Hearth, Amy Hill. Having Our

¶ … Hearth, Amy Hill. Having Our Say: The Delaney Sister's First 100 Years. New York:

Dell, 1994.

The seismic changes in America over the course of the last 100 years are embodied in the lives of the Delaney sisters, Sadie and Bessie Delany. These two African-American sisters, one born in 1889, the other born in 1891, reflect the changes that occurred in America from the end of Reconstruction up to the present. Their story is one of triumph and survival over the evils of Jim Crow. Author Amy Hill Hearth's Having Our Say: The Delaney Sister's First 100 Years examines how these two women's lives both reflect the limits the times placed on African-Americans and also how they rose above them. The lives of the sisters, from one of the finest and most respected African-American families in North Carolina are eccentric and extraordinary, yet interact with seemingly every major historical event in American history, from the end of slavery, to the depression, to the Civil Rights movement.

Oral historian and journalist Amy Hill Hearth met the Delaneys in 1991. She immediately became impressed by the ways in which they confronted racism in very different ways. Sadie was a high school teacher of home economics in New York City. She saw herself as elevating her people through education. "Being presentable and having good manners -- don't underestimate the importance of this if you're colored," she reflected ruefully, using the vocabulary of her time to designate an African-American individual (Hearth 143). Bessie became the second licensed black woman dentist in New York City after graduating from Columbia University. Bessie's eventual vocation seemed to make things come 'full circle' regarding the fate of the sister's grandmother, Martha Logan who was the "ladylove" of an amateur white dentist named James Miliam and helped him in his work (Hearth 29). Their grandmother inherited the farm after his death and miraculously won a legal challenge to her claim to keep Miliam's land.

Growing up, Bessie was more vocal and less able to forgive the racism the sisters confronted. At one point, Bessie says that she worries if she will get into heaven. Unlike her sister who is 'molasses' and sugar without trying, Bessie says that she always was the type to look the Devil in the eye, no matter what the price (Hearth 9). Bessie was the more politically active of the two. While Bessie was practicing dentistry in Harlem, a patient exclaimed:

"your office isn't a dentist's office. it's a social service agency" (Hearth 159). Sadie, said Bessie, was more practical about helping people "one person at a time," while Bessie wanted to change the world, and felt like she was walking around with everyone's troubles on her shoulder, all of the time (Hearth 159). Bessie's more radical nature was evident even as a child -- Bessie painted a porcelain doll's face to match her own skin, because she was angry that there were only white dolls. "You couldn't get a colored doll" back then, remember the sisters (Hearth 69).

In reading about the lives of these living sisters, the relatively recent demise of slavery and Jim Crow becomes patently clear. Their own father had distinct memories of being freed as a slave. He became an Episcopal Bishop and made his children very cognizant of the value of education, given the advantages his schooling had given him, compared to other freed slaves. At St. Augustine's where the sisters were undergraduates Sadie even met Booker T. Washington, in another brush with history. For a woman to drive a car was extraordinary during that era but Sadie "got to be a good driver, and when Mr. Booker T. Washington would come to visit Raleigh, he would climb into the passenger seat of Lemuel's car" and she would act as his chauffer (Hearth 80). "Mr. Washington tried to help his people getting them educated," says Sadie sadly, mourning the fact he is often regarded by more black radicals in an unflattering way.

Hearth's purpose in writing her book is twofold. On one hand, she wishes to celebrate the lives of these extraordinary women. She also wishes to show the multifaceted nature of the black experience in America. As professionals, these two women had access to advantages that other blacks did not, but they used these opportunities to excel far beyond any expectations the black or the white community had about the lives of women. Again and again, Bessie and Sadie find themselves in the middle of what will later become epoch-shattering history -- although the sisters are careful to add that when they moved to Harlem said they did not "venture too far into the jazz scene" because "after all, we were Bishop Delany's daughters" (Hearth 139).

Reading this book is a fascinating tour of the two sister's lives and gives a sense of their unique and distinct voices. The paths of these sister's was extraordinary -- Bessie graduated with a dentistry degree in 1919, when women had not long had the vote and Jim Crow was still in force in the South. "As a woman dentist, I faced sexual harassment -- that's what they call it today -- but to me, racism was always a bigger problem" (Hearth 10). Sadie was afraid to go to her first job interview, even in New York City, because she would be denied because of her race. Yet the sisters were still full participants in history, supporting their brother Hubert's run for Congress in 1929, seeing Paul Robeson portray Othello on stage, and meeting Cab Calloway (Hearth 213; 188; 216).