- 1 Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, Having our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 (...)
1Complexities jump up and start multiplying as soon as one looks a little more closely at the Delany sisters’ story1. In fact, there is a whole voyage to be taken before one enters into it. One could begin with the two handwritten signatures that form the only text on the front cover: “Sadie Delany” on top—she was the elder—and “Bessie Delany” below, but positioned slightly more to the right, as if wanting to get out from under the influence of her sister. Obviously, these signatures cannot but give a first impression of the sisters: Sadie’s slanting slightly to the right, as taught in school—she was the teacher of the two—and Bessie’s upright, the more modern and perhaps more professional-looking of the dentist that she was. Rather than giving a title here, Sadie and Bessie, two African-American sisters born in 1889 and in 1891 respectively, sign in, identifying themselves as “authors”.
- 2 The explicit or implicit contract between writer and reader that what will follow is a truthful ac (...)
- 3 As an answer to the often-asked question of readers about the origin of the title, Hill Hearth exp (...)
- 4 This seems in accordance with Philippe Lejeune’s discussion of the ambiguities of the cooperative (...)
- 5 The publisher of the book had, after the initial article had been published, asked for a biography (...)
2When one opens the book and discovers the first title page, with the title Having our Say, the work seems to identify itself as an autobiography, with the “autobiographical pact”2 directly and concretely visible. But, one is struck by the contrast between signature and sign of orality as well as between the plural and the singular; that is to say, after having signed in as two separate writers, the sisters now, with the noun phrase our say, seem to identify themselves as one combined speaker3. Indeed, what will follow seems to announce itself as a double hybrid, a fusion of singular and plural as well as one of writing and speaking. Turning the page again, one finds the second title page, which shows the same title now joined by a subtitle, The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years, and the authorial information “Sarah and A. Elisabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth”. Even if the preposition with, at this point, gives little direct information on the nature of the collaboration or of the relationship between the parties, it is clear that some of the work has been delegated, and with it a certain distance has been created that allows for the objectifying subtitle. With the irony of its quantifier first, however, it nevertheless seems to guard the essence of the sisters’ signatures4. In the Preface that follows the two title pages, in any case, Amy Hill Hearth makes her position explicitly clear. She had come to write “a story on these two elderly but reclusive sisters who had just celebrated their one-hundred-and-second and one-hundredth birthdays” (xi) after having received a letter of invitation from a neighbor. After the article, “Two Maiden Ladies with Century-old Stories to Tell”, had been published in the New York Times, letters arrived “from all over the country” (xii), with requests to learn more about these extraordinary sisters. Though they first “demurred, unsure that their life stories were sufficiently interesting or significant”, they finally agreed to a series of interviews with Amy Hill Hearth that lasted a full 18 months and that resulted in the book. Even if the exact discourse behind her summary remark that after the initial newspaper article “the reaction was swift” and “readers fell in love with the Delany sisters” remains hidden, it is clear that the “autobiographical pact” is entered into with considerable implication of the prospective reader5.
- 6 Amy Hill Hearth does not specify how exactly she interviewed the sisters; for instance, it is unkn (...)
- 7 Carole Boyce Davies, “Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production”, in Sido (...)
3Amy Hill Hearth, making herself a representative of this voice, clearly acknowledges her initiating and structuring role, specifying firstly that the stories were “coaxed” from the Delany sisters, which implies a certain pressure or even manipulation to overcome their hesitation, and secondly that they were “woven” from “thousands of anecdotes” (xiii), that is to say, relatively brief and pointed fragments of life, presented to her by the two sisters6. What is more, even if Amy Hill Hearth usually devotes different chapters to Sadie and to Bessie, she at times decided that “the sisters’ versions of particular events” were so similar that she gave their stories one voice, presenting them in chapters that “bear both of their names” (xiii). To do this work, she depended on the trust that the elderly sisters were able to extend to her. In her article “Collaborating and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production”7, Carole Boyce Davies elaborates upon the building of such trust between the telling subject and the writing subject, trust being “the critical ingredient in having the stories told at all”. As the “primary facilitators of, or interferences in, the collaborative life story telling process” she identifies here “affiliations or disjunctions of gender, class, nationality, language, and shared politics” and she concludes from her own investigation that in the “more revelatory narration”, at least three of these factors tend to be present (12).
4It is clear that the parties, here, easily fulfill these requirements, sharing at least gender, class (professional middle class), nationality and language. One may be surprised, however, that racial identity—not shared in our case—is absent from this list. Because the Delany sisters did not write their story themselves, theirs links itself, in this respect, to the long line of slave narratives of the Antebellum Period, where race mattered a lot and the black teller depended on white writers, publishers and audiences. No clear trace of the racial difference between tellers and writer can be found, however, in the published text of the Delany sisters. The other common factor on Carole Boyce Davies’s list is that of age—also missing here—and it is perhaps worthwhile to reflect briefly on the extreme age difference between tellers and writer8. In contrast to racial difference, a clear trace is there right at the start of Amy Hill Hearth’s preface, where she tells how she is ushered in by Sadie with the words: “Please come in, child. Won’t you sit down?” When she still hesitates, the other sister adds: “Sit down as long as you like. We won’t charge you rent”, after which the two break out in a roaring laughter (xi). It is this humor, shared by the two tellers to the detriment, however mild, of the single interviewer that at once acknowledges age difference—through a term of endearment—and establishes the kind of emotional distance that the sisters like to preserve.
- 9 To Amy Hill Hearth what was especially important in establishing a close relationship with the Del (...)
- 10 Amy Hill Hearth explains: “I also wrote the historical background pieces in between sections of th (...)
5So it seems that in this case, at least, the need for trust that Carole Boyce Davies identified must be supplemented with a desire for personal space. It is a sign of what is to follow: the Delany sisters’ approach to the world strictly on their own terms and the role of irony and humor in this. Far from being docile sources of information, Miss Sadie and Miss Bessie announce themselves as formidable speech partners9. Still, what one ends up with cannot simply be their life story. In this type of collaboration between teller and writer, the oral text is “displaced”, as Carole Boyce Davies puts it, and “the autobiographical ‘I,’ with its authority, is replaced by a less stable ‘we’”. Indeed, even if Amy Hill Hearth is certain that “the words are all theirs”, it is clear that the coaxing, the weaving together of the anecdotes and the combining of the two voices cannot be without consequence. In addition, even if she does not mention it here, she has divided the book into seven separate sections, each with its own short preface, in which she sets the scene or emphasizes a certain line of argument10. The organization of the text has thus become thematic rather than anecdotal.
- 11 C. Boyce Davies, op. cit., 5.
6All in all, the work shows itself as a complex hybrid, of single and plural, of oral and written, and generically, of narrated autobiography, biography, social history and even ideological tract, with the lives of the sisters as “illustrations of explicitly defined ideological positions”11. In her one to two-page introduction, however, Amy Hill Hearth is careful to place the Delany-Logan family’s history within the larger history of the United States and not within any overtly African-American or feminist ideological position. This accords with what “the Delany sisters like to say”, namely that “their story […] is not meant as ‘black’ or ‘women’s’ history, but American history. It belongs to us all” (xiii). Indeed, these passages, the first one giving a brief overview and the following focusing successively on the Antebellum Period, the Civil War, the Jim Crow era, the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression and the Civil Rights Movement, are presented in such a way that they are “American” events, never excluding the “white” experience. Still, they cannot but bring out especially the difficult position of black Americans in the different periods, against which the success-story of the Delany family is allowed to stand out. All ten of the Delany children became “college-educated professionals when few Americans—black or white—ever went beyond high school” (3).
7As far as the allusion to women’s history is concerned, one can argue the same phenomenon, with Amy Hill Hearth’s introductions creating a version of American history in which both men and women play their roles, against which the life stories of the sisters stand out, not just as successful blacks but as successful women. Indeed, if white people believed, at the time Sadie and Bessie were children, that “black people were incapable of being educated” and many blacks themselves argued that “a classical education was a waste of time for people who had little hope of a future in which to use it”, black women “faced even higher hurdles”. Like white women, they were, as Amy Hill Hearth puts it, “expected to marry and become mothers”, so that “higher education for them was deemed unnecessary” (39). Within this context, the sisters chose to stay single, so they could break, in one blow, the expectations concerning blacks and those concerning women, Bessie becoming “only the second black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York, and Sadie […] the first black person ever to teach domestic science on the high school level in New York City public schools” (xii). Not surprisingly, when in 1920 American women got the right to vote, the sisters registered right away and, as Bessie puts it: “we have never missed a chance to vote since”. But she immediately emphasizes that for blacks it was even more important to vote than for whites. As she puts it: “We’ve come a long, long way in a short, short time since slavery days, and there ain’t no use in quitting now” (141), the reference of the pronouns “we”, here, shifting smoothly from the sisters as women to the sisters as members of the larger African-American community.
- 12 The term is James Olney’s, to refer to an autobiography in which not the individual “I” but the pl (...)
8As a matter of fact, this shifting of reference of its first person pronouns is a major stylistic element of the text. Because Amy Hill Hearth chose to divide the book up into chapters with one sister or the other, or the two at the same time, as protagonist(s), a constant play of singular and plural is to be found. Obviously, the chapters presented under the heading “Sadie” (12 in all) and “Bessie” (a total of 13) can be expected to feature the pronoun “I” to refer to their respective protagonists, while those under the heading “Sadie and Bessie” (7 out of 32) will naturally have many occurrences of “we”. Taking Sadie’s first chapter as an example, however, one sees that the pronoun “I” seldom occurs alone, but almost always in standard combinations: “Bessie and I”; “She […] and I”; “I and Bessie”; “neither of us”; and many times “we” and “us”, to refer to herself and Bessie or to all the Delany children. This is far less so in later chapters, and in those of Bessie in particular, but still the distinction between the autobiographic intention of these chapters and the autophilographic12 intention of the combined chapters is not all that absolute: both are to a large extent focussed on the Delany sisters, on the Delany children, or on the Delany family. This is the “American-type” nuclear family rather than the extended family traditionally associated with African Americans. Even a relative, Cousin Lot, nicknamed “Culot”, who lived with the family and, among other things, served as an escort for the Delany girls, is never included in the “we” of the family (44), and when brother Lemuel wants “to move his bride right in” with the family, his father responds, with humor and conviction: “I’m sorry, Lemuel, but you can’t live at home once you have a wife. This is your Mama’s house. We can’t have two queens in one hive” (78).
9In some instances, the reference of the pronoun “we” is larger, to encompass the whole of the African-Americans’ experience, as in the first example of pronoun shift given above. Another example is when the sisters, in a chapter under their shared responsibility, reflect on the evils of the Jim Crow laws, starting with the least expansive use of the pronoun “we”: “This is how we [the sisters] remember it” (65; my emphasis), soon followed by an enlarging of the scope: “They thought we [African Americans] were just like animals”, after which the pronoun makes a third shift, restricting again, in “we [the Delany family] encountered Jim Crow laws for the first time on a summer Sunday afternoon” (66; my emphasis). But instances like these, in which the scope of the pronoun “we” moves all the way out to its broadest reference, African Americans as a group, are not very frequent. In the following example, similarities between the Delanys and other blacks are only just conceded, as a kind of afterthought: “One thing that happened to a lot of colored folks when they moved to Harlem was that they got a little too big for their britches […]. Well, I guess we thought we were a little special too” (131; my emphasis). Most often, however, the text works to distinguish the Delanys from other African Americans.
- 13 “By relatively isolating the roles, the collaborative autobiography calls into question again the (...)
10Of course, the pronouns not only shift their reference in the text, they also evolve over time. That is to say, the “we” doing the remembering is not the same as the “we” experiencing Jim Crow, and the “I” feeling a little special is not the “I” guessing about it, as more than 60 or even 80 years separate the two in time. This complexity, in autobiography, is the reason why Philippe Lejeune does not see the narrated autobiography as such an abnormality after all: both in the independent autobiography and in the assisted one, subjectivity is problematic and multiple, as in both cases there is a certain distance between the experiencing and the telling subject(s).13 The further one advances in time, of course, the closer the two become, but in any case, there will always be some measure of mediating to be done. As in many other autobiographies, photos of the sisters, the family, and even the ancestors they came from, provide visual support for the evolution of pronouns. Going beyond the written word to illustrate the passing of time, they bring the reader closer to the original anecdotes and the primary communicative situation that preceded the writing of the book.
11This sense of the pre-writing situation is strengthened in the text itself by terms of endearment, such as the word “child” already seen in the preface of the book. Originally addressed to Amy Hill Hearth, they work to evoke an audience throughout, for instance when Sadie introduces two of her former teachers by saying “those two were the cream of the crop, child” (70) and when she remarks: “I’ve had a good life, child” (84), or again when Bessie, discusses different skin colors, saying “honey, I mean black as your shoe” (75). Together with direct forms of address like “you see, I think I’m just as good as anyone”, “I’ll tell you a secret” (Bessie, 75) and even more directly, “Now, isn’t that awful of me? Isn’t it vicious?” (Bessie, 90), these linguistic elements preserve something of the original orality of the text. Other characteristics of the discourse strengthen this effect, such as the oral style of direct discourse and of parataxis, both found in the following passage:
One time he [Bessie’s landlord] came into my classroom and said, “Oh, Miss Delany! Miss Delany! And I said, “What’s the matter, Mr. Atkinson?” And he fell to the ground and said, “It’s terrible, it’s just terrible!” And I said, “What’s terrible?” And he said, “That ship [the Titanic] they said could not sink, well, it’s done sunk!” (Bessie , 89; my emphasis).
12In these instances, the signs of orality emphasize a dramatic quality in the narration, also emphasized by the numerous exclamation marks. Amy Hill Hearth also uses italics, suggesting the raising of voice, to obtain this effect: “I like my men tall (Bessie, 88); “for the first time in our lives, we had spending money (Sadie, 134); “I’m just as good an American as he is—better!” (Bessie, 161). Such aspects of the text convey spontaneity and emotion while being geared towards clarification and persuasion of an audience.
- 14 On the “southern dialect”, see Michael Montgomery, “The Southern Accent—Alive and Well”, in Southe (...)
13Although the text is written in standard, educated English, quite frequently there are somewhat more colloquial expressions that strengthen the impression of orality, such as in the following sentences: “I cosigned a loan for a man […] and I got stuck paying it” (Sadie, 134); “I wanted justice for my people […] a fair shake!” and “Too bad, I was there whether they liked it or not!” (Bessie, 141). These are general American colloquialisms, not specifically “southern” or “black”, but on a few occasions, there are forms that can be identified as belonging to the “southern dialect”: “he […] was fixing to get married” (Sadie, 78); “Ain’t it the truth” and “I had never stolen nothin’ in my life” (Bessie, 113). This last example is especially surprising, as it combines a grammatical deviation (the double negation) with a pronunciation deviation (the lack of “g” in “nothin’”), variations that are used by black as well as white people in the South, but that are identified as “Black English” outside of it14. It is difficult to say why these variant forms were included here and not in other places, but the effect is certainly to foreground the passage, to lift it out of the written text, beyond the narration and back into the experience, as it were, and thus to make the consternation of Bessie, who is accused of theft, more tangible.
14One other element of the book that can be mentioned here, in connection with the tangible, the oral and the visual, pre-dating the writing of the autobiography, is the family tree of the Logans and the Delanys. This genealogy, the origin of which is not given, shows the coming together of the Delany family from St. Mary’s, Georgia and the Logan family of Danville, Virginia Area. The earliest date given is that of c. 1780, the birth date of a Mrs. Logan, “White; wife of army officer”, who had a child called Eliza with a “Negro Slave” around the year 1812. This child of mixed race had a daughter called Martha (born in 1842), again with a white man, Jordan Motley, who in her turn, in 1861, gave birth to the daughter of a white man by the name of James Miliam. This last daughter, Nanny James Logan, became the mother of the Delany sisters, marrying Henry Beard Delany (born in 1858), the son of Thomas Sterling Delany (born around 1810), of “Negro + White” ancestry, and Sarah (born in 1814), a slave of “Negro + Native American” descent. The story of the Delanys is thus from the beginning an multi-racial story, black and white on one side, black, white and Native on the other.
15In the first sections attributed to Sadie and Bessie together (chapters 5 and 6), this family tree is “fleshed out”, as the sisters share the intimate history of their family before they were born. What strikes one at once is the way in which, at each turn, the family members, individually or together, were able to take advantage of the chances given to them. Sarah, the grandmother on father’s side, had been so much loved and appreciated by the plantation mistress that she was allowed a formal, if not legal, marriage to Thomas Delany in the front parlor of the house. In addition, their master allowed the family to keep the name Delany, a source of identity and pride, and the couple was blessed with eleven children, who all took advantage of the chance they had to learn to read and write. The sisters’ father Henry was the youngest, “just a little bitty fellow—seven years old—when the Surrender came” (23) and they left to try their luck in Florida, where all of them learned a trade or profession instead of becoming sharecroppers. As for Henry Delany, he became a mason, but when he was already in his twenties, he was offered the possibility to enroll as a student in the Episcopalian Saint Augustine’s School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he met Nanny James Logan, who would become his wife and the mother of Sadie and Bessie.
- 15 From what we know this did not happen very often. Usually they would be his extra-marital children (...)
- 16 For a full discussion of sexual mores in America through the ages, including much information on s (...)
16Nanny Logan’s family history is even more extraordinary. It begins with an army officer, John Logan, who was called to battle during the War of 1812. Upon coming back he finds his wife, already mother of seven daughters, with two new female offspring, Patricia and Eliza, the products of her romance with one of their slaves. What consequently happened to the slave is unknown, but the officer evidently forgave his wife for her escapades. The Delany sisters show clearly how they feel about this—forgave her!—but their outrage obviously concerns the adultery, not the mixed-race issue. The children were adopted by the officer as his own15 and became very popular. But they were unable to marry, as most black men were slaves, and marriage to a white man was out of the question on account of their “coloredness”. Thus, for two generations, the family name Logan was inherited through the female line. Of the two mixed-race girls, the one called Eliza had a child named Martha with a white man, and this Martha, in her turn, lived with another white man, James Miliam, “like man and wife for fifty years and didn’t part until death”. Bessie and Sadie are convinced: “they clearly loved each other very much” (30)16.
- 17 Eating in the kitchen is a powerful image of the black-white relationship. Many autobiographies me (...)
17As is clear, the sisters’ account becomes more involved here; after all, Martha Logan and James Miliam were their grandparents and they knew them first-hand. They emphasize that the situation of their grandparents was an irregular one, as Mr. Miliam had no wife and devoted himself completely to his mixed-race family, while in the normal situation the colored woman and children were kept “on the side”. Indeed, most black autobiographies distinguish themselves by the absence of white fathers. Still, the sisters do not remember anyone speaking out against this unusual situation, because “Mr. Miliam was one tough fella, and that’s no lie” (30), and he let it be known that “if anyone messed with his ladylove, why, he’d track ‘em down and blow their head off” (31). When at the end of his life and a widower, one of his grandsons, the little Delany brother Harry, was sent to take care of him, and a friend suggested that the little “nigger child” eat in the kitchen17, he told him “to get out of his house or he might soon find himself dead and shoveling coal for the Devil” (34). These stories show clearly how identity and a sense of self-worth were nurtured in the children of this extra-ordinary family from the beginning.
18Most essential to the sisters’ own lives is the name that the couple gave the daughter who was to become their mother: Nanny James Logan, the middle name—James—substituting for the last name that the child was not allowed to carry. The question of naming and identity reveals its great importance here as elsewhere. As has already been shown, the sisters mention with pride that the Delanys were allowed to keep their own name under slavery, and Sadie remembers how each morning their own father would make them “line up” for inspection. She explains: “We carried the Delany name and he wanted us to look respectable when we left the house” (50). In addition, they have not forgotten how their parents consistently called each other Mr. Delany and Mrs. Delany in front of other people—including even them—so as to keep their first names a secret and “block” the tradition of calling colored people by their first name only (6). The pride that this entails is not limited to the last name. One anecdote, presented by Bessie, recalls how a white man once knocked at their door to ask for the use of their phone, casually calling their mother “auntie”, as was the habit, just as it was common to call a black man “uncle” or “boy”. As Bessie tells it; “Mama told that man, ‘You may use my phone, but you may not call me auntie. I am no kin to you,’” and she comments with pride: “Now, that was a very courageous thing for a colored woman to do in those days” (54). Even much later, in Harlem, the sisters’ behavior is guided by pride in the Delany name: “Knowing that Mama and Papa were counting on us to behave like ladies put the pressure on us to be good. We were very proud of the Delany name” (133).
19Likewise, the Delanys were always proud of their race. Sadie having a rather light complexion, she might have had the chance of “passing” as a white person, but she never considered taking it. As she puts it: “I never had any desire to be white. I am absolutely comfortable with who I am […] I had no desire to change me. I guess I owe that to my Mama and Papa” (121). In fact, Sadie, here, follows the example of her mother, who was proud to be a black woman yet looked completely white, so that she would shock people who did not know her when she was greeted affectionately by her husband—“this good-looking Negro man”—in public (71), and who on occasion was forced to travel in a railway carriage reserved for white people (72). Bessie, with her much darker complexion, was often treated less well than Sadie, and especially than their younger sister Julia, who was lighter still. One day she and Julia presented themselves for a factory job and the white foreman, trying to give her a break, asked Bessie if she was “Spanish”. As she puts it: “This was supposed to be my cue to nod my head, since they’d hire you if you were ‘Spanish’”. But rather than take advantage of the chance given to her, this only makes Bessie furious, and with the answer “No, I am not Spanish. I am an American Negro!” the sisters walk out of the foreman’s office, their pride intact (110). Of course, attacks on this pride were continuous. But the sisters were protected by their parents’ convictions and instructed in the use of cleanliness, defiance, humor and irony, and if all else failed, a refusal to be dishonored. These are age-old defense mechanisms dating back to slavery times, with which slaves managed to preserve their sense of honor and pride. They are worth exploring in the text.
20First of all, on the subject of cleanliness, Sadie mentions how her mother used to bathe her children every night, “in a tin tub which she had to fill by hand”, and she assumes this was because “people used to say that Negroes were dirty people and she may have been trying to combat that image” (49). She also recalls one of her students, whose neck had a dark ring around it, which the girl’s mother believed to be a birth-mark, but which she knew was just plain old dirt. Sadie was finally able to rub it off, and she thinks now:
[…] that’s kind of funny. Imagine not knowing that your child’s neck is dirty. Well, there are a lot of people who weren’t raised properly themselves, so how can they teach their children right? Sometimes it’s neglect, sometimes it’s just ignorance. And what people don’t know will really hold them back. This is especially true of colored children once they try to succeed among white people in the job market. Being presentable and having good manners—don’t underestimate the importance of this, especially if you’re colored. It’s amazing how many people don’t know the basics about simple hand-washing, how to iron a shirt properly, things like that (143).
21Bessie, on her part, remembers how their father used to worry when he came up to New York to see them and they went out to the Old Bronx Opera House together. She explains this worry as follows: “Papa always did care about appearances. But I think it was because he had to; it was part of getting ahead. White people were watching you all the time, just waiting for you to make a mistake. So we not only lived a clean life, we wanted to be sure people knew that we did” (129). She tells how at dental school “her locker was always perfectly clean and neat” while those of her white fellow students were “pigsties”, and how her uniform was always “scrubbed, starched and ironed”, because, as she puts it: “when you are colored, everyone is always looking for your faults. If you are going to make it, you have to be entirely honest, clean, brilliant, and so on. Because if you slip up once, the white folks say to each other, ‘See, what’d I tell you’” (114). As regards cleanliness, then, both sisters seem to have incorporated the attitudes of their parents to an equal degree, but where it concerns the other protection mechanisms, individual differences between the sisters become much more apparent.
- 18 Martin Luther King refers to this ability to overcome the fear of death as one of the great treasu (...)
22Defiance, for instance, comes quickly to Bessie, who is thus able to restore her sense of self-worth in the face of an attack on her pride. Sadie tells, for instance, how when New England missionaries gave them each a beautiful china doll, Bessie used the artist’s palette she had also been given, mixed the paints until she was satisfied and painted her doll’s face the color of her own, while their parents looked on and “just smiled” (69). When segregation comes to be established and their park suddenly has a separate water-fountain for “colored”, Bessie waits till nobody is looking and takes the dipper “from the white side” and drinks from it (67). Even in the “colored” waiting-room, at Waycross, Georgia, where she has to change trains, Bessie has to use this defiance. While she is taking her long hair down in order to comb it out before going to present herself for a new job, a white man enters and leers at her. As Bessie puts it: “He was drunk, and he smelled bad, and he started mumbling things”. Unable to accept this kind of behavior towards her, Bessie tells him: “Oh, why don’t you shut up and go wait with your own kind in the white waiting room?” (92). Even though the people she is traveling with run out of the back of the building and hide in the woods, out of a real fear of being lynched on the spot, Bessie continues to sit there combing her hair as if nothing has happened, while a crowd gathers outside. The only thing that saved her, she thinks, was that the white man was obviously very drunk and thus the other whites did not feel like taking his side against her. Through her enormous need to keep her personal dignity, Bessie is able to overcome even the fear of death18.
- 19 Bessie compares her sister to Booker T. Washington, whom she calls “a smoother of the waters”. Sh (...)
- 20 We see here the stereotypical reason given for the lack of achievement of black people. Still toda (...)
23In comparison to Bessie, Sadie’s protection strategies can be identified as far more “accommodationist”19. Naturally, this often created a certain indignation in Bessie. In the situation mentioned above, for instance, Sadie scolds Bessie for having provoked a white man and put her life in danger, which still causes Bessie to react with exasperation: “As if I provoked him! Honey, he provoked me! Sadie says she would have ignored him. I say, how can you ignore some drunk, smelly white man treating you like trash!” (93). Sadie is often successful through compromise. A student at Pratt Institute in New York City, where she is one out of just two “colored girls”, she once received an A for chemistry but only a C for class participation, as the instructor believed that she was too “lazy” to raise her hand20. She protests the grade, saying she is just shy and afraid to give the wrong answer, and is finally able to negotiate a B, something that would never have satisfied Bessie. Later, when she presents herself for teaching positions at white schools in New York, officials habitually refuse her on account of her southern accent, obviously to avoid bringing in the sensitive question of race. This stimulates her to adapt, and take speaking lessons with a white lady in Manhattan, whose doorman makes her use the freight elevator. Again Sadie accommodates and decides not to “make a fuss”. As she explains it: “You had to decide: Am I going to change the world, or am I going to change me? Or maybe change the world a little bit, just by changing me? If I can get ahead, doesn’t that help my people?” (118).
- 21 This is close to what Zora Neale Hurston, in the introduction to her autobiography Dust Tracks on (...)
24Important ingredients of Sadie’s kind of defiance are humor and irony. She explains, for instance, how she “handled white people” during the Jim Crow era. When she wanted to buy a pair of shoes, for instance, she would be “invited” to “go on and sit in the back”, away from the white people in the front of the store, to try them on. Instead of getting angry or protesting, as her sister would have done, she would ask sweetly “Where, Mr. Heller?” for him to gesture to the back and say: “Back there”, to which she would react by asking once more: “Back where?” As Sadie puts it: “Well, I’d just worry that man to death. Finally, he’d say, ‘Just sit anywhere, Miss Delany!’ And so I would sit myself down in the white section, and smile” (72). Sadie also remembers, with obvious pleasure, that a white colleague used to say about her: “That Sarah Delany. You tell her to do something, she smiles at you, and then she just turns around and does what she wants anyway” (73)21. In fact, humor and irony, as already identified in the subtitle of the book—TheDelany Sisters’ First 100 Years—are a constant feature in the text. The two sisters grew up with the knowledge of how to turn a situation around and create the necessary distance to preserve honor and pride. Their father, for instance, had a joke on white people’s belief in their superiority based on the purity of their blood—even when the black people around them could easily identify the tell-tale signs—saying that “Negro blood must be superior, it must be strong stuff, ‘cause it always showed up!” (65). Bessie is especially gifted in this respect. When she complains once again that “when Negroes are average they fail, unless they are very, very lucky”, while “if you’re average and white, honey, you can go far”, a final sentence rounds off and brings a smile to the face: “Just look at Dan Quayle. If that boy was colored he’d be washing dishes somewhere” (114). Later-on she explains with humor why she would not participate in the 1920s Harlem lunch counter sit-ins: “I was afraid some nasty white folks would spit in my food in the back, then serve it to me. I didn’t want their germs, no sir. You can yell at me, call me names, hit me, but keep your germs to yourself!” (138).
25With these defenses—cleanliness, defiance, humor and irony—the Delanys were able to keep their personal space, and with this, to preserve their sense of dignity and pride. In addition to these, duty was a key word in the sisters’ lives. Both grew up with the conviction that it was their duty to advance themselves and not to rely on other people for help. Sadie recalls her father’s words: “Daughter, you are college material. You owe it to your nation, your race, and yourself to go. And if you don’t, then shame on you!” and “Daughter, I have no money. But you must not take a scholarship. If you take a scholarship, you will be beholden to the people who gave you the money. You must make your own way” (79). Obviously, her sister Bessie, remembers hearing the same speech (85). Thus, to support themselves, they had to take small jobs. Naturally, as young black girls, they were offered domestic jobs in white households—and they looked forward to the bit of money they would make—but to their disappointment, their mother considered it “completely out of the question” (76). Now, at the end of their lives, they are proudest of all that they “never worked for white people in their homes” (76). Here is one of the instances where the sisters can clearly distinguish themselves, as domestic work in white people’s homes is a constant in black women’s autobiographies.
26It is because of this sense of duty, of pride and of being special, paired with enormous willpower, that the sisters are able to climb up the social ladder. Sadie eventually becomes “the first colored teacher in the New York City system to teach domestic science on the high school level” (120), but not without having to ”be a little clever—Bessie would say sneaky” (119). Indeed, knowing that if she came to an interview at an all-white high school she would be rejected on the spot, she “skipped” her appointment “and sent them a letter, acting like there was a mix-up”, after which she simply arrived on the first day of teaching. As Sadie explains what happened: “they just about died when they saw me. A colored woman! But my name was on the list to teach there, and it was too late for them to send me someplace else” (120). Bessie’s willpower is equally impressive, but it allows for no tricks. When at Columbia University Dental School she receives a failing grade, she has a white friend turn in the work again, as if it was hers. Her outrage is still audible when she says: “I’ll tell you what happened, honey. She passed with my failed work! That was the kind of thing that could make you crazy, as a Negro” (113). When later she is accused of the theft of some expensive dental instruments, she is finally able to put the blame where it belongs with the white girl who had planted one of the instruments in Bessie’s locker, thus trying to frame her. Bessie is certain that but for her own vigilance, the girl “would have gotten away with it because it would be easy for everyone to believe that this darkey was a thief”, and again her outrage seems undiminished by the years which have passed: “Now, that just kills me” (114). “I suppose”, she adds, “I should be grateful to Columbia that at that time they let in colored people. Well, I’m not. They let me in but they beat me down for being there!” (115).
27While her sister Sadie stayed in a traditionally female profession, that of domestic science teacher, Bessie, by taking up the male profession of dentist, crossed not only boundaries of race but of gender as well. So she suffered discrimination from two directions. She remembers, for instance, how one man who came for treatment said to her: “Can you pull teeth with those little hands?” and she responded just as strongly as if it had been a racial slur: “Do you really want to find out?” As always, Bessie adds a commentary that shows how her feelings are still very much alive: “It made me mad. I could take those forceps and pull just as hard as any man. That sexism was a nasty thing to deal with” (124). Still, between the two evils, Bessie knows which is worse, as she explains:
I was torn between two issues—colored, and women’s rights. But it seemed to me that no matter how much I had to put up with as a woman, the biggest problem was being colored. People looked at me and the first thing they saw was Negro, not woman. So racial equality, as a cause, won my heart (141).
28Bessie’s goal in life was to be seen as an individual, not as “a ‘colored’ person, or a ‘Negro’ person”, and she feels that she succeeded “to some extent” (129-130). But even if she believes that she and her sister “were good citizens, good Americans!” and “as patriotic as anyone” (172), it is clear to her that their country did not love them back (60). Nor do they feel included in its mythology. In one of their joint chapters, the sisters mention, for instance, their first trip up to New York City by boat. They recall that afterwards someone asked them if they saw the Statue of Liberty as they pulled into the harbor, which makes them reflect: “Tell you the truth, we didn’t care too much about it. The Statue of Liberty was important to white European immigrants. It was a symbol to them. We knew it wasn’t meant for us” (99).
- 22 Bessie is referring to racist Southerners, defenders of the Confederacy and all it stood for.
29A lot of pain is embedded here. Bessie, after evoking the lynchings committed by “rebby boys”22 for nothing more than “a colored man” objecting “to being called ‘uncle’”, or a white woman saying that he “had looked at her in a certain way”, reflects that but for the white missionaries at her school and her mother’s white relatives, she would have hated all white people. As she puts it, not without humor:
Once in a while, God sends a good white person my way, even to this day. I think it is God’s way of keeping me from becoming too mean. And when he sends a nice one to me, then I have to eat crow. And honey, crow is a tough old bird to eat, let me tell you (77).
Bessie might be referring to Amy Hill Hearth here but in any case, even if they had the good example of their ancestors, and the Delany sisters recognize the beauty of the inter-racial relationship, they did not expand the multi-racial family tree their ancestors started. In fact, they did not enter into lasting intimate relationships or start families at all. Sadie is the only one who discusses a specific “beau”, called Frank, a fellow student at her brother’s medical school. But after some rumors came to his ears, Sadie allowed her father to make the decision: “Sadie, you won’t be seeing any more of Frank for now”, which she accepted without further ado: “I guess he really was involved somehow but I never learned the details. All I know is that I never saw Frank again” (83-84). For Bessie, as a young woman at dental school, it was clear that she should stay away from the opposite sex. As she puts it: “The white boys looked down on me and the colored boys were too busy trying to goose my behind!” (111). But Bessie makes sure this is not understood as weakness: “Don’t you go thinking because we are maiden ladies that Sadie and I didn’t have lots of beaus. We were popular, good-looking gals, but I think we were too smart, too independent for most men” (85). Determined to develop themselves as equal American citizens, they seemed to have stayed away from anyone—black or white—who would have categorized, restricted or taken advantage of them in any way.
- 23 As the old folksong presents it: “Got one mind for white folks to see / N’other for what I know is (...)
30The final defense, the refusal to be dishonored, concerns those situations where a loss of honor cannot be avoided, and one must rely on the power of the imagination to create an alternative world, a spiritual world of wholeness that can become a sanctuary23. The sisters remember their parents as their great examples, both through their actions and through their words. Bessie still hears her father saying: “Remember, they can segregate you, but they can’t control your mind. Your mind’s still yours” (113). As in slavery times, religious faith plays a large role here. Indeed, as Bessie puts it: “It was religious faith that formed the backbone of the Delany family. We were good Christians, and God never let us down” (60). Their father taught them not to complain but to “let God do His work, ” a lesson that became concrete early on, for instance, during a frightening thunderstorm. Bessie recalls:
The whole house was just a-trembling. And so were we! When the storm was over, there was the most beautiful rainbow. Papa said, “Look, children, it is a gift from God”. Sadie took my hand and we ran outside to get a better look at that rainbow. We were certain God had hung it in the sky, just for us (59).
As they believed when they were young, they still believe in the special relationship of their family to God, and their prayers, each morning and each night, take a very long time, because they pray for every living member of the family—fifteen nieces and nephews, plus all their children and grandchildren—as well as for all those who are no longer there (203).
31As they see the younger generations grow up, the sisters become observers rather than actors. Nephews go off to fight in World War II and later in Vietnam, and great changes for black people announce themselves and become reality. But the sisters are already quite elderly—in their seventies—at that time. Bessie calls it “one the biggest regrets” of her life that Sadie and she did not participate in the 1963 March on Washington and hear Martin Luther King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech, because some younger relatives, who thought they would be “overwhelmed in those crowds”, talked them out of it (197-198). Still, they never lost their lust for life. They were finally able to buy their own house—with a porch—and they love their garden. The telling of this proud fact is in itself an occasion for further humor, because the first time someone came to the house, she told the sisters to “be sure to tell the owner […]”, giving Bessie a chance to say: “Lady, I have news for you. I am the owner”. Bessie remembers: “She about dropped dead. It was clear she thought I was the maid”, and she adds with the power of what seems like extra-sensorial perception, but which is, unfortunately, the fruit of experience:
You know what she was thinking, What’s this little darkey doing, owning a big house like this? Or: Lord, this neighborhood is finished! It’s doomed! The darkies have taken over! They’ll bring all of their friends! (194).
32Having discussed the cleanliness, the defiance, the humor and irony, the will-power and finally the refusal to be dishonored with the help of which the Delany sisters were able to carve out their place in a world still dominated by whites, there is one traditional defense left undiscussed: that of vengeance. This defense does not seem in character for the sisters, Sadie being too gentle in nature, and Bessie too straightforward and honest. Still, the title of the last chapter is interesting in this respect. In “Outliving the Rebby Boys”, right before the end, Bessie suddenly realizes that they have finally taken revenge on southern racists through their longevity. As she puts it:
All those people who were mean to me in my life—all those rebby boys—they have turned to dust, and this old gal is still here, along with sister Sadie.
We’ve outlived those old rebby boys!
That’s one way to beat them!
That’s justice!
They’re turning in their graves, while Sadie and me are getting the last word, in this book […]. I’m having my say, giving my opinion. Lord, ain’t it good to be an American (209).
Thus the last words of the book are for Bessie, who reflects: “Maybe I’ll get into Heaven after all”, still playing her old role of the “bad” one when she adds with her customary humor: “I may have to hang on to Sadie’s heels, but I’ll get there” (210). There is a curious similarity between these final words of the last chapter of the book, where Bessie claims room for herself in heaven next to her sister, and the final words of the first chapter, where Sadie claims room for the both of them in the world, because, as she puts it: “we kind of balance each other” (8). With this return to the beginning, the story seems to become eternal, the story of the realization of a Dream: an American story.
