A Black Appalachian Treasure

FEATURED AUTHOR—CRYSTAL WILKINSON A Black Appalachian Treasure George Brosi From the time Crystal Wilkinson was six weeks old, she was raised by her grandparents, the Silas and Christine to whom her first book, Blackberries, Blackberries (2000), is dedicated. They lived in the Indian Creek community in northeast Casey County, Kentucky. Once a bustling enclave where most of the county's Black families lived, it had dwindled to only four Black households by the time "Crissy" was born in 1962, and, today, not a single Black family lives there. The community was rich in story-tellers, but Crissy remembers no stories about slavery days. It was, however, common knowledge that the Indian Creek Wilkinsons bore the same name as the descendents of the White families that had held their people as slaves, including former Kentucky Governor, Wallace Wilkinson. They also shared the same ancestor many generations before. Silas was a well-respected tobacco, corn and sorghum farmer, and Christine worked in the homes of school teachers in the Casey County seat, Liberty. When she retired in the 1990s, Christine was still receiving just $20.00 for cleaning houses three days a week. When Crystal Wilkinson has recently returned to Liberty to give readings at the Public Library, she has experienced strong mixed feelings about the compliments showered upon her grandmother, for example, for her willingness to stay extra hours and be helpful in times of need. It was those times when Crissy was most missing her primary care-giver and worried about why her grandmother wasn't home yet. Wilkinson cherishes powerful and positive memories of growing up out in the country, an "only child" about a mile from the closest playmate her age, in a home that didn't get indoor plumbing until she was in college. She loved the woods and the animals and the attention of her loving grandparents. Wilkinson recalls being so sympathetic to the farm animals that she refused to eat eggs one whole year. In the not-too-distant past, Indian Creek had been served by a one-room segregated school, and Silas and Christine, who themselves had only gone to the 3rd and 8th grades respectively, had hosted the community school teacher. There were still lots of books in the schoolhouse which had been built on their property. Silas and Christine raised seven chil- dren before taking in their granddaughter and sent them to the only high school available to them, a "colored school," located in Stanford, the county seat of adjoining Lincoln County. As adults, several of them settled in Stanford, and Crissy usually spent most of the summers living with her aunts and uncles and cousins in Stanford. Water Street, which provided the title for Wilkinson's second book of stories, was a gathering place for the Black community there. Her grandmother taught Crissy to read before she entered nearby Middleburg Elementary, and Crissy skipped second grade which put her in the same class with her second cousins, Tracy Sweeney and Loretta Patton, the only other Black students in the entire county school system. She told interviewer Joyce Dixon of Southern Scribe, "reading and writing became my playmates. I would take a pen or pencil and go down by the creek or at the edge of the yard for hours making up stories." Crystal Wilkinson asserts that she actually started writing books when she had finished reading all the books available to her. As a third-grader, she began collecting her tales and sewed them into little books on her grandmother's sewing machine. Throughout her youth, her world centered on Indian Creek and extended only as far as Liberty where her family went to the Laundromat and shopped for groceries and Stanford where they occasionally watched her cousin play basketball for Lincoln County High. She never traveled to the parts of Casey County where Amish families lived but remembers, Hannah, the one Amish student at Casey County High, and she recalls Ms. Sapp the one "hip" teacher at CCHS who encouraged her and others to write. When she turned 16, Crissy got a job on the Casey County Library's Bookmobile, and her grandparents bought her a car so she...