If you want classic, tried-and-true recipes of authentic Southern dishes like chicken and dumplings, skillet cornbread and jam cake, look no further than Crystal Wilkinson’s new book “Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts” (Clarkson Potter, $30). As the subtitle states, it features recipes passed down by “five generations of Black country cooks.”
But “Praisesong” is so much more than a cookbook. It is a food memoir filled with evocative essays about the intersection of food and family — especially Wilkinson’s foremothers, the kitchen ghosts.
“These women, some of them dead for 200 years, still affect the ways in which I hold my hands, the tools I choose, the way kitchen work feels in my body,” writes Wilkinson, the former poet laureate of Kentucky.
Raised by her grandparents on a remote farm in rural Kentucky, Wilkinson, 62, lived an insular childhood. There were few Black children in her elementary school, and “just about every Black person I knew was a relative or a member of our church,” she said, speaking from her home in Lexington.
The isolation had an effect. “It shaped my experience — in negative ways, of course, with the racism and my sense of belonging or not belonging socially and in school,” she said. “But also, the insular nature of it fed a love of reading, which led to a love of writing. I think living geographically isolated in a rural space also fed my creativity, because there weren’t other distractions.”
In addition to cooking, which she learned first-hand from her family’s matriarch, reading was very important in the Wilkinson household.
“My grandmother had an eighth-grade education and wanted to be a teacher, so she always encouraged me to read. She always said that after I’d read all the books in the house, I started writing my own.”
Wilkinson was a painfully shy child, but reading and writing gave her a sense of empowerment. Eager to see herself in what she read, one day she mustered the nerve to ask a local shop owner to stock some magazines with Black people in them.
“The drugstore started ordering Essence for me and Jet and Ebony. … All of my black cultural education came from there, and I was like, oh wow, there’s a whole world going on.”
Credit: Crystal Wilkinson
Credit: Crystal Wilkinson
Because of Wilkinson’s reading skills, she skipped some grades and graduated high school at age 16. But it wasn’t until after she got her bachelor’s degree, birthed three children and was working in journalism that her creative writing career took off. The tipping point was joining Frank X. Walker’s Affrilachian Poets writing group, an influential organization of Black Appalachian writers established in the early ‘90s.
Her previous experiences with writing groups had proved to be a bad fit. Either the writers were all white or all Black and urban. Joining Affrilachian Poets was a game changer.
“I found commonality as far as the way that people grew up and the way that they talked about their families and the way they talked about food,” she said. “I felt a renewed sense of identity to be in a space where country was not a cuss word. To be Black and country wasn’t a bad thing. … It lit a fire in all of us. It was such a nurturing space.”
Wilkinson made her literary debut in 2000 with the short story collection “Blackberries, Blackberries,” the first of five books she’s published since then.
At the heart of “Praisesong” is Wilkinson’s concept for the kitchen ghost, which came to her on the first Thanksgiving after her grandmother died. Throughout Wilkinson’s life, her big, extended family had gathered at her grandmother’s house for the holidays, but that era was now over. Wilkinson decided she would cook the holiday meal for herself, her three children and her mother, who didn’t cook.
“I knew how to cook, and I cooked all the time,” said Wilkinson, “but I hadn’t cooked a big important holiday meal by myself ever.”
As Wilkinson undertook the daunting task, she quickly became overwhelmed. She broke down and began to question whether she could pull it off. Then she remembered her grandmother’s dress hanging in the closet.
“I went and got her dress and hung it on the back door while I was cooking, and I began talking to her. I said, ‘OK, Granny, we can do this. Can I do this? Can you help me do this?’ That’s where the idea of the kitchen ghost came from.”
After that, the idea of matriarchal lineage and ancestral memory began to recur in Wilkinson’s writing. She started researching her family’s genealogy, thinking she already knew everything, and discovered her fourth great-grandmother Aggy, an enslaved woman who was freed when she married the son of her enslaver.
“As a Black woman it really cracked open something for me. I am a professor, I’m an educated woman, I live in America. I know about African Americans’ legacy of slavery. I’ve studied it. I know our history. But I had never thought about it directly in such a personal way,” said Wilkinson.
Throughout “Praisesong,” as Wilkinson tells her family’s stories, Aggy’s voice appears occasionally, noted in italics. The author can’t explain where the voice came from, but the choice to include it in the book was irrevocable.
“When I got to (Aggy), I got stuck on her — wonderfully so, painfully so. I went to sleep thinking about her and woke up thinking about her,” said Wilkinson. Then one day, Aggy’s voice spoke to her.
“I don’t know if it was a dream or divination or both, but I woke up, and she said to me, ‘My mother speaks to me but not in my language.’ … I thought, What is this? Is this fiction? Is this nonfiction? Is this personal or is this something I’m supposed to be writing about? And, of course, it’s all the same thing. So, I said, OK, and I wrote whatever she was thinking.”
For Wilkinson, including Aggy in “Praisesong” was a way for the author to connect with her fourth great-grandmother, but it also was a way to give her ancestor a voice.
“In life she didn’t have much of a voice. Historically she hasn’t had a voice, but to be able to give her one was so important to me. That’s Aggy’s story as far as I’m concerned,” said Wilkinson. “But in turn, I believe she represents all those other hundreds of thousands of Black women, and through her they all have a voice.”
Charis Books and More presents Wilkinson in conversation with Tayari Jones in person and online on Feb. 1. For information go to charisbooksandmore.com.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. You can contact her at suzanne.vanatten@ajc.com.
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