A Page a Day

On a recent trip home to Kentucky, I came across a small worn black journal called “A Page A Day.” I realized that it began my life-long habit of keeping a journal, all now housed in my archive at Duke University. I didn’t remember this little book, and it is full of surprises.

The journal was given to me by my older brother, Worth, when I was nine years old. My nearly unreadable pencil scrawled entries faithfully record going to school, looking forward to vacations, receiving presents, making “cloths” for my dolls and other mundane events, now and then ending with “It was a beautiful day.” Nothing unusual here for a nine-year-old who had not yet imagined becoming a writer. I was spelling my first name in the ordinary way, “Sally”—with a y. It was changed a few years later by my mother to reflect the way my great-grandmother had spelled it: “Sallie.”

But inside the front cover of the journal, my pencil scrawls record this message: “I hope who ever reads this will understand that it was a happy childhood and how grateful (sic) I am to all the dear people who made it so.”

I have never imagined a nine-year-old making such a wish, but the unchanged handwriting makes me feel sure it was written at the same time as the rest of the journal.

One of the horrifying facts of many childhoods and certainly of mine is that there is no privacy for one’s thinking or one’s writing, even though some journals were locked with little gold keys. A friend tells me that she came home from school one day to find her mother crying as she read her daughter’s journal. She had picked the lock.

Was this fact what inspired me to write the wish? Someone, probably my mother, would eventually read my journal and might find something less than golden written there; the wish would neutralize her anger.

The handwriting changed dramatically on July 5th when a palely penciled page is topped by “Was by Worth”—my older brother, his entry partially erased. The entries for July 6-12th are all titled in my handwriting, “By Worth.” My five years older brother, the nemesis of my childhood, had taken over my journal.

Of course I didn’t complain. The response would have been, “You shouldn’t have left it lying around.”

His entries were mostly about swimming and tennis lessons. But one stands out. Summers are very hot in Kentucky, and down the hill from the family house there was a large concrete swimming pool, unfiltered, filled with a hose.

Worth’s entry for July 14th records, “We let George go in the swimming pool today.” George was the young son of the African-American yard man. Worth goes on, “When we told Mother about it she said that he could not go in again and gave me a long talk on the Negro question.” She also emptied the pool.

That was Worth’s final entry. The remaining months are blank except for one last entry in my handwriting, listing the books I was reading (including “Jane Eayar”) and a curious little drawing. It had been impossible for me to reclaim the remaining pages.

We hear a lot these days about White Supremacy; I think it is the greatest threat this country has ever faced. Now as our true history is gradually revealed, we learn that its roots go back to pre-colonial times. But no one has yet studied the way the U.S. top class—the white men of money and education who have always run all aspects of this society—reflect from childhood on the entitlement of their class and background. They long ago subsumed women’s privacy, and even the privacy of girls; that is always the first step in a system of socially-sanctioned abuse. It begins in childhood, and it goes on.

In My Family, Writing Kentucky 21 Favorites of 2021 Worth Bingham