January 2011

On February 5, 1858, our papa, Henry Beard Delany, was born into slavery on a plantation owned by the Mock family in St. Marys, Georgia, on the coast near the Florida border. He was just a little bitty fellow—seven years old—when the Surrender came in 1865. “The Surrender” is the way Papa always referred to the end of the Civil War.

We used to ask Papa, “What do you remember about being a slave?” Well, like a lot of former slaves, he didn’t say much about it. We persisted, and finally Papa told us of the day his people were freed. He remembered being in the kitchen and wearing a little apron, which little slave boys wore in those days. It had one button at the top, at the back of the neck, and the ends were loose. And when the news of the Surrender came, he said he ran about the house with that apron fluttering behind him, yelling, “Freedom! Freedom! I am free! I am free!”

Bessie and I have been together since time began, or so it seems. Bessie is my little sister, only she’s not so little. She is one hundred and one years old, and I am one hundred and three. Bessie was what we used to call a “feeling” child; she was sensitive and emotional. She was quick to anger, and very outspoken. Now I was a “mama’s child” and followed my mama around like a shadow. I always did what I was told. The way I see it, there’s room in the world for both me and Bessie. We kind of balance each other out.

Neither one of us ever married, and we’ve lived together most all of our lives and probably know each other better than any two human beings on this earth.

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When I met Sadie Delany and her sister, Bessie, in September 1991, I was on assignment for The New York Times , hoping to write a story on two elderly and reclusive sisters who had just celebrated their one hundred and second and one hundredth birthdays. In my hand I carried a letter written by their neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, who had extended an invitation to come by and meet them. The Delany sisters had no phone, so I wasn’t entirely sure they knew exactly when I was coming. I was prepared to be turned away.

I knocked on the door. I waited and had raised my hand to knock again when suddenly the door swung open. The woman who answered, with her head held high, her eyes intense and penetrating, extended her hand in formal greeting. “I am Dr. Delany,” she said elegantly.

Jack Kemp was born in 1935 in Los Angeles; his father owned a small trucking company. He came of political age in a time and place that made it likely enough that he would become a lifelong Republican, and he did. But the kind of Republican Jack Kemp became defies stereotype.

Prosperous Southern Californian Republicans do not normally become professional football players, but Kemp was for nine years the quarterback of the Buffalo Bills. Nor do they normally found trade unions, but Kemp co-founded the American Football League Players Association in 1965. He became a special assistant to then Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, won election to Congress in 1970, and was continuously re-elected until becoming Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1989. By then an observer might have thought that the young fellow whose dad had owned the trucking company was simply getting back on track. However, the genuinely odd portion of Jack Kemp’s odyssey was yet to come.

Last month, a curious new book appeared. Churchill: The End of Glory, by the English historian John Charmley, examines Britain’s wartime leader and finds him a disastrous failure.

In a fluent, richly detailed narrative, Charmley explains that his subject threw away the British Empire through his obstinate insistence on the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The author does express a rueful admiration for the old war-horse’s bamboozling the citizenry into thinking it was worth fighting on after France collapsed in 1940 (the “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets” speech is “sublime—nonsense—but sublime nonsense”). But once Hitler, frustrated in his attempts to reduce Britain, turns on Russia, Charmley really has no patience with Churchill’s refusal to make peace on what surely would have been very good terms.

One winter Sunday morning a few years ago, I happened to look out my bedroom window as I was getting dressed. There on the lawn below was the carcass of a deer, its hindquarters half-eaten by whatever had brought it down. Tufts of its fur were scattered across the grass. Its eyes, glassy in death, stared back at me sightless. A coyote, slat-thin and mangy, was taking furtive bites, looking up every few seconds as if expecting to be attacked. A few feet away three turkey vultures were walking about in that peculiar loping gait unique to vultures, waiting their turn at the carcass.

The Cuyahoga River died for our sins. In 1796, the Cuyahoga, which promised easy transportation into the wilderness of the Ohio country from Lake Erie, prompted the city of Cleveland into existence. Over the next 170 years, a primitive frontier town grew into a mighty industrial city, one that stretched for miles along the banks of its seminal river.

By the mid-20th century, however, the river no longer served as a major artery of transportation, having been superseded by railroads and highways. Now, instead of carrying the products of civilization into the vast interior, it carried the effluent of a far more technically advanced civilization out into the lake. The once crystalline waters of the river had become turbid and rank with its new cargo of chemicals and sewage. Its once abundant wildlife had long since fled, leaving only a few carps and suckers to eke out a living in the foul sullage on its bottom, testifying thereby to the very tenacity of life itself.

It was the spring of 1966 when we first heard the rumor through the post grapevine. But we didn’t believe it. Helen Hayes? Coming here—to Korea? Impossible.

For the preceding six months, as program director of a U.S. service club at the base in Pusan, Korea, I had come to admire the indefatigable efforts of a people struggling to overcome postwar hardship and rebuild a nation. But cultural life at the base had been strictly starvation rations: an occasional showing of Beach Blanket Bingo or some Japanese science fiction flick.

But the rumor was true, and gradually, in bits and pieces, we learned more. Miss Hayes was to give a reading of selected scenes from Shakespearean plays at a university in Pusan. Our Special Services officer arranged for our attendance, and on a cold and raw April evening five GIs and I, feverish with anticipation, set off for the program.

It was the summer of 1944. I had just been promoted to captain in the Ferrying Division of the Air Transportation Corps. My job was to deliver various types of aircraft to all parts of the country and half the world. One day I was sent to the Bell Aircraft plant at Niagara Falls, New York, to pick up a new P-6 3 Kingcobra Fighter and ferry it to Fairbanks, Alaska, by way of Great Falls, Montana, for delivery to the Russians. I had made the same trip a few times before and enjoyed this type of long flight.

When I reported to Flight Operations to pick up my delivery orders, I found that I was not going to Alaska after all but to Wright-Patterson Field, in Dayton, Ohio. The Operations officer told me that I would be ferrying a new type of P-63 that was not only experimental but secret.

He pointed out the aircraft on the flight line and said, “You can’t miss it, it’s painted orange! They already have a nickname for it—‘Pinball.’”