My mother and father plunged into parenthood with a vengeance. Early on they sought to build a good learning environment for me, reading stories to me every night until I was able to read myself. My mother was as determined to raise a musician as my father was to cultivate a sports fan. She bought my first piano when I was three months old, and I learned later that we would “play” songs together, Mother moving my fingers along the little keyboard.
Before I was one, my mother returned to teaching. There weren’t any debates in my community about the relative merits of rearing children while working. Almost all of the women in my community worked, most as teachers. Teaching was such a prized profession that most who could teach did. There weren’t many other options except perhaps nursing. Most men did the same, though occasionally they went to law or medical school.
There was a kind of hierarchy of employment among the school systems, the Birmingham public schools being the most sought after. The county schools, such as Fairfield, where my mother taught for the first few years of my life, were not as favored. I remember how thrilled she was when she finally landed a job at Western-Olin High School in Birmingham.
A white superintendent oversaw the entire Birmingham public school system, but there was also a director for the city’s black schools, Dr. Carol W. Hayes, who, it is said, personally selected his teachers. It was a big day when families learned that their daughter or son had been accepted into the profession. The Birmingham schools’ convocation for new teachers was quite an event, with beautifully dressed young black professionals—women in hats and gloves, men in suits and ties—attending a daylong orientation at the civic center. Occasionally it was a good place to meet a mate—my uncle Alto met his wife, Connie, at one such event in 1962. Put simply, there were no more respected figures in the community than teachers and principals.
Extended families provided a good child care alternative for these working parents. It was convenient that the length of the school day as well as vacations was roughly the same for parents who worked in the schools and for their children. But often grandparents filled in with kids who weren’t yet school-age. I was dropped off by my parents at my maternal grandparents’ house in the morning and picked up after school. There was no safer or more nurturing environment than the one provided by Grandmother and Granddaddy Ray.
WHEN I was almost four, my father persuaded the church to build a proper manse so that we could move out of Westminster. I have only a few memories of living in the back of the church, but I remember very well the whole process of building the small gray house on a corner lot at 929 Center Way Southwest. The manse was located about five minutes from the church in Birmingham’s black middle-class neighborhood of Titusville.
My parents tried to involve me in family decision making from a very young age, and the impending family move was a perfect opportunity. There were so many decisions to make about paint colors and the functions that would be assigned to various rooms. I personally picked the pale green for the bathroom, the yellow for the kitchen, and a rich blue for my playroom. Mother decided on “Chinese” red for the living room. Since I was an only child and had no competition from siblings for space, I had a pink bedroom in addition to the playroom. But I was afraid to sleep in it alone, having shared the bedroom in the church with my parents. My bedroom was soon turned into a small den and a second bed was put in my parents’ room. This was the arrangement for a few years until at about eight I declared the need for my own space and reclaimed my bedroom.
But then there was the question of what to do for a den. Again here was an opportunity to involve me in decision making. By now I was president of the family. We held an election every year. My father insisted on a secret ballot, but since my mother always voted for me, I was assured of victory. There were no term limits. My responsibilities included calling family meetings to decide matters such as departure times for trips, plans for decorating the house at Christmas, and other issues related to daily life. So I called a meeting, and after some discussion, we all agreed that the playroom should become the den.
The move to 929 Center Way had been one of the most exciting times in our lives and included the family’s first TV purchase, a little thirteen-inch Zenith black and white set. We watched a lot of TV. I have many intellectual friends who either don’t watch TV or pretend they don’t. Some go so far as to refuse to own one. And I know that parents today restrict television watching for their kids.
My parents didn’t set limits on how much TV I watched. To be fair, television was a lot more wholesome in the late 1950s. But there was more to it than that. I have always thought that it’s harder to be the parent of an only child than to be an only child. Someone has to entertain the little one when night falls and playmates go home. In that regard, television was one of my parents’ best friends. We watched TV together just about every night, and I often watched alone too.
The only black people regularly on TV were the characters on Amos ’n’ Andy, and while we watched their antics, my parents went out of their way to point out and correct their butchered English. Mostly I watched cartoons such as Popeye and situation comedies such as I Love Lucy. The Popeye Show took place in a studio with Cousin Cliff, a big white man in a sailor suit, hosting an audience of schoolkids. Sometimes kids would bring their friends and celebrate a birthday on TV. The studio audience was all white, of course, until about 1962, when the show started devoting a few days each year to “Negro day.” I actually got to go when I was about seven years old and one of my friends had her birthday party there. I remember finding the whole highly anticipated event rather disappointing. We drove up to Red Mountain, where Channel 13 was located, sat on bleachers in a studio, and went home. I never again held Cousin Cliff in high esteem.
My mother also made sure that I watched Mighty Mouse, in which the heroic mouse sang, “Here I come to save the day!” Mother explained that this was a form of opera in which dialogue is sung, not spoken. She seemed to find high culture in just about everything.
But my favorite show was The Mickey Mouse Club, which we watched as a family every day after school. All three of us would put on our mouse ears and sing, “M-I-C (See you real soon) … K-E-Y (Why? Because we like you) … M-O-U-S-E.” It was a real family ritual, not to be interrupted by anything. One day Mr. Binham the insurance agent was in the living room pitching my parents on some new policy. He was the only white man that I can ever remember coming into our house in Titusville. In any case, it was about time to sing the Mickey Mouse song, and I was becoming agitated that my parents were otherwise occupied. Daddy politely told Mr. Binham that he’d have to wait. We put on our mouse ears and engaged in our family ritual. I felt very proud that my parents had put our time above whatever business it was they had with Mr. Binham. This small gesture was simply one of the many that communicated they always had time for me.
After The Mickey Mouse Club we would take a break from television for reading time and, as I became older, doing homework together. We would then tune in to the nationally televised news program The Huntley-Brinkley Report. My father would comment on each story, explaining the historical significance of big events. I remember watching John Glenn’s historic mission to space, which preempted all other programming for the entire mission. For a while I wanted to be an astronaut, as did most of my friends. We’d load up our “space capsule” out in the backyard, with some lucky kid getting to be the astronaut and others being confined to earth as ground controllers.
But one of my most vivid childhood memories is the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. We were glued to the set every evening during the thirteen-day standoff. It was a very scary time. We’d never bothered with a bomb shelter in the house, even at the height of the Cold War. But some of our friends did have them, fully stocked with provisions to survive a nuclear exchange. In school, we went through duck-and-cover drills. When the alarm sounded, all the children fell to the floor, huddling under their desks. My friends and I even played bomb shelter, cr
awling into the little space just beneath the house in response to a “nuclear attack.”
But the standoff in Cuba was no drill. Because the missiles were deployed just ninety miles from the Florida coast, the newscasters reported, probably incorrectly, that Birmingham was in range. They showed big arrows pointing right at us. I could tell that my father was worried, and I realized that this was something my parents couldn’t save me from. It was the first time that I remember feeling truly vulnerable.
Daddy explained that our country had never lost a war, and he was sure we weren’t going to lose this one. He was nevertheless visibly relieved when the Soviet ships turned around, ending the crisis. The whole episode had a surprisingly strong impact on me. I once told an audience of Cuban Americans that Fidel Castro had put the United States at risk in allowing those missiles to be deployed. “He should pay for it until he dies,” I said. Even I was surprised by the rawness of that comment.
CHAPTER FIVE
“I Need a Piano!”
AFTER OUR move to 929 Center Way, my parents set about building a solid and enjoyable life for our family. Each day my father would drop me off at my grandparents’ and Mother and Daddy would come together in the afternoon to pick me up. Granddaddy still worked a pretty full day, and my grandmother was a full-time homemaker. I’d “help” her around the house and watch soap operas with her. She loved As the World Turns, and I loved the commercials, especially for Tide and Mr. Clean, which made stains disappear right before your very eyes.
Sometimes Daddy would pick me up early to go to a high school football game at Rickwood Field, the somewhat dilapidated stadium at which black high school teams played their games and which the city of Birmingham today calls, with a touch of irony, “historic” Rickwood. According to Grandmother, I would become so excited at the prospect of going to a game that I would pester her all day about the time. “When is it going to be two o’clock?” I would ask over and over. My exasperated grandmother finally showed me a clock and the position of the hands at 2:00 p.m. so that I could track the time myself. I guess I can thank football for helping me learn how to tell time.
But the activity that I enjoyed most was watching my grandmother teach piano. Grandmother Ray had about twenty students, ranging from beginners to quite advanced pianists. Her lessons started at about three o’clock every day, and she taught for a couple of hours, charging twenty-five cents a session. When the students would leave, I’d go to the piano and pretend to play, banging at the keys and “reading” the music. Then I’d ask to take some sheet music home so I could “practice.” Each day I’d leave with music, usually forgetting to bring it back the next day. To preserve her music collection, Grandmother finally gave me a regular book to take home. “Grandmother, this isn’t music!” I told her.
Grandmother Ray decided that it was unusual for a kid to know the difference and asked my mother if she could start giving me piano lessons. I was three years old, and they wondered if it might be too early but decided to give it a try. Unlike the early experiment with first grade, this worked. I loved the piano.
Grandmother started every student in a series called The Standard Revised (I still don’t know what exactly had been revised) that trained young fingers to do progressively more difficult things. Each student also learned a prescribed series of increasingly more difficult hymns, starting with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Because I was so young, I don’t remember learning to read music, so today it is like a native language for me. This made it much easier to master sight-reading, something that I do well to this day.
My parents had bought a little electronic organ for our new house, and I’d play for hours when we got home. They claimed that it was hard to get me to do anything else, including read books or watch television. But a problem emerged as I began to play hymns: the little organ did not have enough keys. Each time that I wanted to play low notes in the bass, I was out of luck.
“I need a piano,” I told my parents several months into my lessons. Daddy made me a deal. “When you can play ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ perfectly, we will buy you a piano,” he said. Everyone in the family has exactly the same memory of what transpired. The next day I went to my grandmother’s and sat at the piano for eight hours, not even wanting to break for lunch. I practiced and practiced, and when my parents came to pick me up I played “What a Friend” perfectly!
As they’d do many times in my life, John and Angelena found a way not to disappoint. They didn’t have the money to buy a piano, but they rented one the next day from Forbes Piano Company. By the end of the week I had a brand-new Wurlitzer spinet piano.
I became good at the piano very quickly and started to play publicly. Mother found opportunities for me to play at various church functions as well as citywide events. I played several pieces at the gathering of new teachers in 1959, where I was decked out in a gray polished cotton dress with pink flowers, black patent shoes with rhinestones, and, curiously, a white fur hat. I don’t remember being nervous and have always thought that these early experiences helped me to overcome any sense of stage fright. My parents also called me into the living room to play whenever there was a visitor to the house. I hated that, perhaps sensing that the poor captive audience wasn’t really all that interested in seeing little Condoleezza perform.
My mother reinforced my inclination toward music in multiple ways. She’d buy books written for children about the great composers. I imagined what it would have been like to meet Beethoven, who scribbled musical notations on tablecloths, or Bach, who fathered twenty children. My favorite story was about Mozart’s life. I was totally enchanted by this man who had written so much and died so young at the age of thirty-five. I even developed a little crush on him, imagining myself as his wife, Constanze. Admittedly, this was a strange infatuation for a little black girl in Birmingham. Most of my friends were in love with Elvis Presley.
Mother also brought home records, which we would listen to together. One day, when I was about five years old, she brought home Aïda, the Giuseppe Verdi opera. My little eyes were as big as saucers as I listened to the “Triumphal March” for the first time, and I played the record over and over. And on Saturdays we listened to radio broadcasts of the New York Metropolitan Opera, “brought to you by Texaco.” Opera and classical music were totally and completely my mother’s domain. My father loved jazz but had no interest in or taste for classical music. Even so, he displayed admirable patience when my mother and I took charge of what was playing on the car radio as we ran errands on Saturday afternoon.
Daddy was the one, however, who taught me to dance. He’d put on a record by jazz singer Dinah Washington or play the big-band music of performers such as Duke Ellington. Then I would stand on his feet as he walked me through the box step or the fox-trot.
But Daddy’s real territory was sports, and I took to it with great fervor. We watched the National Football League on television every Sunday after church. In those days, there was one game and no halftime studio show. Daddy wanted me to really understand football and would analyze the plays, explaining what the defense was doing to counter the offense and vice versa. As the season approached, we would go to the drugstore and buy magazines previewing the matchups. Our favorite was Street & Smith’s pro football report.
Our team was the Cleveland Browns, and to this day I am a fan. This may seem puzzling given that I didn’t visit Cleveland until the mid-1990s. The reason is simple: Birmingham had no NFL team when I was a child. It was one of only two cities in the South, the other being Memphis, that prohibited blacks and whites from playing together professionally. In 1954, Birmingham’s city commission actually tried to amend the city’s laws and relax its prohibition against integrated professional football teams. Outraged voters, however, reversed this decision by ballot initiative and reinstated segregation a few months later. By the late 1950s, the NFL was refusing to play in the South because segregation made it impossible for the teams to bring their players there.
My father told me that in the 1940s, before the League’s epiphany, the first black players would stay with local families when games were played south of the Mason-Dixon Line since they couldn’t stay in hotels or eat in restaurants. The last team to integrate was the Washington Redskins, which had no black players until 1962. Though Washington, D.C., was geographically the closest to us, my father hated the Redskins for their racist policies. They couldn’t be our team.
But the Cleveland Browns had running back Jim Brown and the dominant teams of Paul Brown, their innovative coach. The Browns were on television almost every Sunday. Like my father, I was a Browns fan until Art Modell, the new owner, fired Paul Brown in 1963. At that point, I tore down the Cleveland Browns posters in my room and transferred my loyalties, temporarily, to the Baltimore Colts and Johnny Unitas. When Paul Brown founded the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968, I became a loyal fan. Many years later, when my friend Carmen Policy became the president of the “new” Cleveland Browns in 1999, I returned to my roots. The Browns—for better or worse—are my team today.
Each Thanksgiving, Daddy and I would watch the Detroit Lions, who by tradition played on that holiday every year. The next day, we would play the “Rice Bowl,” a touch football game held at “Rice Stadium,” known the rest of the year as the front yard. It was just the two of us, veering right and left and scoring touchdowns with the never-born John’s football. Years later Mother got tired of being excluded from the fun and adopted a team of her own because she liked their uniforms. The undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins would, at last, give my mother a reason to become a sports fan.
MY PARENTS may have doted on their only child a little more than their friends did, but they shared the same goals of other parents to provide a safe, nurturing, and stimulating environment for their kids. The task was hard and complex and yet straightforward at the same time. The hard part was obvious: Birmingham was the most segregated big city in America, and daily life was full of demeaning reminders of the second-class citizenship accorded to blacks. Whites and blacks lived in parallel worlds, their paths crossing uneasily in only a few public places.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 4