Review: Crystal Wilkinson’s Blackberries, Blackberries

I saw Crystal E Wilkinson’s collection of short stories, Blackberries, Blackberries (2011), reviewed on With Love, From Kentucky and was intrigued. I love a good collection of short fiction. And moreover, some of my favorite pieces of literature—the stories that haunt me—are short stories written by women (The Yellow Wallpaper! Story of an Hour!). Once I got Wilkinson’s book I took my time with it, savoring each of the aptly named blackberries.

If you’re looking for stories that pass the DuVernay test, look no further. Creating compelling narratives, Wilkinson portrays the interior lives of a diverse group of African American women that captures the intersections of gender, race, and rurality, yet allows each character to shine in her own unique circumstances of family and personality. Each story focuses on African American women from Kentucky’s small cities to the rural “backwoods.”

Like a wild blackberry ripening in the summer sun, Wilkinson’s prose is sumptuous and poetic, such as this opening line: “Aberdeen Copeland was bringing back yesterday from twenty years of hiding. (Humming Back Yesterday, p40). Or when Bessie says, “I used to watch a stuck hog writhing on the ground at hog-killing time, wondering what he was thinking” (The Reaper, p107). Wilkinson’s language is ripe with the histories of the women, sweet and rich with only a hint of the bitters.

Worlds open in her sentences. When Bruce, a young boy, describes another boy’s relationship with his mother, saying, “He is always with her with the grown folk (p. 32), Wilkinson paints a picture of a world where it is unusual for a young boy to be in the presence of adults visiting with one another. The reader knows that his mother is different from the other mothers, yet achingly familiar like so many of the characters in the collection. I particularly loved the story Need, in which “the other woman” meets with “the wife.” Having been through my share of relationship drama, I felt intimately connected to both of these women.

Like other Kentucky writers, Wilkinson’s work invokes a strong sense of place; these stories feel like Kentucky. What is it about Kentucky writers? bell hooks, Wendell Berry, to name my two favorites, and now, Crystal E. Wilkinson. I don’t know what’s in the water, but I look forward to reading Wilkinson’s award-winning novel, Birds of Opulence. It is the September 2018 selection for Wiley Cash’s Open Cannon book club. Crystal E. Wilkinson is a member of The Affrilachian Poets.