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You are here: Home / My Family / Growing Up Without Africa

Growing Up Without Africa

November 11th, 2011 by Sallie Bingham in My Family, Kentucky 1 Comment

Misses and Her Servant - Harry Smith

It has taken me a long time to realize how little I knew about the women who raised me.

They lived in our house, full time, on the top floor, where we children knew instinctively not to go: small rooms I saw many years later, suffocatingly hot, reached by long flights of stairs or a creaking elevator put in a generation earlier for a daughter dying of tuberculosis. One of those rooms had a beautiful view of the Ohio, the boundary between the slave states and the free.

I knew these African American women loved me, and that love, which they could not express in words, but in the small essential gestures of care, saved my life. I remember my sorrow when they began to call me “Miss Sallie” after I turned twelve, the beginning, I knew, of the end of our wordless intimacy.

It has taken me a long time to realize how little I knew about the women who raised me.

My father shocked me once by referring casually to Lizzie Baker, who had been his caretaker ever since he graduated from Harvard, as one of the best because her slave ancestors (probably her grandparents) came from the old African Gold Coast. He said, “They were always the best.”

Lizzie didn’t know about the Gold Coast, or if she did, she never mentioned it, for obvious reasons. What black woman in those days would have raised the issue of slavery? Although Kentucky was a border state, and due to Lincoln’s strenuous efforts never seceded, it had a slave population, and had supported a large slave market. I read the historical marker every time we went in town.

But that was the past, obscure and obscured.

Neither Lizzie nor I knew the rich artistic tradition from which she had come. She would have stared in amazement at the delicate clay masks in the new African exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, masks superior in refinement to the images produced by Picasso or the other twentieth century European artists who saw some of this work and were deeply influenced by it.

The benign, meditative expressions on the abstracted clay faces that topped jar stoppers spoke of spiritual illumination; for Lizzie, the only remains of that tradition were the old spirituals she hummed, under her breath, as she went about her duties. She did not try to teach me those songs.

The queens with their elaborate headdresses left a faint reminder in Lizzie’s white cloth turbans, which a later generation would abhor.

Did it matter?

I knew her as a woman of great dignity, silent strength, and palpable mystery. Perhaps that was enough. But if we had known that she descended from great artists whose anonymity can never diminish their worth, we would both have realized that she was created for another life beyond lighting coal fires and folding sheets.

I wish she could have rocked, on her small, swollen feet, through the august chambers of the Met, recognizing her ancestors and a heritage of which she could never be deprived, even by the ignorance of her white “family”.

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In My Family, Kentucky Lizzie Baker Kentucky Slavery

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Spence Porter on Facebook says

    November 11th, 2011 at 12:07 pm

    Beautiful! How fascinating your father’s comment was!

    Reply

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Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

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Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

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