The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Birds of Opulence (2016)

by Crystal Wilkinson

218 Martin Luther King Street, Stanford, Kentucky

Kentucky: 1/16

  I've never given much thought to the African American population in Kentucky.  If you look at Kentucky of a list of the United States, they slot in between Oklahoma and Minnesota.   That's far lower than the comprable percentages in Missouri (15%), Pennsylvania (13%) and Arkansas (12%).  The title is a reference to the African American women who live in Opulence, Kentucky.  Opulence was founded by a freed slave of means who found someone to sell him a piece of land- a frequent issue for African Americans who HAD money to buy land in the first place.  The women of this book all struggle with similar issues: poverty, mental illness and difficult life choices, but author Crystal Wilkinson also does a good job showing the strength (albeit bred by isolation) of this community.

  Like many other titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America that feature characters in the lower echelons of the social-economic hierarchy, the characters in The Birds of Opulence don't do much, or go anywhere, or learn anything.  At best they are observers of the limited activities of the local men folk.  When the characters in a novel don't go anywhere or do anything, there is only so much THEY can observe about the physical surroundings, and that limits the effectiveness of the work as an exemplar of the area depicted (an African American community in rural Kentucky).