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You are here: Home / Kentucky / Saved

Saved

May 10th, 2016 by Sallie Bingham in Kentucky 1 Comment

Louisville Courier-JournalIn the attic of a decrepit garage on the old farm I own in Kentucky, Wolf Pen Mill, piles of old paperbacks were found recently, soggy from a leak in the roof; but in a far corner, a decaying box, covered with a crumpled sheet of brown paper, had not been touched by a single drop.

Inside that box I found dozens of letters, spanning the 1930’s to the 1960’s—only the latest in typescript—one from a husband to a wife, regretting her visit to Horse Cave and admitting that even after six years of marriage, he missed her keenly.

Here also I found letter paper from a business in Frankfort that sold lumber of every description, and hand-drawn geometric images that may have served as patterns for pieces of a quilt.

And much more.

Has this box come to me as a necessary interruption, a reminder, as a Zen teacher said, that our plans are never as tasty as reality?

Why was this box spared destruction by rain?

I don’t think these letter writers would have been considered, or considered themselves, “important” although they were apparently comfortably off—at least able to provide a young wife with a brief vacation in a country town (where, many decades later, I was part of a group that started an amazing professional theatre: Horse Cave Theatre, now, sadly, defunct.)

The writers of these letters trod this earth, they had their satisfactions and their woes, children were born and grew up more or less satisfactorily, few marriages ended in divorce, and nearly everyone in the family knew where they would be buried.

Stability.

Suffocation.

Hardly to be valued now, if it ever was.

But someone, doubtless a woman, perhaps without much forethought, simply began to save all these letters and documents, including a boldly colored rotogravure section from the Louisville Courier-Journal, published in 1942 and titled, “The History of Kentucky,” with the obligatory bloodcurdling account of depredations by “Redskins.” It would be many years before schoolchildren in the state learned that the Shawnee had claimed the area for their own, hunting, building settlements, and vigorously opposing the settlers coming through Cumberland Gap to take their land and drive them across the Ohio.

The Story of Kentucky

These letters would of course detail nothing about this history, but would they in their humble way re-create an era that seems almost as remote as the state’s settlement?

I don’t know.

As in the case of the blue box, on which I based my most recent book, The Blue Box, Three Lives in Letters (Sarabande Books), this box came to me as a complete surprise, handed over by the farm manager, Ben Hassett, who had found it when cleaning out the garage attic before renovations.

And I am grateful.

There is something infinitely touching, to me, in these faded tan envelopes and dark or bleached handwriting; they seem to convey, forcibly, the value of these and all other forgotten lives.

I’m finishing my biography of Doris Duke this month and sending it off to Farrar, Straus & Giroux for publication next year, and my next book, as well as a set of linked short stories, is already beginning in my brain and on paper—and there is another book idea looming beyond that.

But has this box come to me as a necessary interruption, a reminder, as a Zen teacher said, that our plans are never as tasty as reality?

Letters - Wolf Pen Mill Farm
January 1942
Drawings - Wolf Pen Mill Farm

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In Kentucky Wolf Pen Branch Mill Farm

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. Judith Wise says

    May 14th, 2016 at 3:22 pm

    Oh Sallie! This is so wonderful! Such a treasure. As you know, the book I’m writing is also based on letters and The Blue Box came at a perfect time for inspiration. Congratulations on sending your Doris Duke biography to the publishers. I look forward to reading it. Judy

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