Un essai sur Delany

[jerome]

L'essai est un peu long et en anglais. Deux inconvénients qui ne feront pas peur aux fans.

Tout l'essai est ici

en voici le début :
"After a difficult 36-hour labor, on April 1st, 1942, at seven o’clock in the morning, Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., was born at Harlem Hospital on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street, in New York City’s black ghetto. Because he was cyanotic, there was some suspicion he might be brain damaged.

The youngest of four daughters, Delany’s mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany (June 16th, 1916–March 2nd, 1995), was a short, level-headed, intelligent woman — exactly five feet tall — who’d met her husband while she worked for the WPA. For a while, after her marriage to Samuel Delany, Sr., Margaret had worked as a stenotypist. At her husband’s urging, she got her own license as a funeral director, though she never practiced.

Samuel R. Delany, Sr. (May 6th, 1906–October 1st, 1960), was the youngest of ten children in a family of black educators and professionals involved with the black Episcopal college, St. Augustine’s, in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1923, at age 17, Samuel Ray Delany had followed his older brothers and sisters to New York. After a first marriage at 19 to a young woman named Mary, of which his family generally disapproved, followed by a brief stint owning a haberdashery on 138th Street, he became a successful Harlem undertaker, initially in partnership with an older black man, a Mr. Levy. Delany bought out Levy in 1938, the year of his second marriage, to Margaret, but kept the name of the funeral establishment, Levy & Delany’s, which he moved to 2250 7th Avenue, across and one block up from the old Lafayette Theater (a supermarket by the time of Samuel junior’s childhood; later it would become a church). Often Delany senior said he owed Levy a great debt: “He showed me almost every way possible not to run a successful funeral business!” In a November 1978 talk Delany junior delivered at the Studio Museum of Harlem (“The Necessity of Tomorrows”), he said:

- I wonder, with my father dead twenty years now, if the two of them found any irony in the suggestion of the Jew and the Irishman running what, by the middle of the 40s, was considered a rather swell Harlem funeral establishment. At any rate, the irony was misleading. Both were black men. Both owed their ethnic patronymics to the whites who had owned their grandparents, their great-grandparents. "