Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: While I tend to understand the thesis of Harry Robie's essay and have written on similar themes myself, I want to correct a glaring error he made with respect to his characterizations of John G. Fee. Perhaps this is understandable since none of the works he cited really go into detail about Fee's background and it would be easy to assume that he, too, came from "up North." But he didn't. Robie simply repeated a lot of often repeated folk wisdom about Fee which has little relationship to the actual situation. The specific reference to Fee is as follows and is found in the last paragraph on page 7: As early as 1855, the Northern Congregationalist minister, John G. Fee, saw the non-slaveholding mountaineers as natural allies in the war against slavery. He established his institution, Berea College, as a boarding school where blacks and mountain whites could be educated together and, just as importantly, as an Abolitionist wedge into the slaveholding South. First of all, Fee was not a Congregationalist and would have been insulted to have been called one. He was from Northeastern Kentucky, nominally Presbyterian , and a Presbyterian minister until kicked out of the church because of his anti-slavery views. Being both a mountaineer and slaveholder himself, Fee had to face up to the system of slavery in his own family. Having known intimately the slaves owned by his family , he knew personally of the evils of the system and freed the slaves given him by his father as property only to see a freed mother imprisoned because she came back into Kentucky to steal property —her own children. Fee was passionately interested in the co-education of the races. He accepted whites from wherever he could get them and many came from nearby mountain counties as well as the Blue Grass and parts of Ohio. He was staunchly antisectarian as well as being anti-slavery and ceased his affiliation with the American Missionary Association when it ceased to be multi-denominational as it was chartered and became exclusively an agency of the Congregational Church. Bill Best Dear Editor: I wish some English teacher would write a paper for your magazine to explain today's short stories and poetry. Most of the poetry I don't understand at all. I love poetry and have three leather loose leaf binders of poetry I have loved over the years. Your poem "Appalachia, Where Are Your Hills" (I think this is the title) I found very beautiful; it made me think of Harry CaudiU's fight to restore the strip mined mountains. I like poetry I understand, don't want to have it explained. As for the stories, so many end without a climax. When I was a child I was taught every story needs a climax. I have Eudoras Welty s book of short stories and have tried several times to read it but always lose interest because her stories leave you wondering what happened. There must be a reason for writing this way and it would be most helpful to have a teacher tell us why. I have no one to ask here. One of my sisters lives in Kentucky and she told me [about] Harry Caudill's [death]. That made me very sad for he had so much to offer and I wish he could have seen the scarred hills restored as he wished. Mrs. Christella Butler 15 ...