Essay on Having Our Say

The social, cultural and political history of America as it affects the life course of American citizens became very real to us as the Delaney sisters, Sadie and Bessie, recounted their life course spanning a century of living in their book Having Our Say. The Delaney sisters' lives covered the period of their childhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, after the Surrender to their adult lives in Harlem, New York City during the roaring twenties, to a quiet retirement in suburban, New York City, as self-styled "maiden ladies." (Delaney, 1967)

In a memoir that's as much a historical record as a testimony to two extraordinary women, the Delaney sisters recall their remarkable lives, spanning more than a century of the African- American experience. Daughters of the nation's first black Episcopal bishop, Sadie and Bessie Delaney, born in 1889 and 1891 respectively, are a living record of the seismic changes that have affected black America since Emancipation.
Their father was born in slavery; their mother was the daughter of an issue-free Negro and a white Virginian farmer who, though prohibited by law from marrying his beloved Martha Logan, treated her and his children as his lawful family. Raised in the sheltered environment of St. Augustine's School near Raleigh, where their father was the principal, the two girls were expected, like their eight other siblings, to excel both academically and morally.

An idyllic childhood was followed by the introduction of Jim Crow legislation that soon made life in the South intolerable, prompting the sisters to move to Harlem. In New York, Sadie graduated from Pratt and became a high-school teacher, while Bessie, graduating from Columbia, became a dentist.

Today, looking back, they continue to reflect the wisdom, humor, and feistiness that enabled them to triumph over racism and sexism the latter, in their opinion, not as corrosive as the former......................

ESSAY ON THE AMERICAS