One afternoon, the Delany sisters sit in the living room of their red brick house in Mt Vernon, N.Y. Their memories a held in common, and their voices jockey for position as they recall their childhood in Raleigh, N.C., and their father, a former slave who became America’s first black Episcopalian bishop. Did their father sit at the head of the table? Sadie: “Oh, yes.” Bessie: “And we had three squares a day! And we always said grace!” Sadie: “Always. Yes, indeed.” And their mother? Bessie: “My mother used to wash us every night. All 10 of us! And she had to bring water from the well.” Sadie: “She emptied the tub for each one of us.” Bessie: “They were good people.”
Neither sister ever married (they refer “maiden ladies” to the odious “old maids”), and they’ve been together for most of this century’s sea changes. Sadie and Bessie graduated from Columbia University in the ’20s; pursued teaching and dentistry, respectively; spent Harlem Renaissance with friends like Paul Robeson and n Hughes. “Having Our their story in brisk, cleareyed prose: “Sadie and I were very upset by that whole Vietnam mess,” “That girl, Anita Hill, is telling he truth.” The Delanys talk, and the decades come tumbling out. Sadie and Bessie call racists “rebby boys,” and one of the themes here is, If you can’t beat them, you can always outlive them.
With “Having Our Say” in its fifth printing, the Delanys ave enjoyed a quirky celebrity, including a TV appearance during 1923 which they did yoga with Charles Kuralt. Still, their fife remains steady. “If I don’t hear Bessie get up, I’ll go…wake her,” Sadie writes. “Sometimes I have to knock on her headboard. And she opens her eyes and says, ‘Oh, Lord, another day?!”’ Here’s hoping there’s many more.
