For all of us who are influencing the development of daughters and granddaughters (and nieces and young friends) here are a few thoughts:

IF YOU WANT TO BUILD A STRONG GIRL:

Be relentless. She must graduate from college and graduate school, not because these institutions offer young women much but because they still provide the only entrance into the professions.

Alternatively, trade schools. Women plumbers and electricians earn a good living and are providing useful services to their communities (and we need to get over our white upper-class insistence on white upper-class professions).

And be equally relentless in teaching about desire in all its forms and birth control.

And in laying down a standard of ethics—one we adults often betray: preaching inclusion while never having a dark skinned person in the house. Girls and young women know we are all hypocrites but, strangely enough, that doesn’t seem to destroy the power of our ethical teaching.

And insist by example that other females are and will be their best and sometimes only friends.

BUT IF, BASED ON YOUR OWN HISTORY, YOU WANT TO BUILD A GIRL WHO FITS IN…

And this requires an honest appraisal of what it has cost you to fit in or not fit in…

Then the church in all its many forms is your answer. Not because it offers anything specifically tailored to the many women and girls that fill church pews, but because it endorses an ideal of self-sacrifice that ensures that the self-sacrificer will always fit in.

Here I come to the photos I took Sunday the 20th at the Santa Fe Convention Center’s show, “Crown & Cloth: The Sacred Style of Our Lady.”

You don’t have to be a Roman Catholic to appreciate the enormous number of small dresses and cloaks and the array of jewelry created (often by men) for the dressing of the ancient statue of La Conquistadora, also called, paradoxically, Our Lady of Peace.

This statue, according to the legend, was carried away from Santa Fe during the spectacular eviction of the Spanish conquistadors in the fifteenth century, only to be carried back by them in triumph fifteen years later, in the so-called “Bloodless Reconquest.” I doubt if any of the members of the 18 northern pueblos who achieved the Spanish eviction would call their return “bloodless.”

Be that as it may, this version of the Mother of Christ is attended by La Cofradía de La Conquistadora, a group of men who wear wide ceremonial red satin sashes; two of them are posed beside her statue at the show of her garments. Essential, for a girl to fit in, is to belong to a group hosted by men.

Ceremonies of all kinds—birthdays, weddings, baptisms and christenings—are also essential parts of this training. Never neglect or ignore the good wishes assigned to these ceremonies. Many of La Conquistadora’s outfits are created to celebrate a fiftieth wedding anniversary as well as a recovery from illness or the birth of a child. Greeting cards are a poor substitute but they are better than nothing.

These garments are not special because of the needlework involved; most depend heavily on the gilt and glitter of manufactured decorations. And most in this show were created very recently.

Does that mean La Conquistadora will soon lack new outfits for Easter and Christmas as well as for the procession of Holy Days?

Probably not. Her wardrobe is so extensive there will never be a lack of choices.

Seeing her at home, high up in a side chapel in Santa Fe Cathedral, a visitor may not be aware that this is a fashion show. The women who dress her may now and then reflect on this curious concurrence of style and spirituality.

But they will certainly know that all followers of this Lady are sure to fit in.

In an attempt to make this latest effort a little more fun, certainly for me and maybe for my students, I’m going to try to get them to think and write about using their noses.

If you think about what you are reading now—and of course I’m making the risky assumption that you ARE reading—check if there is any mention of smells. One reason may be that we are all horrified and embarrassed by bad smells and these are often the most potent around. They certainly arouse many associations, more than perfume, cigarettes, French wine, etc.

To inspire them, I’ll bring out a wooden box given to me by a friend years ago. Inside it are about twenty sweet little boxes, tied with white ribbon and decorated with flower decals, labeled on the front with their contents:

SAFFRON
SAGE
CLOVES
NUTMEG

…and so forth as well as little tin can of BAG BALM and another of VAPORUB. And a cigar.

The point is not to identify but to use the smells (all good, by the way) to conjure up a mood, a relationship, a situation, a place.

Of course there are some smells we can no longer find. For me, the perfume of Sweet Peas will always call up my mother but since Sweet Peas have been hybridized, they no longer smell.

And I doubt if the Madeleines I buy at the supermarket smell or taste at all like the ones that evoked his childhood for Marcel Proust.

I’ll let you know what happens. Meanwhile, try an experiment, find something that smells (or stinks?) and write your associations…

It contains my long forgotten, carefully printed poems—without smudge or correction—of which this poem, “Icarus,” is an example.

I was astonished to read the inscription: “To Mother and Daddy with love from Sallie Christmas 1956.”

1956! I was a far-from-home seventeen-year-old, beginning to revel in the unexpected adventures and treasures of my sophomore year at college. I would never have expected that I would make a gift of my poems to my parents. The years of alienation that followed the late 1980s sale of my father’s companies in Louisville makes it hard to believe that I was ever such a trusting and sharing daughter.

Well, there it is, as instructive as it is surprising.

These solemn and stilted verses remind me that my models at that time were the male romantics of the 19th century: Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth. Nothing wrong with those models except for their complete elimination of the female voice or the female experience. I would never have thought of such a thing in 1956 because I was unaware that there ever was such a thing as the female voice. I hadn’t even heard of Emily Dickinson; she was not taught at Harvard, nor were any of the other poets and writers who were female.

I’d like to imagine that this narrow-mindedness is the reason Mr. T has slashed billions from the Harvard federal grants—but of course it was not that.

1956 was the last year I wrote poetry. I was taking a writing course every semester at college, and I was usually the only female, or perhaps one of two, in these self-important groups dominated by assured young prep school graduates, males of course, and opinionated professors like Archibald Macleish, well known at that time. The only time he spoke to me was to correct my pronunciation of a Greek name.

My fellow students, the prep-school boys, were even worse. The first and only poem I read aloud was a lyrical description of fish swimming in a Kentucky stream.

A bad-ass boy opined, to general chuckles, that it was really about sperm swimming up a vagina.

I was mortified. I never spoke in that class again, and I stopped writing poetry until three decades later when two dear friends, both professors at Western Kentucky University at Bowling Green where I was teaching, shared poems of mine and theirs and persuaded me it was worth starting again.

I relate this story because it is difficult for young women who will be heading to college next month how lethal the Ivy League colleges, in particular, were for talented young women for decades. Change when it came may have been short-lived. The white elite lives off discrimination in its many forms, and I am not sure any of these “institutes of higher learning” have been able to suppress that appetite.

After all most of their big donors have probably silenced many women in their personal and corporate lives. It can become a habit.

Watch this video at SallieBingham.com.

In dense nineteenth-century legal jargon, the paper granted Caroline Clifford Nephew, my great-great-grandmother, continued ownership of her slaves, although she was married to the Reverend Joseph Clay Stiles. According to the rules of that day, all of Caroline’s worldly possessions passed to her husband on their marriage. Did this later agreement signal a divorce?

This ancient version of an antenuptial agreement was signed by Joseph Stiles with his seal. Two other men, Charles West and B. King signed in the same way. Since she had no legal identity, Carolyn did not sign but I’m presuming she at least agreed if she did not initiate this move. The trust established would hold her slaves in perpetuity, assuring her financial independence.

I do not know what this unusual move means in terms of what had happened to Caroline’s marriage. I will find out, in time, with further research into the other letters that lie with the legal paper. Since the book I’m imagining will be an historical novel, I’ll also be free to invent if I find no written proof but only the suggestions that flit, undefined, through ancient letters.

But the list of her slaves, by name, has brought them to life for me, raising the question that may come to define our times: what is our responsibility as the descendants of slave owners?

If I were to divide my inherited money, coin by coin and bill by bill, which could I prove was the result of two hundred and fifty years of slave labor? Of buying and selling?

Not possible, of course.

Here are the names: Thomas, Bella, William. Maria, Sandy, James. Amy, Samuel, Chloe, and her three children. Eve and her child, Squire. Lydia, Joe and Andrew.

They of course had not been given last names when their original names, from Africa, were washed away. And as chattel slaves, their children, even if fathered by a white man (hinted at in the usual choice of Squire), were born slaves and would remain slaves in Carolyn’s possession.

There are further mysteries. The paper is entitled “Marriage Settlement of J.C. Stiles and C.C. Nephew” and cost two dollars and twenty cents.

But Caroline and Joseph were married years earlier.

And the Emancipation Proclamation had already freed her slaves.

What to make of this?

Time—and research—will tell.

July 9 2024:

Pip is suffering, he has suffered in silence and withdrawal, sleeping outside at night for the past two weeks. Now his stomach is full of tumors, he can’t eat, throws up what he drinks. I will work on remembering all the years of his blessed companionship: How easy he was to train as a puppy (although stubborn later in insisting of the direction of his walks;) how he ran joyously ahead of me on the trail, or waited between the back door and the garage door at night, no matter the weather, even pouring rain, for me to come home; how he responded with moans of excitement when I told him we were driving to one of his two favorite places, the dog park or the kennel where he boarded when I was away—and how the young people loved him there; how quiet he was, except for necessary warning barks when someone was coming in the gate; how he loved men, and how yesterday in the dog park the native man rubbed and rubbed his ears. He has been the angel of my life alone.

How he began to drag on his leash this summer as his strength left him and the heat thickened.

And always close to me, always willing—or nearly always—to do what I wanted.

July 11, 2024

Pip is slowly starving himself to death. Five or six days now with no food except for the grasses he eats while wading in the shrunken Santa Fe River. I have a notion the water and the leaves will cure his tumors. He’s depleted but not yet ready to die. I’m abiding by my decision, based on instinct, to let him die on his schedule and in the way he wants.

July 12, 2025

Pip slowly making his way into death, withdrawing, noble, mysterious, very quiet. No more barking when someone comes to the gate, no more tail wagging except once, for Barry. He stares at me with opaque brown eyes, seems to want to be with me but spends his nights on the couch outside under the portico. I check each morning, fearing that he has gone. His open grave waits.

July 14, 2024

Pip’s death, approaching slowly, is as natural as his birth would have been. It is what comes to all of us. My attempt to comfort and console him, interpreting his long stares as desperation, is the way we, modern and faithless, show our incomprehension. I don’t know if he is comforted. I don’t even know if he seeks comfort. All of that is unknown.

July 18, 2024

Pip goes on.

July 20, 2024

Pip died this morning, my most beautiful dog, my companion for nine years, closer than any human. I spent some time with him under the portale where the couch had become his resting place; he dozed, opening his eyes to see if I was still there, then dozing again. I was not with him for his death. He lay on my white bathroom floor, his bowels evacuating, perhaps heading for his dog door, but in every way beautiful, black on white, peaceful, resting his chin on his paws.

We buried him in the garden.

The Statue of Liberty, New York by Carol M. Highsmith (Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

NUMBER TWO: In the June 23rd edition, a guest columnist for Your Turn, Rick Adams, reported these amazing statistics:

“More women are serving in elected office than at any time in American History: 151 women are in the US Congress, 94 women are statewide elected officials, twelve are governors [including here in New Mexico] and these numbers may and likely will increase.”

This is our future, the work of decades of hard work by many women in all layers of this society. More women than men now graduate with college and advanced degrees: we’ve worked long and hard to make this happen, helping our daughters and granddaughters to understand the importance of education.

And, in the arts, as I’ve observed, we have broken the barrier: more women are writing and directing plays on stages all over the country, large and small; more women are publishing books in all categories; more women are seeing their art displayed in more museums, and as some of you have surely noticed, more women are the voices of our National Public Radio on all subjects. Yes, this is subjective, I have no numbers to back up my conclusions—but I think some of my readers will have noticed the same thing.

It’s important not to be ploughed under by the chaos and intemperance in Washington. We don’t live in that swamp, and we don’t need to allow our hopes and dreams to be drowned out by the noise.

We then examined the same results for my other books published since 2020. The results were somewhat the same. I was amazed, I was gratified, and I was reminded yet once again to place little faith in my late-night musings, which always tend to be dark.

So here’s the rundown:

• 2020: The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• 2020: Treason, Sarabande Books
• 2022: Little Brother, Sarabande Books
• 2024: Taken By the Shawnee, Turtle Point Press
• 2025: How Daddy Lost His Ear, Turtle Point Press

It has taken many years, many rejections, disappointments and sidetracks, to get to the place I wanted to be when I published my first book in the 1960s. A lot of what I’ve often called lost time. But that lost time—births, children, friends, husbands, lovers, vacations, activism, philanthropy—turns out not to be lost time but what I’ll now call “marinating.”

Here are the results.

Three of these four books draw on the letters in my mother’s blue box, found after her death at the top of her closet by my sister. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for turning the blue box over to me.

The first book came from the top layer of letters in this many-layered box. It is called The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters, published by Sarabande Books outside the time frame of this essay in 2014. The elisions I found in these detailed accounts by my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother provided me with my entry into writing historical fiction.

Women letter writers in the past tended to be too discreet. They came from a tiny sliver of elite, educated white women, and along with their education, they had swallowed notions of privacy and circumlocution—and of course later there had also been edits by their descendants—that means a lot of what is interesting to readers was only hinted out, or left out entirely.

For example, the fact that my Irish great-grandfather was dying of tuberculosis when he married my great-grandmother is not mentioned; it’s only possible to surmise that he was already sick because he died a few years after their marriage. Who knew he had TB? Why was it concealed? Here is where the honest and informed writer of historical fiction fills the gap.

The next book in my list, Little Brother, depended on and drew from the few letters my younger brother Jonathan left behind when he died at 21. The blue box also contained his diary, written during the last weeks before he dropped out of Harvard. Jonathan was less hamstrung by discretion than his female relatives yet the complexity of his conflicting emotions is only delicately hinted at in an era when relationships between men were carefully scrutinized and criticized.

Then comes Taken by the Shawnee. Margaret Erskine’s dictated account of her capture and subsequent life with the Shawnee is, again, full of curious gaps, but since I was able to find many published accounts of that time and place, I could tell her story in all its complexity.

Since my local bookstore, Garcia Street Books, is still re-ordering copies of Taken by the Shawnee every two weeks, John and I decided to run the interview he first taped a year ago to introduce that historical novel. I’ve had to admit that I don’t, after all, look too terrible in that interview, a humbling admission of my long-lived vanity!

Far more important, I’m so very grateful for all my readers who keep me and my books alive.

Watch this video at SallieBingham.com.

I live in the high desert. Water here is precious, to be measured by the drop as the aquifer sinks lower and lower, drained by overdevelopment and agriculture. Nobody, including me, has the right to a large fish pond. Even with recirculated water, too much is lost to evaporation.

The pond holds perhaps twenty Koi, from the large multicolored ones to the next generation of babies, fingerlings mostly black but with a few tinted silver and gold. Soon, there will be too many fish for the pond and I will join the many owners trying to give away surplus Koi. But since no one is foolish enough to build a large fish pond now, there are few takers—and certainly no one will buy them.

What is the moral of this little story? That in love we are all blind?

That seems downright petty.

I think instead my pond is an illustration of the slogan on my favorite t-shirt: BAD CHOICES MAKE GOOD STORIES.

This is one of the good stories because my pond for all its wastefulness has some golden uses:

First of all, the birds. In this June heat, they perch in the surrounding junipers and piñons, preparing to dip down to the edge of the water to drink.

Then the creatures, who mostly come at night: coyotes by the dozen, those that have escaped widespread pogroms to poison and trap them.

Then, the red fox, creeping along the edge of my pond at dusk, wary, wise, before crawling down to the edge to sip.

Then, the neighborhood dogs, out on a walk with their owners, who lap greedily in the heat.

And, since we are all threatened with wild fires just about all the time, the pond is the only source of water on this hill where there are no hydrants because there is no city water. “Leave a few inches for the fish,” I’ll plead when the time comes—not if, but when—as though fish could survive the onslaught of debris, smoke and dust.

Well, it’s worth trying.

Meanwhile, when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the chaos that is assaulting all of us, I walk to the pond on a rocky path where an over-leaning big spiny cactus has to be carefully negotiated—I have one of its spines in my lower back now—and sit for a few minutes and watch the fish, swirling eagerly around the handful of food I’ve thrown in for them.

They are eager, even greedy, for about two minutes, darting and snapping at the food, gulping it noisily, big mouths open on the surface of the water.

But they get tired of it very quickly. Have they had enough or is it that chasing the floating pellets is no longer fun?

(I’m assuming that for the fish as for us humans, “fun” is as important or even more important than food.)

And they drift away, oblivious to each other, as they always are.

Then it’s the babies’ turn to come and snap up a little.

I’m not saying any of this justifies the waste of water, but at least it adds a comforting ending to my little story.

And we all deserve some comfort.

Author Ernest Hemingway in Key West, Florida, USA, in the 1940s, with a sailfish he had caught

“Hello! What are you doing there?” I asked.

The eyes didn’t answer, nor did the face of the somber tabby cat perched safely in the leaves on the trellis—which led me to reflect on the other eyes I saw this early morning (or rather did not see) as I ushered the little spider, with a dish brush, out of my kitchen sink.

How many other eyes surround us even when we ignore them?

That sounds threatening, but I don’t mean it that way.

There are all the eyes of unknown or forgotten friends.

There are the eyes of strangers.

There are the eyes in the yellow centers of daisies and in the light flashing off the leaves of holly.

The eyes of children, the eyes of dogs.

And the eyes of my tabby cat.

Then came an email from the man, now middle-aged, who due to the vagaries of three adults, one being me, became my stepson when he was five years old.

Doug has the gift of remembering only happy moments. One he reminded me of today happened off Key West in the 80s when my then-husband, his two sons, and my son Will took a deep-sea fishing boat far out into the ocean.

As Doug remembered it, Will, always a passionate fisherman, cast with an enormous rod from the seat at the prow of the boat to which he was attached.

Within minutes, a magnificent sailfish broke the surface of the ocean, flying up in a desperate attempt to get rid of the hook in it’s mouth.

Will reeled the huge creature in. I don’t remember how it died; someone must have clubbed it on the deck. It was eight feet long, spectacularly colored, blue and silver, the colors rapidly fading as the fish died. I don’t remember its eyes.

On shore, we found a taxidermist who made the sailfish into a permanent record of what seems to me now a terrible act of destruction. But Doug remembers the triumph of the catch.

And this leads me to my favorite Ernest Hemingway novel, his last, called Islands in the Stream. An alienated, long-divorced husband and father decides to take his three sons on a fishing trip in hopes of restoring their ruined relationships. But when one of the sons fails to reel in a large fish—maybe a sailfish—his father derides him as a weakling and the possibilities of reconciliation are destroyed.

Heather Cox Richardson in her remarkable Letters from an American calls this “Cowboy Individualism,” the myth aimed particularly at disempowering women.

I’ve come a long way from the cat’s eyes in my garden, but this is one of the pleasures of writing my posts.

May you all have a pinch of Doug’s optimism mixed with my darker interpretation of reality.

Religious Icon of Hagia Sophia by Eileen McGuckin

Unfortunately our wisdom can be bought, suborned, which is what I see in all the pretty women around Mr. T. Somewhere along the way, they must have learned that wisdom seldom endears and often runs counter to the interests of the male establishment. And there are always rewards for our silence and compliance: credit cards, big houses, expensive cars and the fawning of the Big Man’s cronies who see or hope to see a way to the throne through us.

Of course there may be exceptions unknown to me, a woman who said something about the suffering we see on all hands, a woman from another country who sees her compatriots’ chances limited or ended. Melania Trump’s miserable expression during last Saturday’s Parade of Ego surely meant she wasn’t having a very good time.

But I expect she felt she had to come up with a really expensive birthday present any-way.

Now and then I amuse myself with imagining a conversation between those two when they are doing something ordinary like brushing their teeth—a humble necessity even with gold-plated toothbrushes:

Well, we can dream. But until Lady Wisdom learns to avoid the blandishments of power and stay out of the old traps—flattery, disempowering criticism, mercenary appetites—she will not exercise the power we need right now. We saw that power in the demonstrations, we felt it in the cheering and chanting when women’s voices rose high. Lady Wisdom is eternal and she will decide all our outcomes in the end.