“B.B.” Celebrates 105 Years Young

Bessie Duncan has plenty of wisdom to share upon reaching the age of 105. 

One piece of advice: Drink one full cup of black coffee every morning, no cream, no sugar. 

Another: Obey the law, because if you act up, you’ll suffer the consequences. 

A third, at least in regards to this reporter: If this article about her centenary-plus-five birthday celebration is not accurate and true, she’s ​“gonna get” me.

Those sprightly and pugnacious words of warning and encouragement came from Duncan on Saturday morning as 40 people — about 38 of whom were relatives down to the fourth generation — gathered to honor her at the Whitneyville Cultural Commons in Hamden.

Duncan is a proud graduate of Hillhouse High School, class of 1938. Back then she was known as ​“B.B.,” as her name before marriage was Bessie Baylor. Her hobby was tennis. Her future occupation of choice was to become a nurse.

She fulfilled that dream with a career in nursing, culminating with retirement after 20 years of service at the Manhattan Psychiatric Hospital on Wards Island in New York City.

All this cool biography and deep dive into a remarkable family history emerged over the course of Saturday’s get-together. 

The attendees’ aim was to eat a healthy lunch of salmon, sprouts and rice, and to mark the red-letter anniversary of the family matriarch Bessie Duncan’s birth back in 1919.

Not that eating particularly healthily was part of any prescription for longevity that Ms. Duncan offered. Quite the contrary. 

Although she’s surrounded by scores of relatives, all of whom frequent the long-time family house on Orchard Street, Duncan lives there quite self sufficiently cooking for herself and eating any darn thing she wants. 

That means meals of chicken, spare ribs, ham, all kinds of roasts, cabbage, and collard greens among other foods she cited as her favorites. 

Until quite recently ice cream every night was also part of the menu, although according to her great grandson Jerrell Duncan, who is her chief shopper (she allows family members to help out in that department), Ms. Duncan has cut down a bit recently; or rather she has substituted a few cookies every night instead of the ice cream.

What Ms. Duncan has going for her, according to the testimony as well as the presence of the many older women relatives at the party — nieces and cousins in their 70s and more — is good, very sturdy, lucky genes. 

Longevity, primarily on the female side, said niece Joyce Lassiter, just runs in this family with many of the women — though not necessarily the men — living to be 100 or more.

“She’s very witty, she says what she’s thinking and what she feels,” Jerrell Duncan added, and that frequently means ​“she ​‘fusses’ you,” he said.

She lets you know immediately if what has been brought back from the store is not the right item, or a different brand from what has been specified. ​“If you don’t buy the right groceries, right brands, and right sizes,” he recalled, ​“there’s a problem.”

That means it had better be wheat bread, not white; sweet pickles and not sour; French dressing and not any other type; the specified brand of cream of wheat and no substitute, and the apple sauce has got to be cinnamon or it goes right back to the store, he recalled.

As she ate her birthday meal and relatives caught up with each other around a balloon-filled festive room and awaited the cake-cutting, Ms. Duncan remembered — in response to a reporter’s question — that among her fondest work experiences was serving on the ward for alcoholics at the hospital on Ward’s Island.

Although the patients had done every kind of disreputable thing, she remembered, including conniving and stealing because of their conditions, she nevertheless was able to establish meaningful personal bonds with many of them. With the cantankerous ones, she recalled, they would let only her take their blood or supervise urine samples. The hospital even relaxed regulations prohibiting women nurses from being alone with the men, given how she was in demand on the all-male wards.

In many ways, the Duncan family story, as it emerged from chats with many relatives, was of a piece with one of the main themes of African American migration journeys through 20^th century America.

Bessie Duncan ended up working in New York City, and settling initially in the Bronx, because employment there had been the opportunity that originally drew her mother and her grandmother to relocate in the North from Charleston, South Carolina, from where they hailed. There was a particular market, one cousin said, for Southern black women to come to the big city for domestic employment.

Eventually the family husbanded resources and purchased property, although not in the Bronx, where they lived at first, but farther north in New Haven. After renting on Eaton Street, Ashmun, Webster, and Foote, they purchased a venerable old house on Orchard Steet that soon became the Duncan headquarters, always thronged with relatives. 

Bessie Viola Baylor, born in 1919 (so affirmed the proud purple t‑shirts many of the party attendees wore), attended the Troup School as a young teen, and then went on to Hillhouse High School, which was then located where the Yale University power plant now sits on Tower Parkway. 

According to her graduation card, she always knew she wanted to be a nurse and her training location of choice was Freedmen’s Hospital, which was established after the Civil War, the first hospital focused on the treatment of former slaves; in the 1960s it became part of Howard University. 

She was the third child of four siblings. She went on to marry and have twins, although only one survived — Steven, who died in 2015. 

New Haven is a pretty good place to grow old. According to the Agency on Aging of South Central Connecticut, their catchment area, at least as of 2017, indicated upwards of 900 documented centenarians, including 219 residing in New Haven County, which would have included not only Bessie Duncan but her good friend, an older woman, Hildreth Hawkins, age 106.