Extraordinary, Ordinary People

by Condoleezza Rice

  In fact, my childhood was quite normal. I liked but didn’t love school. When Lane Elementary closed after third grade, I enrolled at Brunetta C. Hill. Again, it was not in my neighborhood, but my parents chose it because my uncle taught there. After school he would take me to my grandmother’s, where I would stay until my parents could pick me up on the way home.

  I was taught by superb teachers, particularly in fourth and fifth grade, where Mrs. Hagood and Mrs. Colquitt were able to convince me that I really was good at math. Mrs. Hagood even played to our competitive instincts by seating in the front of the class those students who did best on the weekly test. This made me a lot more careful about avoiding errors because I really didn’t like being in the back of the room.

  My parents were very involved too, mostly for the good. Like their friends, they were members of the PTA and attended the meetings. They checked my report card and discussed my progress with me at the end of each grading period. They were especially interested in my conduct grade because disrespect for my teachers was simply not tolerated. My parents were, after all, teachers. But occasionally when they thought that I had been treated unfairly they took my side. One day the home economics instructor sent me home with a note saying that I was uncooperative. I had simply observed that the project of making bathroom curtains from towels with lace sewn on them seemed rather ridiculous. “You can buy them at Sears,” I said, “and they look much better.” My mother told the teacher that I had a point but insisted, nevertheless, that I make the curtains.

  Then there was the time that I received a C in music. My mother was furious and confronted the music teacher, Mrs. Gertie Battle, who backed down and changed my grade to a B. She wouldn’t give me an A, though, saying that she expected more of me since I was such a talented musician. I later suspected there might be something more to this when I learned that my mother and Mrs. Battle had disliked each other since college.

  Though I did well, I have to admit that my study habits left something to be desired, given my strong tendency toward procrastination. Unfortunately, my parents, eager to help me succeed, probably reinforced this problematic instinct. One morning when I was in third grade, I woke up and realized that I’d forgotten to do a class assignment for that day. The task was to make a book with pictures that illustrated the story we were reading that week. Perhaps my parents should have just let me face the consequences. But they didn’t. The three of us rushed around, cutting pictures from magazines, books, even the encyclopedia in order to finish the assignment. I got an A. All through school and college I was given to last-minute completion of my assignments and cramming for tests in all-night sessions. I’m afraid that procrastination remains a problem for me to this day. It’s one of the few bad habits that my parents failed to cure me of when they had the chance.

  I know this admission stands in contrast to the image that has emerged of me as a “grind”—someone who early in life studied all the time and did assignments well ahead of due dates. That description better fit my best friend, Velda Robinson, whom I adored but envied for her organized approach to her schoolwork.

  The fact is, I was always more interested in other activities such as piano. My parents were especially concerned that I did not love to read, as they did. They enrolled me in every book club known to man, but the books would just pile up unread. At one point they resorted to something called “Classic Comics,” which were comic-book versions of works by authors such as Daniel Defoe and Mark Twain. I read principally when my schoolwork compelled me to do so. Eventually I discovered biography and found that I loved to read the stories of real—as opposed to fictional—lives. That is true to this day, though I still feel outmatched by the volume of books my friends and colleagues consume.

  Despite my uneasy relationship with reading, my parents thought that I was a genius; they even arranged for me to take an IQ test at the age of six to prove it. When my score came back at 136—good but not Mensa level—they were convinced something was wrong with the test. But when I told them how hard I had found it to match the squares, circles, and stars with the correct hole in the puzzle, they calmed down. They hid whatever disappointment they might have felt at discovering that their daughter was, after all, a fairly normal little girl.

  Yet there was no shortage of opportunities to develop the strengths that I did have and even some that I didn’t. My Scouting career, for instance, was not wholly satisfactory. I was a Brownie and then a Girl Scout for a few years, and I was doing pretty well—until we got to the part about camping. One trip to the wilderness outside of Alabama convinced me that I was not the outdoors type. In fact, the mosquitoes, heat, and warm Kool-Aid were enough to make me call my mother and tell her I wanted to go home. My parents picked me up, and to this day I’ve never tried camping again.

  There were certain school activities I would have liked to do, but my parents quickly vetoed those ideas. When organizers of the school variety show cast me as one of the Supremes singing “Stop! In the Name of Love,” my father decided that it would be undignified. Instead my parents hired Mrs. Clara Varner, the cosmetology teacher at Ullman, to teach me a tap-dancing routine to “Sweet Sue (Just You)” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.” I was dressed in a blue leotard with tap shoes and a top hat, which my uncle had spray-painted gold. The routine was awful, but I gamely went out and performed. My father stood on the side of the stage, just in view of the audience, his arms folded sternly so no one would laugh. Given his imposing size, no one did. The end of my performance was greeted with applause. I was just glad it was over.

  Outside of school, my parents provided me with a prodigious number of extracurricular opportunities. In addition to piano, I took all kinds of lessons: ballet, gymnastics, and even baton twirling, of all things. My mother decided that every well-bred young girl should speak French, so when I was eight my parents hired Mrs. Dannetta K. Thornton, who’d earned a master’s degree in Romance languages and taught at Ullman, to give me French lessons on Saturdays. She transformed her basement into a French “salon” with all sorts of French pictures and artifacts. I liked Mrs. Thornton, but I didn’t care much for the French language. Nonetheless, I kept plowing ahead and acquired enough of a foundation to continue my studies through high school and well into college. My parents also thought it important that I learn to type, “just in case you need to know how,” and enrolled me in Saturday lessons with a teacher down the street.

  In time, my mother and her friends formed a chapter of a club called Tots and Teens to structure the many lessons they were providing to their children. In addition to field trips, parties, and modeling lessons for the girls, the organization offered cultural programs in music and art appreciation. I learned much later that my mother and her friends had formed Tots and Teens because there had been a disagreement with the leadership of Jack and Jill, the oldest black children’s organization in America. Ask almost any black person my age whose family was upper-middle-class and you will learn that they belonged to Jack and Jill. I do not know for sure, but I suspect that our families in Titusville lacked the blue-blood credentials to be welcomed into Jack and Jill. The local ladies were highly critical of Jack and Jill and determined to do everything better.

  I also played several sports. My friends contend that I was always a little lady in starched dresses, but I remember myself as bit of a tomboy who loved to tumble and run around. I ruined more than a few of those starched dresses, much to my mother’s dismay and my father’s delight. I also discovered that my parents’ bed made a very nice trampoline. My folks tolerated my acrobatics as long as I jumped on the bed only when supervised. But they put an end to this when I fell off the bed during one of my “routines” when they weren’t looking.

  Trying to cope with my excessive energy, my dad tried to interest me in organized sports and finally found one that I liked: bowling. He loved to bowl, and when Star Bowl opened in the early 1960s it became a regular stop for us on Saturdays. Usually Daddy would bowl with his friends from church
and school early in the morning, and then there would be lessons and tournaments for the kids. Star Bowl kept its premises clean and had a recreation room that became a favored place to hold birthday parties and even an occasional wedding reception. In segregated Birmingham, gathering spaces were at a premium, so Star Bowl was a welcome addition.

  I didn’t, however, learn to swim. When I was six, I swam a few times, but the next spring, Mother said that there would be no lessons. In late 1961, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, had decided to close all recreational facilities rather than integrate them under court order. Not until I was twenty-five and living in California did I finally take swimming lessons. I suspect that there are a lot of black and white kids from Birmingham who learned to swim late in life thanks to Bull Connor.

  The fact is, as hard as they tried, our parents could only partially succeed in building a fully adequate and parallel social structure. The time would always come when the children of Birmingham had to face the realities of segregation. For my friend Deborah Cheatham Carson it was when she asked if she could go to Kiddieland, an amusement park that her family passed on the way to her grandmother’s house. Her father did not want to tell her that she couldn’t go because she was black. So he said that Kiddieland wasn’t good enough for her and that they were going to Disneyland instead. He then scraped together enough money to fulfill his promise.

  One of my earliest exposures to segregation came when our family went to downtown Birmingham at Christmastime to see Santa Claus. Only about five years old, I overheard my father commenting that Santa seemed to be treating the black children differently from the white ones. My past encounters with Santa Claus hadn’t been the best anyway. When I took one look at this big white man with a beard—likely the first one I had seen up close—I slowly pulled away, eyeing him suspiciously. My parents had to intervene to get me to finish telling him what I wanted for Christmas.

  But on this particular day, the Santa in question had been putting the white kids on his knee and holding the black children away from him, keeping them standing. “If he does that to Condoleezza,” Daddy said to Mother, “I’m going to pull all of that stuff off him and expose him as just another cracker.” I fearfully went forward, not knowing what to expect. Perhaps Santa felt the vibes from my father because he put me on his knee, listened to my list, and said, “Merry Christmas!” All’s well that ends well. But I never forgot how racially charged that moment felt around, of all things, Santa Claus.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Summer Respite

  THE ONLY break from segregation came when we left Birmingham, which tended to be in the summer. When we would visit my grandmother and Aunt Theresa in Baton Rouge, we took the train, which provided integrated facilities.

  We’d board the Silver Comet at about five in the evening in Birmingham, eat in the dining car, and sleep overnight in a bedroom berth. I can still taste the pudding served in heavy silver ice cream cups and feel the excitement of getting into bed as the train rushed along the tracks. But when we returned to Birmingham, the only place to eat out was A. G. Gaston’s restaurant, and Mother didn’t like to eat there because it was next door to a funeral home.

  Once in a while we’d travel to Atlanta, about 150 miles away, where there was a wider variety of black restaurants and a nice movie theater. I can remember seeing Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor on one such occasion, being treated to dinner at Pasquale’s, and then driving home since there was really no place to stay.

  In 1959, my father decided to start graduate school. He wanted out of the ministry and into college work and began to pursue a master’s degree in student personnel administration. The University of Alabama wasn’t an option since it was segregated. As a result, many black professionals of my father’s generation received their advanced degrees from midwestern or northern schools. Daddy learned that New York University had a fine program, and in the summer of 1959 and again in 1960, we packed up the family car and drove to New York City.

  The problem was that there was nowhere for blacks to stay or eat until you reached Washington, D.C. The only option was a picnic lunch of fried chicken, pork chops, bread, and potato chips to eat in the car. Mother would get up very early and prepare the feast. We’d leave before daylight, hoping to make it out of the deepest South before dark. This was in the days before the interstate highway system was completed, and for a black family some of the roads in Georgia and South Carolina could be pretty scary.

  When we reached Washington, D.C., we were all excited to be staying in a new chain of hotels called Holiday Inn. The rooms were hardly luxurious, but they were clean and it was a relief to have a bathroom. My parents, particularly my mother, were not too keen to stop at the gas-station restrooms for “coloreds” because they were almost always putrid and foul-smelling. If we couldn’t find a reasonably clean bathroom when nature called, we just, shall I say, went in nature.

  New York was fun. We ate at Howard Johnson’s almost every night and went to the movies, including one that everyone was buzzing about, Ben Hur. We stayed in a nice hotel called the Manhattan until we started to run out of money. For a few days we stayed at the house of my mother’s cousin Kate in Orange, New Jersey. But my parents were too proud to accept Kate and her husband Nat’s charitable offer to stay until we were ready to go home. Somehow my father managed to get a small apartment in the quarters for medical students near Bellevue Hospital.

  The second time in New York we began our stay in that complex. My mother didn’t like the arrangements, though, complaining that the students would sometimes come home with blood on their clothes. I remember that there were quite a few roaches in residence too. Our dwindling resources and the less than ideal accommodations were taking a toll. Even I was able to tell that things were pretty tense between my parents. It was the first time I’d ever heard them yell at each other, and I was quite unnerved by the whole thing.

  The next year my father decided to look for a more suitable place to pursue his studies. He learned that the University of Denver had a new program offering the degree that he wanted. More important, it offered reasonable student housing for families. So for the next two summers, when I was six and seven, we set out for a new destination: the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado.

  The trip to Denver was longer than the trip to New York, but traveling westward, we were able to find lodging just across the Tennessee border. After a stopover we would resume driving, trying to make it as far as St. Louis or Kansas City, where we’d stop again. The car wasn’t air-conditioned, and Kansas was always flat and hot. We would play all of those games that families do: How many different state license plates can you identify? Or can you guess the number of miles to the next town? My parents developed another game: What colleges are located here? On one of these trips we actually went several hundred miles out of the way to see Ohio State. My parents counted the number of college campuses visited like some people count national parks.

  But all in all I loved these trips. I’ll never forget the first time we crossed the border into Colorado. When you reach Colorado, the horizon appears to rise and you know you’re about to climb a mile high. My heart would beat faster as we drew closer to Denver, and to this day I am happiest in the high mountains of the western United States. I always felt that I should have been born in the West.

  The move to Denver was a good one. The university had very nice accommodations for families in Aspen Hall, complete with a full kitchen. My mother was also able to enroll in classes. Her certifications to teach were in English and science, so, to capitalize on her music skills, she decided to pursue a third qualification in music.

  The problem was what to do with me. There was a day camp to which I could and did go, but the activities ended in the early afternoon. One day we were passing by the campus ice arena, and I got an idea: ice-skating lessons. I’d seen two teenage figure skaters coming out of the arena in their little skating skirts. Since I loved watching figure ska
ting on television, I was immediately taken with the idea. The Denver Figure Skating Club ran a full-day summer school at the University of Denver arena. Skating was therefore the perfect answer: an opportunity to learn something new and high-priced child care.

  In short, the summers in Denver were perfect for the whole family, with clean, cheap accommodations, educational opportunities for both Mother and Daddy, and skating for me. We discovered all kinds of activities in the relaxed atmosphere of Colorado. Evening trips to Elitch Gardens, an amusement park outside the city, were my favorite. I loved to ride the carousel and to play the game where one throws balls at bowling pins, winning prizes for knocking them down. We went to see movies and discussed them afterward at a nice pizza parlor near the campus. When it was time to go home, I was really sad to leave and sorry to say goodbye to my new skating friends. Funny enough, I don’t remember reflecting much on the fact that, for the first time in my life, my little friends were white.

  CHAPTER TEN