January 2011

These days I am usually the first one awake in the morning. I wake up at six-thirty. And the first thing I do when I open my eyes is smile, and then I say, “Thank you, Lord, for another day!” If I don’t hear Bessie get up, I’ll go into her room and wake her. Sometimes I have to knock on her headboard. And she opens her eyes and says, “Oh, Lord, another day?” I don’t think Bessie would get up at all sometimes if it weren’t for me.

In the mornings, Monday through Friday, we do our yoga exercises. I started doing yoga exercises with Mama about forty years ago. Mama was starting to shrink up and get bent down, and I started exercising with her to straighten her up again. Only I didn’t know at the time that what we were actually doing was yoga. We just thought we were exercising. I kept doing my yoga exercises even after Mama died. Well, when Bessie turned eighty, she decided that I looked better than her. So she decided she would start doing yoga too.

It was particularly interesting to read the portion of the article about the invention of the birth-control pill. As a very young lawyer working for the Continental Bank in Chicago in the early 1950s, I was involved in a minor way with Mrs. Stanley McCormick, the lady who used a significant part of her substantial fortune to bank-roll the pill’s development. My role was ministerial: To be sure that each month Mrs. McCormick’s funds got to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. The article is excellent and very accurate. The only thing I question is the use of the name “Kate McCormick.” No one ever called the formidable Mrs. McCormick “Kate.” To do so would, I believe, have ended the conversation with a look of displeasure.

Generally, your magazine is adept at presenting both sides of an issue. However, David Halberstam’s article “Discovering Sex” in the May/June issue appeared to be biased against women who choose, or long, to be full-time homemakers. The author stated women were expected to take care of their children and help their husbands, and equated this with “never having any thoughts” of their own. He may have simply been paraphrasing the ideas of society in the 1950s; nevertheless, I felt the piece seemed to present homemaking in a negative aura. As a professional practicing social worker graduated summa cum laude from the State University of New York, I work and see children every day in broken, abusive and neglectful homes, and the “togetherness” and support of a healthy, functioning family is exactly what they require. When I am fortunate enough to have a family, I am looking forward to being fulfilled by “making of beds, shopping for groceries, matching slipcover materials, eating peanut-butter sandwiches, chauffeuring Cub Scouts and Brownies and lying beside my husband …”

Well, it was obvious that I was the one who should quit my job, even though Sadie was a mama’s child. We sat down and thought it through, financially. If Sadie continued to work until 1960, she would get a hundred and fifty dollars a month from her pension with the New York City Board of Education. She said, “That would be fifty dollars for Mama, fifty dollars for you, and fifty dollars for me.” She was going to just split it three ways. We figured that the three of us, living together, could do O.K. on one hundred and fifty a month. And Mama got fifteen dollars a month from Papa’s pension. Mama was so funny about that fifteen dollars. She was so proud of it you’d have thought it was fifteen million .

I got my first teaching job in New York in the fall of 1920. I think I was paid fifteen hundred dollars for the year. It was at RS. 119 in Harlem, which was an elementary school, mostly colored. This was a typical assignment for a colored teacher. They most certainly did not want us in schools where the children were white. The parents would object. One way that the principals kept us out was to say they could not hire anyone with a Southern accent because it would be damaging to the children. Well, most of us colored teachers at the time had Southern accents. So it was just a way of keeping us out.

When my accent was considered a problem, I found a way around that. I signed up with a speech coach, a woman in Manhattan. She was a white woman, a lovely woman. I don’t think she had too many colored clients. I remember that when I would go to her apartment for the lessons, the doorman made me take the freight elevator. I didn’t make a fuss because I wanted those speech lessons.

I had always dreamed I would become a medical doctor, but I ran out of time and money. I was in my late twenties already, and I would have needed a few more credits to get into medical school. I was worried that by the time I earned the money and took those classes, I’d be too old.

My brother Harry was a dentist, and he was going to see if I could enroll at New York University, where he had graduated. But this was in 1918, and New York University would not take women in its dentistry program. Instead I enrolled at Columbia University. This was in the fall of 1919. There were eleven women out of a class of about one hundred and seventy. There were about six colored men. And then there was me. I was the only colored woman!

When I first came to New York, I was so green I don’t know how I survived. I was shy, but I was determined. I just kept hearing Papa’s voice: “You are college material. And if you don’t go, shame on you.”

One problem was that I was lonely. There were just two of us colored girls in the domestic science division at Pratt Institute when I enrolled, and the other girl dropped out. I had a difficult time at first, because I really had to scramble in courses like chemistry. At St. Aug’s there were no chemistry labs, so I was weak in that area.

I remember that I got an A on the chemistry final exam, but then the teacher gave me a C for the course. He said it was because I wouldn’t raise my hand and participate in class. He said I was lazy! But I was a little shy, and I found chemistry hard, and I was afraid I’d give the wrong answer. So I kept my mouth shut. I protested the grade, though, because I felt an A on the final exam spoke for itself! They compromised with me, and I got a B.

We encountered Jim Crow laws for the first time on a summer Sunday afternoon. We were about five and seven years old at the time. Mama and Papa used to take us to Pullen Park in Raleigh for picnics, and that particular day the trolley driver told us to go to the back. We children objected loudly because we always liked to sit in front, where the breeze would blow your hair. That had been part of the fun for us. But Mama and Papa just gently told us to hush and took us to the back without making a fuss.

When we got to Pullen Park, we found changes there too. The spring where you got water now had a big wooden sign across the middle. On one side the word white was painted, and on the other the word colored . Why, what in the world was all this about? We may have been little children but, honey, we got the message loud and clear. When nobody was looking, Bessie took the dipper from the white side and drank from it.

Our childhood years were so protected that we didn’t have but the vaguest notion of what sex was. I would see the rooster worrying the hen, and I didn’t know what was happening. But I’d watch the hens and had it figured out when they were just about to pop out an egg. And I’d shout, “Sadie! Sadie! Come quick, if you want to see this hen lay an egg.” She kept missing it, so one time I picked up the hen and held her upside down until Sadie got there.

We lived a clean life, but Lord, we had a good time. Why, every one of us children played an instrument, and you know as a family we formed a band.

We Delanys had no money at all. We were perceived as an elite family, since our parents were college-educated and had important jobs. But honestly, money was very tight. We bought all our clothes at the mission store, and only one time in my childhood do I recall having a new outfit. That was when some white missionaries in New England sent all the Delany children brand-new clothes one Christmas.

Another time, the missionaries gave Bessie and me these beautiful china dolls. Those dolls were white, of course. You couldn’t get a colored doll like that in those days. Well, I loved mine just the way it was, but do you know what Bessie did? She took an artist’s palette they had also given us and sat down and mixed the paints until she came up with a shade of brown that matched her skin. Then she painted that white doll’s face! None of the white missionaries ever said a word about it. Mama and Papa just smiled.