In college the “Ray girls,” as they were called, were popular, with outgoing Mattie becoming a majorette and my more reserved mother breaking out of character by becoming a cheerleader. Mattie, who played high school and collegiate tennis and basketball, was a real athlete. My mother, however, was not. In order to fulfill her physical education requirement, she created a scrapbook. Her teacher gave her a B for the beautiful work but told her he just couldn’t give her an A when she didn’t even break a sweat. This was very much my mother. She was an artist and a lady, and she didn’t really believe that women should play sports or, heaven forbid, perspire. I can’t remember my mother ever picking up a bat or a ball of any kind, and though she later learned to enjoy spectator sports with my father and me, she never fully came to terms with my tomboy tendencies.
After college Mattie and Angelena continued to live at home. My mother and her sister had many friends, but they were clearly each other’s best friends. Life in segregated Birmingham was in some ways pretty simple: family, church, work, and a social life built around black fraternities and private clubs. Mother and her sister became well-regarded teachers at the same high school, though their perpetual tardiness led their father to set the house clocks far ahead to force them to be on time.
They’d been taught music by their mother and grandmother and on Sundays played organ and piano for Baptist churches. Although they were Methodists, the Baptists paid better. They had to learn to play gospel and improvise by ear, something that those who read music sometimes find hard. I certainly do. But it was apparently not so difficult for my mother and Mattie. I asked about this once when I played for a Baptist church and found myself unable to follow the preacher when he’d “raise a song.” “Mother,” I said, “he starts in no known key. How am I supposed to find him?” “Just play in C,” she said. “He’ll come right back to you.” It was good advice, but I never mastered playing gospel the way my mother and Mattie did.
On the weekend, the girls went to fraternity and social club dances in dresses that Mattie, who could sew beautifully, made from whatever material they liked. They loved clothes. My mother once said that her meager teacher’s salary was already owed to fine clothing stores such as Burger-Phillips and Newberry’s the minute she got it. They took trips to shop in downtown Birmingham, where their really light-skinned acquaintances would “pass” as white so that they could go to lunch counters and bring hot dogs out to their waiting, darker-skinned friends.
I’VE HEARD many friends and family say that they never thought my mother would marry. She was so close to her family, extremely reserved, sharp-tongued, and, despite her beauty, headed for spinsterhood. But one day she went to work at Fairfield Industrial High, where she’d been teaching for several years. There was a lot of buzz about the new athletic director and assistant football coach. Tall, dark-skinned, and extremely athletic, he was powerfully built with a deep, resonant voice. And he was a preacher who happened to be single.
Mother claimed that John Wesley Rice Jr. first saw her walking down the hallway in a red polka-dot dress and red, very high-heeled strappy shoes. He was leaning against the wall, filing his fingernails and hoping to have a chance to say hello. He claimed that it was she who had made the first move, dressing that way to catch his attention.
Daddy had come to Birmingham after finishing Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. He’d started school at Stillman College in Alabama, but when World War II broke out, Granddaddy decided to send him to Smith, where he could attend college and then go on to seminary. For reasons that I don’t know, Granddaddy didn’t want his son to fight in the war. I don’t think he had any political or philosophical objection to the war. Perhaps he was just fearful of losing his only son, whom he counted on to follow in his footsteps into religious ministry. Daddy wanted to go into the army but acceded to his father’s wishes that he continue his work in the seminary. He did do some chaplain’s work for soldiers returning from the front, but I think he always felt a little guilty for not having fought in World War II. He had enormous admiration for those who were in the military, particularly his first cousin, Philip, who served in Vietnam and retired as a colonel in the air force. They became exceedingly close and remained so until Daddy’s death.
In any case, by the time Daddy arrived at Fairfield High School, he had already been pastor of his first church and had worked several jobs simultaneously. On the weekends he played and coached semiprofessional football in Burlington, North Carolina. Sometimes he worked as a waiter to supplement his income, and he even tried opening a restaurant, which failed miserably. Until the day he died he always tipped generously, saying that waiting tables was the hardest work he had ever done.
My father had grown up in a family dominated by his father, John Wesley Rice Sr. My paternal grandfather was born in Eutaw (pronounced “UH-tah”), Alabama. There were apparently three branches of the Rice family, each emanating from a different slave-owning brother in Greene County, Alabama, about an hour’s drive from the Mississippi border. Not many blacks owned land in those days, so my grandfather’s family worked the land of others as sharecroppers. Granddaddy’s father was illiterate—and may not have been his biological father—but his mother, my great-grandmother Julia Head, was a freed slave who’d learned to read. It isn’t clear who educated her, since it was illegal to teach slaves to read. But she was apparently a favored house slave, and there is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Julia had run Union soldiers off the plantation and protected the horses during the Civil War. To the day she died, she would sit on her porch with a shotgun in her lap and a pipe in her mouth. Perhaps she thought she’d have to do it again.
According to my father, Granddaddy Rice was not a favored son because, unlike his siblings, he was very dark-skinned. You will notice that I have by now described the skin color of each of my relatives. Unfortunately, it mattered. One of the scars of slavery was a deep preoccupation with skin color in the black community. The lighter your skin, the better-off you were. This bias extended to other facial features: “thin and Caucasian” was preferred to “thick and Negroid,” just as straight hair was “good” compared to kinky hair, which was “bad.” The repercussions were significant in my parents’ time, when no self-respecting black school would select a dark-skinned homecoming queen. There was even rumored to be a “paper bag test” for membership in the best clubs—if you were any darker than a paper bag, you needn’t bother to apply.
By the time I came along, skin color and other physical features were less important, though not irrelevant. My father loved that I had my mother’s long hair, despite the fact that mine, unlike hers, was a coarse, thick, and somewhat unruly mop. When I finally cut it in college, it was pretty clear that he thought I’d given up some sort of social advantage. But by then the “black is beautiful” aesthetic and Afro hairstyles had introduced a new concept of what was appealing.
One can imagine, though, what it was like for my very dark-skinned grandfather in the first half of the twentieth century. He was given the worst land to work and not much encouragement from his father. But his mother taught him to read and sent him to school. He had big dreams and loved books. So when he was about nineteen, he decided to get a college education. He asked people, in the parlance of the day, how a “colored” man could go to college. They told him about little Stillman College, which was about thirty miles away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He saved his cotton and paid the school.
After one year, though, Granddaddy Rice ran out of cotton and had no way to pay his tuition. He was told that he would have to leave. Thinking quickly, he pointed to some of his fellow students. “How are those boys going to college?” he asked. He was told that they’d earned a scholarship and that he could have one too if he wanted to be a Presbyterian minister. Without missing a beat, Granddaddy Rice replied, “Well, that’s exactly what I had in mind.” As they would do several times in my family’s history, the Presbyterians educated this young black man.
; John Wesley Rice Sr. soon met Theresa Hardnett, a pretty half-Creole from Baton Rouge. The Hardnett family produced educated girls, including two who were among the first black registered nurses to graduate from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. My grandmother, though, left home when she was seventeen and married my grandfather shortly thereafter. She set out with him on his mission of church building and educational evangelism.
While my mother’s family was landowning and settled, Daddy’s family lived the life of an itinerant preacher. As a result, my parents held very different views on the importance of land. Mother always wanted to own a house and sometimes, a little pointedly, reminded Daddy that he’d grown up moving from place to place and living in “other people’s houses.” Her family, on the other hand, had owned land. Daddy didn’t really care and felt a bit tied down by the financial responsibility of home ownership. While they did eventually own property and a house, their differences in perspective on this matter remained a source of some conflict throughout their marriage.
In any case, Granddaddy Rice worked mostly in Louisiana, founding a church and a school next door. Sometimes he found it necessary to work in Mississippi and Alabama, leaving the family behind for a few months in Louisiana. Granddaddy’s churches were successful because he was a powerful speaker. His sermons were intellectually sound and biblically based. He made it clear that he’d studied theology in seminary and was a fully ordained minister. In his sermons, there was none of the “whooping and hollering” emotion of the Baptists across town, who had no formal training. Granddaddy apparently delivered his sermons without notes. I once told my father that I was grateful that I’d inherited his exceptional ability to speak off the cuff. He told me that he was indeed good but not like Granddaddy. “You should have heard your grandfather,” he said. “He spoke in whole paragraphs.”
The Rice schools were even more successful than the churches. My grandfather believed that his schools could better educate black children than the miserable public schools of the day, and he sought funds from any source he could, whether it meant contributions from church members, a few cents from parents in the community, or fifty dollars from rich white people across town. Granddaddy Rice once told Daddy that “white guilt” was his best ally in funding his schools. But when a white church collected a bunch of old textbooks and “donated” them to my grandfather’s school, he politely declined. It was important, he explained, that his kids have the most up-to-date reading materials, just like the white students.
John Rice’s educational evangelism sometimes brought him into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy in Louisiana, which saw his efforts as competing with its own education ministries. Granddaddy Rice maintained that the Catholics had put some of his schools out of business in several parishes. This led to a kind of militant Protestantism in the Rice family. My father, a tolerant and educated man, opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid less because the Massachusetts senator was a Democrat and more because he worried that Kennedy, as a practicing Catholic, might need to answer to the Vatican.
When I went to Baton Rouge for my grandmother’s funeral in 1986, I saw one of Granddaddy’s surviving schools in Scotlandville, on the outskirts of the city. It had been remodeled, but it was still sitting in the same dusty field where it had been built. Several former students had come back to pay homage to what my grandparents had done for them. “Your granddaddy was a giant,” one person said. Another, who was a schoolteacher, acknowledged that she never would have gone to college but for John Rice Sr. Her story was repeated several times. Granddaddy’s educational evangelism compelled him to go door-to-door in the poor neighborhoods around him and impress upon parents the importance of sending their kids to college. Then he would go to colleges—usually Presbyterian schools such as Stillman, Johnson C. Smith, and Knoxville College in Tennessee—and “make arrangements” for the kids to go there. In turn, he would recruit young teachers from the historically black colleges with which he had these relationships. He was zealously committed to education because he believed that it had transformed him, and he was determined to spread its benefits.
When it came to his own family, he was even more insistent. My father and his sister, Theresa, attended schools their father had founded. The family had little money and lived in any house the congregation could provide. Several times when Daddy was a child, Granddaddy decided that his work in a particular Louisiana community was done and the family would move on. If Daddy and his sister resented the upheaval, there was no trace of it in their recounting of their childhood. When it came time for high school, Granddaddy placed his kids in Baton Rouge’s McKinley High, which in 1916 held the distinction of graduating the first class of black students in the state of Louisiana.
Growing up, my father was a very good athlete but not a great student, as he remembered. It was a struggle to get him to study, and he didn’t love to read, though he loved history and politics. The whole family was taken with and followed closely the famed Louisiana governor and U.S. senator Huey Long. Daddy’s uncle on his mother’s side, Sylvester, would go down to the courthouse and sit in the “colored” section when Huey Long was a trial attorney. Family lore contends that Long wouldn’t start a trial until Sylvester was seated. Daddy remembered the family gathered around the radio listening to Huey Long speak and the absolute devastation they felt years later when Long died after being shot at the state capitol building. “They turned on every light in the capitol that night,” he recalled. “The funeral procession was miles long.” I suspect this event loomed larger than life in my father’s memory, as is often the case with childhood recollections. But the Rices really loved Long, a populist politician whom they saw as caring about common people—even black people.
For the most part, Daddy seems to have enjoyed less serious pursuits. He loved to play preacher. One day he and his sister recreated a funeral that their father had just conducted. They went to the church, set their dolls up in the pews, and laid one doll on the altar table to mimic a casket. Theresa was playing the piano, and my father had begun to preach when one of the dolls in the pews fell with a heavy thud. They ran out as fast as possible, sure that they’d somehow awakened the dead.
Theresa, unlike the young John Rice, was an intellectual and a somewhat somber personality from the day she was born. She read constantly and seemed to take personally the suffering and sorrow around her. My father illustrated this in a story about a certain Easter. The seven-or-so-year-old John was thrilled with his new suit for the Easter program and the basket of candy that the Easter Bunny had brought. But nine-year-old Theresa cried. When my grandfather asked what was wrong, Aunt Theresa said that she was reflecting on the bad things that had been done to Jesus.
That in a nutshell captured the difference between Daddy and his sister. Daddy was an easygoing personality who didn’t always take life too seriously. He was a popular kid who would become an outgoing adult.
Theresa was reclusive, brilliant, and determined to follow in her father’s intellectual footsteps. She would later go on to become one of the first black women to receive a doctorate in English literature from the University of Wisconsin. Thus I am not even the first PhD in my family.
Aunt Theresa wrote books on Charles Dickens, including one called Dickens and the Seven Deadly Sins. When I was about eight years old, we were visiting Aunt Theresa in Baton Rouge, where she was teaching at Southern University. When I saw that she was reading A Tale of Two Cities, I asked whether she’d ever read that book before. “I have read this novel at least twenty-five times,” she said. I remember thinking that this was a terribly boring way to spend one’s life. For years it soured my thoughts of being a professor, since I associated the vocation with the drudgery of reading the same book twenty-five times.
CHAPTER THREE
Married at Last
IT TOOK my parents a long time to finally tie the knot. They began “courting,” as my mother called it, almost immediately after meeting, but they did not m
arry for almost three years. I soon learned, both from their recollections and from the stories told by others in the community, that these young sweethearts were apparently the talk of the town.
While teaching their classes, my parents often passed notes to each other through student couriers whom I later met. The students kept the missives and were disappointed to find they usually just said, “Hi. See you tonight.”
The two young teachers were fully committed to their work. Mother taught English. Her former students remember her as a teacher whom you didn’t disobey despite her diminutive stature. She was a stickler for good grammar. I remember that she’d bristle whenever someone misused the subjunctive tense. “If I were,” she’d shout when someone incorrectly said “If I was.” She was the coach of the debate team and would enter her students in citywide “oratorical contests.” She also directed student plays and musicals, gaining a sterling reputation throughout the city for her efforts.
Her most famous student, though, was neither a debater nor a thespian. Mother taught American baseball legend Willie Mays and, despite her lack of sports acumen, knew that he was special. He recently told me that he remembered her well and recalled that she had told him early on, “You’re going to be a ballplayer. If you need to leave a little early for practice, you let me know.”
During my parents’ courtship, Daddy’s workday was completely tied up with sports. Daddy had studied athletic administration at the University of Wisconsin and put that knowledge to work by creating a comprehensive sports program. He started a girls’ basketball team, which he held to the same rigorous standards of technical excellence that he demanded of the boys. Doris Jackson Blue, who went on to become a registered nurse, remembered that Daddy liked the fact that she was strong and aggressive, but he told her that she couldn’t just run over people. She needed to learn to ball-handle. He then spent hours teaching her how.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 2