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You are here: Home / Writing / Those Soft Kentucky Voices

Those Soft Kentucky Voices

April 22nd, 2021 by Sallie Bingham in Writing, Kentucky Leave a Comment

The crowd at George Floyd Square hears the verdict … pic.twitter.com/XmjdRR8njl

— Nick Ferraro (@NFerraroPiPress) April 20, 2021

We stopped Tuesday in the middle of my class on writing memoir to listen to the verdict in Minneapolis that will send the policeman who murdered George Floyd to jail on all three counts. It was a moment of celebration for all of us, perhaps especially for the participants from Lexington, Kentucky, a city that has always seemed to me to be more southern than it has any right to be from its geographical position.

We stopped yesterday in the middle of my class on writing memoir to listen to the verdict in Minneapolis that will send the policeman who murdered George Floyd to jail on all three counts.

It’s impossible now to write a memoir about growing up in Kentucky or anywhere else without considering Black Lives Matter and the intoxicating and productive protests that have followed each of the seven or eight police murders that have occurred during the year past, and that continue to occur. We are a militarized country, guns are everywhere, and we have never outgrown the preoccupation with revenge and retaliation that spurred the revolts in the coal mines in the 1930’s and the mountain revenge stories Mark Twain managed to turn into humor in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Huck encounters two families at war in the Appalachian mountains.

But, as always, there are other sides to the stories. One of my students—not from the South—sent us an excerpt from the memoir he is writing. It begins, memorably, with a scene in his mother’s kitchen—this would have been in the 1940’s—when she gives their African-American housekeeper a plate of leftovers from the family’s dinner, including “some leftover beef stew.”

Ruth, the housekeeper, seemed to the seven-year-old boy to be “overwhelmed with gratitude, claiming it to be so delicious and wonderful, “jest lahk a Sundey dinah.” The little boy wondered, “How some ordinary two-day-old leftovers from the family table could mean so much to another person.”

Using dialect in a piece of writing now offends almost all readers and has become impossible, even when the writer is trying to convey the tone of a particular voice. We all began to discuss the pros and cons of “Political Correctness”—that now dreaded phrase—agreeing that as white people we have no right to assume anything about African-Americans—and also that the discussion would have been difficult if not impossible if the group had included a dark-skinned person.

Trying to dig a little deeper, I asked each student to write a sentence describing the thoughts the housekeeper might have kept to herself while accepting with gratitude the leftover food. As they read their sentences aloud, their soft Kentucky voices added particular poignancy, for me, to their statements. All expressed various versions of the same gratitude the writer had assumed.

My sentences instead expressed the buried resentment and anger which, it seemed to me, might lie underneath and contradict Ruth’s expression of gratitude.

But then I wondered… Several of my students are from Appalachia where the accents, and the choice of words, often seem to correlate with African-American speech. One woman had grown up as the daughter of a small storeowner outside Lexington where she remembered friendly everyday exchanges between white and black customers. This experience does not pretend to negate the hideous results of racism in our country, exemplified by police murders of black people. And yet it is always worth remembering, in writing as in life, that there are subtle and varying interpretations to everything we see and do.

As a sequel, I was gratified to read in this morning’s New York Times a statement I’ve been waiting for for years:

“What opinion polls have not captured well is whether white liberals will change the behaviors—like opting for segregated schools and neighborhoods—that reinforce racial inequality.”

As a white liberal who has always lived in segregated neighborhoods—they are so much prettier!—and also opted to send my children and now my grandchildren to private schools—they are so much better!—with only two disastrous attempts to do otherwise (disastrous for those two sons), I cannot excuse myself.

And yet, and yet—as those soft Southern voices might express it, “This is the way it has always been and always will be.”

Can I be comfortable with that?

Can any of us?

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In Writing, Kentucky

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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Watch Sallie

Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
Visiting Linda Stein

Visiting Linda Stein

March 3rd, 2025
Back on October 28th, 2008, I visited artist Linda Stein's studio in New York City and tried on a few of her handmade suits of armor.

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Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

Rebecca Reynolds & Salie Bingham at SOMOS

November 8th, 2024
This event was recorded November 1, 2024 in Taos, NM at SOMOS Salon & Bookshop by KCEI Radio, Red River/Taos and broadcast on November 8, 2024.
Taken by the Shawnee Reading

Taken by the Shawnee Reading

September 1st, 2024
This reading took place at The Church of the Holy Faith in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2024.

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Pasatiempo, The Santa Fe New Mexican

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