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You are here: Home / My Family / Knife, Dagger, Poignard

Knife, Dagger, Poignard

November 15th, 2011 by Sallie Bingham in My Family, Writing, Kentucky Leave a Comment

From the series: Memories that are forming my next book, The Blue Box

Exploring the process of writing my new book, The Blue Box due out in 2012 – Sallie

Knife, Dagger, Poignard

It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents—which only my grandmother touched—alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories.

By then she was used to the polite incredulity that greeted her tales, published in two well-reviewed books but still tales—or legends, the slightly more upscale title of her second collection. Tales, or even legends, had no historical basis, as far as any of her family knew; they sprang from old Irish folk stories, told her a half century earlier by Curtie, her father’s nurse, or embarrassingly racist anecdotes from that lush embroidery called “The Lost Cause” which, in my grandmother’s lifetime, had subsumed all memories of what the Civil War, in Richmond, had actually been like.

I didn’t care much about historical veracity and I was still too young to catch the stench of racism. I cared about romance and violence, entwined in my grandmother’s stories, and I cared about the things she kept in her curio cabinet.

It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents-which only my grandmother touched-alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories.

The first she took out was a poignard in a jeweled sheath. Handling it gingerly, she refused to draw it out. “It could cut you to pieces,” she warned, and I remembered another tale, not hers but sprung from the Kentucky mountains, in which a knife gets loose and flies around the kitchen, slicing everyone in sight.

Her poignard might do that, I believed. As she passed it, carefully, from hand to hand, she allowed me to touch the sheath with the tip of my finger. It felt hot, as though the knife, inside, had life. I was a little frightened, but mostly enthralled.

And then, in the deeper, more resonant voice she used for her tales, she told me about the way the poignard had been used, in a Chinese mandarin’s court, to cut an unfaithful wife in two.

“They don’t believe me,” she told me darkly as she returned the poignard to its hiding place, “but I have it right here, to prove it, and I have something else….” She reached for the next proof, the object that would convince me—who needed no convincing—that her tales were true.

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In My Family, Writing, Kentucky The Lost Cause The Blue Box Knife Dagger Poignard

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.

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