• October 09, 1995
• Vol. 44
• No. 15

A Life Fully Lived

Bessie Delany, Candid Witness to a Tumultuous Century, Dies at 104

AT AGE 102, ANNIE ELIZABETH Delany declared, "I haven't been afraid to live, and I won't be afraid to die." When death finally came to Bessie Delany—the genteel firebrand who, with her sister Sadie, now 106, charmed readers in their feisty 1993 memoir Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years—she approached it on her own terms. Although she was the second black woman to practice as a dentist in New York State, she couldn't abide doctors or hospitals. And so it was at the redbrick home in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., where the sisters had lived since 1957, that "Dr. Bessie," whose health had been failing since she broke a hip last year, died in her sleep on Sept. 25. "She got what she wanted," says Amy Hill Hearth, the journalist who cowrote Having Our Say. "She didn't suffer, and she died in her own bed."

A "witty, funny woman who never took herself too seriously," by Hearth's description, Bessie, 104, had been thrilled by the success of the book, which sold nearly a million copies and inspired the current Broadway play Having Our Say. "Twenty-eight weeks on The New York Times best-seller list—not bad for two old inky-dinks!" she told Hearth. Deluged with "more fan mail every week than Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser combined," according to their literary agent, Dan Strone, who also represents the comics, they were unable to reply to every letter. Instead, they responded in 1994 with The Delany Sisters' Book of Everyday Wisdom, in which Bessie confessed, "I'm not too old to get crushes." Always ready for new experiences, the two recently accepted an invitation to pose for a pantyhose ad (see page 64).

Fame, it seems, never swayed the Delanys. Though Bessie traded one-liners with Bill Cosby (whose wife Camille coproduced the stage version of Having Our Say) and kept a photo album of her meeting with Hillary Clinton, the two maiden ladies, as they called themselves, often declined requests to receive celebrities. Instead, they followed a routine of rising at 5:30 a.m., doing yoga, praying, reading and ending the day with the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

"I never thought I'd see the day when people would be interested in what an old Negro woman has to say," Bessie once said. But both she and Sadie, the first black home economics teacher in a New York City high school, were pegged as gifted story-tellers by Hearth, who met them in 1991 when she was researching a story for The New York Times. The two provided vivid accounts of their girlhood in Raleigh, N.C., where their father, Henry—who was born a slave and became the nation's first black Episcopal bishop—was chaplain at St. Augustine's College. Hearth persuaded them to share memories of teaching in the Jim Crow South to earn money to continue their schooling, of their move to New York City in 1917 and of their life among the elite during the Harlem Renaissance, when they befriended Cab Calloway and W.E.B. Du Bois.

The spirited Bessie touched many lives. In a letter read at her memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Sept. 28, Hillary Clinton, who had visited the sisters in March, said, "I feel so blessed to have known [her]....
She lived honestly and well."

Although Sadie often said, "I give myself two weeks without Bessie," she is "strong and doing quite well," reports Hearth. As always, she is facing the future without flinching. "I'm not going to give up," she told Hearth. "I'll just do the best I can without her."