Extraordinary, Ordinary People Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Condoleezza Rice

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” words and music by Thomas A. Dorsey, copyright © 1938 (Renewed) by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

  Hal Leonard Corporation: Lyrics from “Theme from ‘The Greatest American Hero,’ ” from the television series, words by Stephen Geyer, music by Mike Post, copyright © 1981 by EMI Blackwood Music Inc., Dar-Jen Music, EMI April Music Inc. and Stephen Cannell Music. All rights for Dar-Jen Music controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rice, Condoleezza, 1954–

  Extraordinary, ordinary people : a memoir of family / Condoleezza Rice.—1st ed.

  1. Rice, Condoleezza, 1954—Childhood and youth. 2. Rice, Condoleezza, 1954—Family. 3. African American families—Alabama—Birmingham. 4. African Americans—Alabama—Birmingham—Biography. 5. Birmingham (Ala.)—Biography. 6. Birmingham (Ala.)—Race relations—History—20th century. 7. Stateswomen—United States—Biography. 8. Women cabinet officers— United States—Biography. 9. African American women—Biography. I. Title.

  E840.8.R48A3 2010

  327.730092—dc22

  [B] 2010021645

  eISBN: 978-0-307-71960-7

  Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are courtesy of the Rice Family Collection.

  v3.1

  To my parents,

  JOHN AND ANGELENA RICE,

  and my grandparents:

  MATTIE AND ALBERT RAY,

  and

  JOHN AND THERESA RICE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  ONE Starting Early

  TWO The Rays and the Rices

  THREE Married at Last

  FOUR “Johnny, It’s a Girl!”

  FIVE “I Need a Piano!”

  SIX My Parents Were Teachers

  SEVEN Something in the Water

  EIGHT School Days

  NINE Summer Respite

  TEN Turning Up the Heat in Birmingham

  ELEVEN 1963

  TWELVE Integration?

  THIRTEEN Tuscaloosa

  FOURTEEN Denver Again

  FIFTEEN Leaving the South Behind

  SIXTEEN Cancer Intrudes

  SEVENTEEN Starting Early (Again)

  Photo Insert

  EIGHTEEN College Years

  NINETEEN A Change of Direction

  TWENTY “Rally, Sons (and Daughters) of

  Notre Dame”

  TWENTY-ONE A New Start

  TWENTY-TWO A Lost Year

  TWENTY-THREE Senator Stanford’s Farm

  TWENTY-FOUR My Rookie Season

  TWENTY-FIVE The Darkest Moment of My Life

  TWENTY-SIX “The Moving Van Is Here”

  TWENTY-SEVEN Inside the Pentagon

  TWENTY-EIGHT Back to Stanford

  TWENTY-NINE D.C. Again

  THIRTY “I Don’t Think This Is What

  Karl Marx Had in Mind”

  THIRTY-ONE Back in California

  THIRTY-TWO Learning Compassion

  THIRTY-THREE Finding a New President for Stanford

  THIRTY-FOUR Provost of the University

  THIRTY-FIVE Tough Decisions

  THIRTY-SIX The Governor’s Campaign

  THIRTY-SEVEN Florida

  THIRTY-EIGHT “The Saints Go Marching In”

  A Note on Sources

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  JOHN AND Angelena Rice were extraordinary, ordinary people. They were middle-class folks who loved God, family, and their country. I don’t think they ever read a book on parenting. They were just good at it—not perfect, but really good. They loved each other unreservedly and built a world together that wove the fibers of our life—faith, family, community, and education—into a seamless tapestry of high expectations and unconditional love. And somehow they raised their little girl in Jim Crow Birmingham to believe that even if she couldn’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, she could be President of the United States.

  As it became known that I was writing a book about my parents, I received many letters and emails from people who knew my mom and dad, telling me how my parents had touched their lives. In conducting this journey into the past I had the pleasure of returning to the places my parents lived and talking with their friends, associates, and students.

  I was also contacted by people who didn’t know my parents but recognized in my story their own parents’ love and sacrifice. Good parents are a blessing. Mine were determined to give me a chance to live a unique and happy life. In that they succeeded, and that is why every night I begin my prayers saying, “Lord, I can never thank you enough for the parents you gave me.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Starting Early

  MY PARENTS were anxious to give me a head start in life—perhaps a little too anxious. My first memory of confronting them and in a way declaring my independence was a conversation concerning their ill-conceived attempt to send me to first grade at the ripe age of three. My mother was teaching at Fairfield Industrial High School in Alabama, and the idea was to enroll me in the elementary school located on the same campus. I don’t know how they talked the principal into going along, but sure enough, on the first day of school in September 1958, my mother took me by the hand and walked me into Mrs. Jones’ classroom.

  I was terrified of the other children and of Mrs. Jones, and I refused to stay. Each day we would repeat the scene, and each day my father would have to pick me up and take me to my grandmother’s house, where I would stay until the school day ended. Finally I told my mother that I didn’t want to go back because the teacher wore the same skirt every morning. I am sure this was not literally true. Perhaps I somehow already understood that my mother believed in good grooming and appropriate attire. Anyway, the logic of my argument aside, Mother and Daddy got the point and abandoned their attempt at really early childhood education.

  I now think back on that time and laugh. John and Angelena were prepared to try just about anything—or to let me try just about anything—that could be called an educational opportunity. They were convinced that education was a kind of armor shielding me against everything—even the deep racism in Birmingham and across America.

  They were bred to those views. They were both born in the South at the height of segregation and racial prejudice—Mother just outside of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1924 and Daddy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1923. They were teenagers during the Great Depression, old enough to remember but too young to adopt the overly cautious financial habits of their parents. They were of the first generation of middle-class blacks to attend historically black colleges—institutions that previously had been for the children of the black elite. And like so many of their peers, they rigorously controlled their environment to preserve their dignity and their pride.

  Objectively, white people had all the power and blacks had none. “The White Man,” as my parents called “them,” controlled
politics and the economy. This depersonalized collective noun spoke to the fact that my parents and their friends had few interactions with whites that were truly personal. In his wonderful book Colored People, Harvard Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. recalled that his family and friends in West Virginia addressed white people by their professions—for example, “Mr. Policeman” or “Mr. Milkman.” Black folks in Birmingham didn’t even have that much contact. It was just “The White Man.”

  Certainly, in any confrontation with a white person in Alabama you were bound to lose. But my parents believed that you could alter that equation through education, hard work, perfectly spoken English, and an appreciation for the “finer things” in “their” culture. If you were twice as good as they were, “they” might not like you but “they” had to respect you. One could find space for a fulfilling and productive life. There was nothing worse than being a helpless victim of your circumstances. My parents were determined to avoid that station in life. Needless to say, they were even more determined that I not end up that way.

  My parents were not blue bloods. Yes, there were blue bloods who were black. These were the families that had emerged during Reconstruction, many of whose patriarchs had been freed well before slavery ended. Those families had bloodlines going back to black lawyers and doctors of the late nineteenth century; some of their ancestral lines even included political figures such as Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first black United States senator. There were pockets of these families in the Northeast and a large colony in Chicago. Some had attended Ivy League schools, but others, particularly those from the South, sent their children to such respected institutions as Meharry Medical College, Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, and the Tuskegee Institute. In some cases these families had been college-educated for several generations.

  My mother’s family was not from this caste, though it was more patrician than my father’s. Mattie Lula Parrom, my maternal grandmother, was the daughter of a high-ranking official, perhaps a bishop, in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Though details about her father, my great-grandfather, are sketchy, he was able to provide my grandmother with a first-rate education for a “colored” girl of that time. She was sent to a kind of finishing school called St. Mark’s Academy and was taught to play the piano by a European man who had come from Vienna. Grandmother had rich brown skin and very high cheekbones, exposing American Indian blood that was obvious, if ill-defined. She was deeply religious, unfailingly trusting in God, and cultured.

  My grandfather Albert Robinson Ray III was one of six siblings, extremely fair-skinned and possibly the product of a white father and black mother. His sister Nancy had light eyes and auburn hair. There was also apparently an Italian branch of the family on his mother’s side, memorialized in the names of successive generations. There are several Altos; my mother and her grandmother were named Angelena; my aunt was named Genoa (though, as southerners, we call her “Gen-OH-a”); my cousin is Lativia; and I am Condoleezza, all attesting to that part of our heritage.

  Granddaddy Ray’s story is a bit difficult to tie down because he ran away from home when he was thirteen and did not reconnect with his family until he was an adult. According to family lore, Granddaddy used a tire iron to beat a white man who had assaulted his sister. Fearing for his life, he ran away and, later, found himself sitting in a train station with one token in his pocket in the wee hours of the morning. Many years later, Granddaddy would say that the sound of a train made him feel lonely. His last words before he died were to my mother. “Angelena,” he said, “we’re on this train alone.”

  In any case, as Granddaddy sat alone in that station, a white man came over and asked what he was doing there at that hour of the night. For reasons that are not entirely clear, “Old Man Wheeler,” as he was known in our family, took my grandfather home and raised him with his sons. I remember very well going to my grandmother’s house in 1965 to tell her that Granddaddy had passed away at the hospital. She wailed and soon said, “Somebody call the Wheeler boys.” One came over to the house immediately. They were obviously just like family.

  I’ve always been struck by this story because it speaks to the complicated history of blacks and whites in America. We came to this country as founding populations—Europeans and Africans. Our bloodlines have crossed and been intertwined by the ugly, sexual exploitation that was very much a part of slavery. Even in the depths of segregation, blacks and whites lived very close to one another. There are the familiar stories of black nannies who were “a part of the family,” raising the wealthy white children for whom they cared. But there are also inexplicable stories like that of my grandfather and the Wheelers.

  We still have a lot of trouble with the truth of how tangled our family histories are. These legacies are painful and remind us of America’s birth defect: slavery. I remember all the fuss about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings a few years back. Are we kidding? I thought. Of course Jefferson had black children. I can also remember being asked how I felt when I learned that I apparently had two white great-grandfathers, one on each side of the family. I just considered it a fact—no feelings were necessary. We all have white ancestors, and some whites have black ancestors. Once at a Stanford football game, my father and I sat in front of a white man who reached out his hand and said, “My name is Rice too. And I’m from the South.” The man blanched when my father suggested we might be related.

  It is just easier not to talk about all of this or to obscure it with the term “African American,” which recalls the immigration narrative. There are groups such as Mexican Americans, Korean Americans, and German Americans who retain a direct link to their immigrant ancestors. But the fact is that only a portion of those with black skin are direct descendants of African immigrants, as is President Barack Obama, who was born of a white American mother and a Kenyan father. There is a second narrative, which involves immigrants from the West Indies such as Colin Powell’s parents. And what of the descendants of slaves in the old Confederacy? I prefer “black” and “white.” These terms are starker and remind us that the first Europeans and the first Africans came to this country together—the Africans in chains.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Rays and the Rices

  ONE DAY Granddaddy Ray, now a coal-mining engineer, passed a beautiful young girl drawing water at a well. He introduced himself, but when he learned that she was only sixteen, he refrained from trying to date her. When she was finally old enough, Mattie Lula Parrom and Albert Ray married. Albert was industrious and worked three jobs for most of his life. He labored in the mines during the week, a profession that saddled him with emphysema and heart disease and gave him a deep admiration for John L. Lewis and the coal miners union; he sheared horses in the evening, a skill that he’d been taught by Mr. Wheeler; and on the weekends he built houses. Granddaddy’s day began every morning at four o’clock with Grandmother cooking a big breakfast of steak or bacon and eggs to sustain him through the hard workday ahead.

  The Rays were proud people. They settled in Hooper City, Alabama, which in those days was pretty far outside the city limits of Birmingham. Even when I was a child, my grandparents’ home felt as though it were in the country, not a city. Life was apparently pleasant, though there were some tensions between my mother and the daughter of the owner of the Italian grocery store, who seemed to have traded racial insults on a fairly regular basis.

  Mattie and Albert Ray were landowners who built their house with their own hands. The white wood-framed home was large for its time, on a corner lot with a big pecan tree in the front yard. It had eight large rooms, including a music room where my grandmother taught piano. Grandmother loved fine things, and the heavy mahogany furniture, always purchased with cash, survives in various family members’ houses—as well as my own—to this very day.

  Still, Grandmother Ray was frugal. When Granddaddy lost his job at the mine, he worried that they might lose the house. But my grandmother had saved enormous amounts of money in a mattress, allow
ing them to pay off the bank and to acquire more land.

  My aunts and uncle remember their parents’ determination to maintain their dignity despite the degrading circumstances of Birmingham. The children were constantly reminded, “You are a Ray!” This was both an admonition to let nothing hold them back and occasionally a rebuke when my grandparents disapproved of their behavior. They were never allowed to use a “colored” restroom or water fountain. “Wait until you get home,” they were told. And my grandparents always made sure that they had a car so that no one had to ride in the back of the bus.

  My mother had five siblings. Albert junior, Mattie, and my mother were born very close together in the early 1920s. Uncle Alto and Aunt Genoa, who went by Gee, made their entrance about a decade later. My grandparents were not themselves college-educated, but they were determined that their children would be. Though they believed in honest hard work, they wanted their children to have an easier life than they’d had.

  As it turned out, this took some doing. The eldest child, Albert, was difficult to educate. Albert started school at Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama, not far from Birmingham. But my restless uncle left school and went north to Pennsylvania with his young bride and first child to seek his fame and fortune. When my grandfather learned that Albert was working in the steel mills, he got on the train, brought Albert and his young family back to Birmingham, and insisted he return to school. My grandfather had had to work in the coal mines, but the steel mills were not good enough for his son. Albert did eventually finish college and became a quite successful Presbyterian minister.

  On the other hand, Mattie and my mother finished Miles in the requisite four years. They lived at home and drove to college each day. Both were stunningly beautiful. Mattie looked like her mother, sharing her rich brown complexion, high cheekbones, and long, wavy black hair. My mother looked like her father, fair-skinned with the same round face that I have and long, straight brownish hair. As little girls they were favored by adults because they were so cute. One of my most cherished photographs shows five-year-old Mattie and three-year-old Angelena as “calendar girls” for the local barbershop.