In her journals in
Falling through Space (1987) Gilchrist claims that she was conceived in a camp on the Mississippi levee that her father helped build. Gilchrist's early childhood was spent on the Hopedale Plantation in Vicksburg, the home of her maternal grandfather, Stewart Floyd Alford. Described by her as "Tall and proud and brave and civilized," Alford prided himself on being an Englishman. Gilchrist's journals present her childhood as idyllic: she grew up on "THE RICHEST LAND IN THE WORLD," the cotton farms where blacks and whites lived and worked together in apparent harmony, though she admits that blacks were often called "niggers."
Because of her indulgent mother, Gilchrist missed school more often than she attended. In her free time she read voraciously, which she regards as the ideal preparation for her career. She concludes, "I almost never went to school. That's why I'm a writer." From her mother she learned to love the classics and to borrow from them ideas for her stories, even those she wrote as a child.
Despite Gilchrist's memories of a happy childhood, several of her finest stories capture the powerlessness and alienation typical of children and adolescents. These themes may grow out of her awareness that Hopedale Plantation was not an idyllic world, though its adults tried to create the impression that it was.
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