Feisty Dr. Bessie and easy-going Miss Sadie, daughters of a former slave and companions for more than a century, reach out to people long after their deaths.
"It makes me feel good when I go to different places and people learn about them," author Amy Hill Hearth said Wednesday. "They kind of live on."
Amy Hill Hearth, author of "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years" speaks to students at Lawrence High School about her book. The book is being used in a school district literacy project. Hearth will give a public lecture on the oral history of the Delany sisters at 7 p.m. Thursday at South Junior High.
At Hearth's urging, Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany and Sarah "Sadie" Delany collaborated on a 1993 memoir, "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years." Millions of copies of the book have sold. Their story was adapted to the Broadway stage and a television movie.
Hearth knew she had hit upon something special the moment she met the sisters 10 years ago at their Victorian-decorated home in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
"I was charmed immediately," she said. "From that moment, I felt my life would change."
Hearth is in Lawrence to participate in the community's discussion of the book. "Having Our Say" is this year's selection for the Read Across Lawrence literacy project, sponsored by Lawrence public schools, the Lied Center and Firstar Bank.
The author will deliver a free, public lecture at 7 tonight at South Junior High School. She'll show three short videotapes of the Delany sisters.
"They're really precious," Hearth promised.
While working for The New York Times, Hearth stumbled across the reclusive siblings. She wrote a lengthy story for the newspaper about the women, who had both celebrated their 100th birthdays.
A publisher read that story and proposed a book. The sisters had to be sold on the idea.
"At first, they didn't think they were important enough," Hearth said. "I had to convince them they were."
The book is organized in rough chronology, beginning with the sisters' earliest memories of growing up in Raleigh, N.C., and ending with their contemporary lives in their home in Mount Vernon.
Bessie and Sadie were part of a large family led by a father born into slavery and a mother of mixed race. The sisters attended St. Augustine's School where their mother taught and their father was an administrator. Their dad was the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.
The sisters moved to New York City in 1917 and graduated from Columbia University. Bessie became the second black woman licensed to practice dentistry in New York state in 1923. Sadie became the first black home economics teacher in the New York City public school system.
Neither married and they lived together most of their lives.
But they had distinct personalities. Bessie was outspoken and confrontational. Sadie was calm and agreeable.
"We kind of balance each other out," Sadie said in the book.
In a discussion with a literature class at Lawrence High School, Hearth said she coaxed from the Delany sisters a 299-page oral history of their companionship.
The sisters lived through the era of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Korean War and Vietnam. They were alive when women gained the right to vote. They were witness to the terrors of the KKK and assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
During the years, the Delany sisters knew some of the most influential people of the day, including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson.
The book is about women, history, race, discrimination, perseverance depending upon a reader's perspective, Hearth said.
Originally, the publisher wanted a simple biography.
"I said it needs to be oral history," Hearth said. "Not have me get in the way, especially because I'm white."
Dialogue in "Having Our Say" is flavored by the times in which the sisters grew up. For example, the sisters use the word "colored" to describe black people.
"This is who they are. That's the point of it," Hearth said. "They are unvarnished. They are what they are and say what they want to say. That appeals to people."
Bessie died in 1995 at the age of 104. Sadie lived another four years, passing away at 109. They had a bond that many siblings can relate to, Hearth said.
"They had been together more than 100 years and still had this sibling rivalry thing."
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