet spot. She’d won, though, still a virgin when she married. Brought on knocking out that white boy, Possum Briggs, that time when he’d called her a black bitch and slapped her one day when they was swimming in the creek and how scared her mama was that she’d hang for giving that old hoogie a black eye even if he did deserve it and more. Brought on plenty, but she had something more pressing before her that needed finishing. She called for Joe to come with the baby so it could eat. And it did, its face going peaceful and satisfied, even with the struggle all around it, as soon as it latched on to the nipple. But Lucy struggles till it’s one, breathing heavy like she’s in a fight for somebody’s life or running from a long ways off. But then she quiets back down when the baby has nursed and goes back to sleep.

Later up in the night when Joe crawls into the empty space beside her, he notices right away where her hands are placed and says, “Baby, you okay? Need anything?”

“Need a lot.”

“You want me to get you some ice water? That fever…”

“No.”

“Hungry?”

“Not for what you talking about.”

Joe Brown clears his throat because even in the dark he can see Lucy’s hand moving around in that place. The smell of women’s blood is filling up the room. Even under the circumstances, though he didn’t want to get an erection, his penis is hard and throbbing against his thigh and he longs to touch himself even more than he wants to touch her but he doesn’t. He just lies in the dark, listening to her breathing beside him. He hears her breath increase and subside when she’s finished.

In his memory years later at her funeral when they have closed the coffin and are carrying Lucy out of Mission Creek Baptist Church even in his grief when the glint of copper on the coffin catches the sunlight, he will suddenly remember this night, and how Lucy’s smell had taken up the entire room. And he will remember the rain pinging on the window and how they were quiet like that for a long time and how her hands were still on herself in those places, her fingers caked with blood and milk, when the sun came up and how he’d watched her sleep then, sleeping just like that with her hands finally still.