Holler

by Crystal Wilkinson

"Turn left where Otha’s one-room store used to be and the poplars get thicker, drive past Mt. Zion Baptist Church and across the concrete bridge and on up the holler. You’ll be able to see Green River if you stretch your neck but don’t expect something out of a picture book. It’s brown, plumb full of mosquitoes, water moccasins galore.
Go to the end of the road and on up the hill a little and this is Mission Creek--this is where we live. You might not expect to find black people in the mountains, not many of us left, but we’re here. Keep going until the road levels out a bit and the gravel gets more scarce and turns to dirt, go around the bend and soon you’ll see the graying heads of black men nodding as you pass, black children playing Red Rover, black women hanging sheets on the lines. "--opening of Holler

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

21 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 3, 2013

About the author

Crystal Wilkinson, a recent fellowship recipient of the Academy of American Poets, is the award-winning author of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, Perfect Black, a collection of poems, and three works of fiction—The Birds of Opulence , Water Street and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Vermont Studio Center for the Arts, The Hermitage Foundation and others. Her short stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including most recently in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, Agni Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American and Southern Cultures. She was Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2021 to 2023. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky where she is a Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor.

Reviews

[Brown Girl Reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short story with a lot of character and emotion. Taking place in the backwoods of Kentucky where it looks as if there are no black people living, a tragedy happens and effects a family and all of the black community. Moreover, it effects greatly one person in particular. This is a story that says things without saying them. That's what's so significative about Holler. Beautifully written and a heart-breaking, Crystal Wilkerson makes us feel and experience a bit of the Kentucky life.

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holler is first and foremost a story of family. It's about the kind of family that you find in the hollers of Kentucky. People who grow up with a kind of kinship that binds them against outsiders even when it's not necessarily in their best interests. Holler is a multi-layered story that feels simple in the read but hits on myriad and complex emotions throughout. In this short story, Wilkinson deftly immerses the reader in interactions that point out preconceptions about country people, city people, skin color, police officers, and even individuals leading to deeper understanding about how much misunderstanding, hurt, and violence could be avoided with a bit more communication and fewer assumptions.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how this story shows that was is being said is just as important as what is not being said. It was wonderful!