Our lives consist of stories, both stories about things we experience and things that we construct from the myriad of threads that enter into the very fiber of our being. Growing up, Wilma Dykeman saw “an old bent man” walking by her house most days. She looked at him “with hungry curiosity” and thought of him as “someone from a story-book, someone unreal and fictional.” One day, the man spoke with Dykeman’s mother and Dykeman listened.

The man told them about the herbs and roots he carried with him, and on another day he told them about “an adventure he had had during the Civil War.” He told them that during the war he wasn’t in many battles, especially “the ones listed down in the hist’ry books and all,” and that the men he served with took to calling The Cap. During one battle, word got out to his fellow soldiers that The Cap was killed. The men retreated, in fear, but when they heard that his death was nothing more than a rumor and that word spread “The Cap still lives,” the men returned to the fighting and won the battle.

Later, after the man left, Dykeman asked her mother is she thought that the man’s story actually happened. Her mother told her, “No.” She continued by telling her that the man “wasn’t even in the Civil War probably.” This news disappointed Dykeman, but her mother continued by asking Dykeman a question: “[W]here else would you find an old man with an imagination like that?” She concluded by giving credence to the man’s story, even if it did not “actually” happen. Dykeman’s mother told her, “I think it’s a better story if he made it up than if it really happened.” Dykeman’s mother doesn’t care whether or not the man’s story “actually” happened; she cares about the story and what it says.

Does it really matter what happened? Can we craft the story? The memory? The event? Is that cafted memory reality? Is it how we view the world? As I read Crystal Wilkinson’s Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, I kept thinking about these questions and what they mean for us and they ways that we engage with the world around us. As she details her family’s history, Wilkinson tells us, “I am the keeper of the stories, the writer, the one who has carried the stories in my apron for so many years, the one who has considers a rusty metal recipe box my finest family heirloom.” Wilkinson is a griot, a well of memories, a conduit for the ancestors, and their mouthpiece.

Throughout Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts Wilkinson communes with familial relatives, those that she knew and those that she never met, not even extensively in the archives. Aggy Wilkinson, born in 1795, is one of these ancestors. Wilkinson knows that she probably came to Kentucky as the property of the white Wilkinsons when they moved from Virginia, and that when she married Tarlton Wilkinson, a white man, “she became a freed woman.” Wilkinson questions much about Aggy and Tarlton’s relationship, especially since the historical record erases her from its pages. Aggy exists within the pages of Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, and Wilkinson writes, “Aggy is the inspiration for this book, though I had to rely on spirit and imagination to conjure her” since the historical record does not include much about her. With the book, Aggy “lives . . . as an amalgam of history, imagination, and divination.”

At various points, Aggy comes to Wilkinson and relates stories about her life for Wilkinson to write down. When thinking about picking blackberries, Wilkinson says she thinks about Aggy: “When I think of ou rlineage with blackberries, I return to Grandma Aggy because the tyranny of slavery makes her the first of our lineage that I can find.” Aggy appears to Wilkinson as a twelve-year-old girl in 1808, and Wilkinson writes down what Aggy tells her, a story about herself and Hannah picking blackberries around a cemetery where those they know and love are buried. Wilkinson knows that this story is not “fact” because the historical record has erased Aggy from its pages, but the story becomes “reality” because it highlights not just Wilkinson’s lineage but also the “tyranny of slavery.”

At multiple times in Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Wilkinson relates stories that have been passed down from generation to generation in her family and in the white community. When writing about how Indian Creek got its name, Wilkinson states that the story related by her family involves an enslaver deeding land to those he enslaved, and this “raised the ire of local white folks.” Wilkinson doesn’t know if this story has any validity or not, but that does not necessarily matter. She says, “I don’t know this to be true and can’t find any proof of it, but I’m a storyteller, not a historian, and this notion has always intrigued me.” While it would be good to know if the story passed down actually happened, that is not the main point. The main point is what the story says about Wilkinson’s lineage and her ancestors and how they passed down the land.

As she thinks about making bread, Wilkinson envisions Aggy’s daughter Patsy coming to her, and Wilkinson asks Patsy to tell her story about an autumn day in 1863. Wilkinson writes down what Patsy tells her, a story about Patsy and her husband William’s hunting lodge and the white men staying there. After going to Middleburg for supplies, William returns telling everyone he is free because of the Emancipation Proclamation. Patsy “legally” owned William because she bought him from an enslaver, but they worked together to purchase “a vast amount of property and established a life for themselves that was in great contrast to other Black lives of their time.” Patsy attempts to quiet William down so he won’t upset the white guests, and she eventually gets him to go outside.

With William outside, Patsy tells the white men gathered at the table about her husband, weaving a tale that makes them laugh and guffaw. She tells the men that William kept saying Abraham Lincoln came all the way down to Kentucky to free him. She says, “I told it that way so they’d go back to where they’d come from all over the country and tell that tale big and loud and in such a way to make every white man laugh,” and they did just that. After telling the white men this, Patsy comforts William, holding him and caressing him, even telling him, “You free, William Riffe.”

Wilkinson notes that the tale that Patsy told the white men “has been documented in several oral history accounts in Casey County,” claiming that she told him, “N*****, I’m going to sell you.!” when he told her that he was free. Wilkinson states that she has “never believed it happened this way,” that Patsy yelled that at William for proclaiming his freedom and refusing to work. Wilkinson knows they were partners. They were “a power couple before their time.” The story that Patsy tells Wilkinson highlights this. The story could have ended with the tale Patsy tells the white men, but it doesn’t. It ends with Patsy telling her partner, “I swear before God you free as any man.”

In Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, Wilkinson gives voice to Aggy, Patsy, and others who have been exorcised from the historical narrative. They speak to her and share their stories with her and with us. Wilkinson notes that she is a “storyteller” and not a “historian,” and as such she crafts narratives that illuminate and become, in many ways, “reality” because they meld the historical record and fiction together. She writes, “As a novelist and poet, I write with an eye toward the curative power that story has to exemplify the diversity of both historical and contemporary Black lives.” Does it matter if the stories “actually” happened? No. What matters is what imagination tells us about ourselves, our world, the past, the present, and the future.

There’s a reason we tell stories. There’s a reason we read them, watch them, listen to them. They tells us about the world we inhabit. They tell us ways to navigate that world. They tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. They impart themselves into our very beings, becoming part and parcel of our existence. They become a form of reality through our interaction with them, and they help illuminate the facts of history, helping us think about the ways that the past impacts our present and our future.

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.