Extraordinary, Ordinary People

by Condoleezza Rice

  When we got to the hospital, Mother was awake and more relaxed than either my father or I. She was relieved to at least know the facts, and Dr. Hamilton was mildly encouraging, saying that the cancer had been caught early. “Early” in those days meant that it had already spread to at least two lymph nodes. She’d need to undergo radiation therapy, which would start in the hospital and continue when she came home.

  My father called my grandmothers, aunts, and uncles with the news. A steady parade of family began to descend upon us. My mother’s sisters, brother, and sister-in-law all arrived. Grandmother Ray wisely stayed home. I love my extended family and we needed them, but after a while it felt like a bit of an intrusion. Mother stayed in the hospital about ten days. On the day before she was to leave, I arrived home from school to see my aunt Mattie moving the bedroom furniture around. “What are you doing?” I said. She explained that it was good when people came home from the hospital to have things look different. Certain that my mother wouldn’t appreciate coming back to a rearrangement of her carefully decorated bedroom, I protested and insisted that the furniture be returned to its original position. My relatives stayed a few days longer. They were trying to help, and for a while they did buoy Mother’s spirits. But then it was time for them to go home. Mother and Daddy and I just wanted to get back to normal. We needed to do that as a family: just the three of us. We even went to the hockey game the night the last relative left—just two weeks after my mother’s surgery.

  But when your mother is diagnosed with cancer you have to find a new normal. Once cancer enters your family’s life it is a constant and unwelcome presence. I prayed every night that Mother’s cancer would not come back. And there were Mother’s periodic checkups, first every month, then every three, then every six, which provoked an indescribable anxiety as they approached and only temporary relief when they passed without incident. I once asked my mother, just before one of these periodic trips to the doctor, if she was afraid. “It’s not so bad. I’m only nervous just before the doctor gives me the news,” she responded. After her five-year mark, which was once promoted as the moment when a cancer victim was considered cured, we all celebrated. But frankly I never believed that the struggle was behind us, and I was right.

  As the daughter of a mother who had breast cancer I can confirm that the perpetual anxiety caused by a parent’s disease is passed on to a child very directly. When Mother was first diagnosed in 1970, the genetic implications of the disease weren’t as well understood as they are today. But over my lifetime the fact that my mother had breast cancer has persisted as a dominant factor in my own health prognosis. I started getting mammograms before I was thirty and have had several scary results leading to multiple biopsies. The promise of early detection (and the prayers that go with it) has become my talisman against this devastating disease. I am grateful for the advances that seem to give me a fighting chance, but I am ever cognizant of my vulnerability. I decided, nonetheless, to forgo the test for genetic markers of the disease. A positive determination would just be too heavy a burden to bear. I don’t want to know the future.

  The cancer altered Mother’s life in other ways too. Though she never complained, I know that the drastic change in her physical appearance took a toll on her. Remember that this was a woman who took pride in her physical beauty and elegance. In 1970, cancer surgery was pretty blunt. The operation left a concave indentation where Mother’s breast had been. It was not standard practice then to do immediate reconstructive surgery. Rather, the attitude was somewhat cavalier: After all, what function does a woman’s breast have past her childbearing years? Mother lived the rest of her life with a prosthetic bra. Moreover, the removal of several of her lymph nodes caused her left arm to swell to almost twice the size of her right. She covered the swelling by always wearing long-sleeved dresses. I remember one day when Mother went shopping and tried on a dress, the sleeve of which was too tight for her disfigured arm. The saleslady innocently asked what had happened. Mother addressed the situation directly, explaining that the swelling was the result of breast cancer surgery. The startled woman fumbled for something to say and then just said, “God bless you.” Mother, gracious and calm, simply replied, “Thank you.”

  I learned a lot about Angelena Rice from how she faced these challenges. She didn’t allow anything “superficial” about her status as cancer victim to matter, sloughing off the physical disfigurement and the psychological toll of living with the disease. She was grateful to be a survivor and to continue her life as wife and mother. Mother was strong in ways that I cannot to this day fully fathom and am certain that I couldn’t reproduce. Her strength allowed us to go on with our lives.

  My father was deeply affected too. He told me that his prayers had been answered. When he’d learned of my mother’s diagnosis he’d asked God not to take her, wondering, “How will I raise a fifteen-year-old alone?” He did not have to. Over the years, Daddy more often gave voice to his fears than Mother did, telling me, for example (but apparently not my mother), that the many doctors he’d spoken to had informed him that cancer never really goes away. “Those little seeds lie dormant and you never know when they’ll strike again,” he said. The fact is, from that brutal Monday forward our tight-knit family’s sense of security was shaken by the infiltration of cancer into our consciousness. That was the new normal.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Starting Early (Again)

  THROUGH THE spring and summer of 1970 life was once again taken up with piano, skating, and school. My first major figure skating competition, held that August, was relatively successful. I had always been good at the compulsory phase of tracing school figures and found myself in first place. On the other hand, my free skating (jumping and spinning) left something to be desired, and I wound up finishing third. Many years later I enjoyed some light moments with my parents when I accused them of putting me in the wrong sport. I was five foot seven with the legs of someone five foot ten, exactly the wrong body type to get any leverage for jumping. “I should have been a tennis player,” I told them. They reminded me that it was I who’d wanted to be a figure skater.

  That summer competition was the only one in which I ever placed. I was simply not a very good skater. I couldn’t bend my knees, leading one judge to remark, “It’s amazing you can do a jump. You never actually leave the ice.” But I was lucky to have wonderful coaches, including Wally Sahlin, who would always tell me to keep my chin up. “You’ll get ’em next time,” he would say after one of my many mishaps. In any case, I loved the challenge, and the sport taught me discipline and perseverance. I have often said that skating taught me more about character than the piano did. It’s really difficult to work hard, fail at the moment of truth, and have to get up and work at it the next day. But that is precisely what skating taught me to do. It may be why my parents continued to pour money into my obviously limited potential on the ice. And why, until I was finally sixteen, my father got up every morning and took me to the rink before dawn.

  I’d settled into a very nice life and didn’t think much of it when my parents said one day after school that they wanted to talk about college. I assumed they meant that it was time to think about applying to universities, since I was entering my senior year. But they had something else in mind.

  We sat in the living room, my mother on the sofa, Daddy in the pink chair, and I on the piano bench. This put us in a semicircle so that our eyes met very directly. Daddy seemed quite hesitant. He started the conversation by noting that I had almost completed the requirements for graduation at St. Mary’s. This was true, but I was planning to take a set of Advanced Placement courses and work extra hard on my piano the next year. I had my eye on entering and finishing conservatory and then going to study in Europe.

  Daddy said that he’d been talking to people at the university and that it might be possible for me to skip my senior year and begin my college curriculum there. This would allow me more time for piano as well. He knew that I wanted to apply
to a music conservatory, perhaps Juilliard in New York or the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. But, he said, this was risky, since once I was in a conservatory I wouldn’t be able to change my mind and major in something else. Moreover, I had a lot of interests, and Daddy and my mother thought that I would be unhappy in a conservatory.

  I protested that I really wanted to be a musician and that they knew that. Was this just a way to keep me in Denver? This retort came out rather bluntly, but I’d long suspected that my parents did not want me to leave home. It was true that I was pretty young. I believed that they just couldn’t imagine sending me off to college and breaking up our tight-knit threesome. For the first time in my life I felt that this was more about them than about me, and I resented it.

  Mother said nothing when I leveled this charge. Daddy remained calm and explained that I could always transfer after one year at Denver if I really wanted to but that they felt strongly that I should forgo my senior year at St. Mary’s. I could go to Denver practically tuition free thanks to a deep discount for the children of faculty. I said I’d think about it, but I didn’t like the idea.

  Several days later I came back with a counterproposal. This time they sat on the sofa and I stood the entire time. I told them that I’d thought about it and had come up with a good idea. Why not finish my senior year in high school and start my freshman year in college at the same time? I wanted to finish with my high school class but was attracted to getting a jump on college. I’d talked to my piano teacher, Mr. Lichtmann, who was thrilled at the prospect of my early entry into the rigors of the performance major.

  My parents explained that St. Mary’s cost a lot of money. I selfishly said that I knew that but wasn’t prepared to give up my senior year. I remember this as one of the most unpleasant conversations I ever had with my parents. They stood their ground and I stood mine. It was late and we went to bed. I know that I was angry, and I suspect that they were too.

  The next day we talked again and after some back-and-forth they agreed to my idea. We set about designing a hybrid path. Each day I would skate and go to DU until eleven o’clock. Then I’d head over to St. Mary’s, where I’d take only a couple of required courses and practice the piano. After that I’d go home to study, skate, and practice the piano some more before bedtime. When I started this gauntlet I was only fifteen, too young to drive to college.

  This worked for exactly one quarter. I am disciplined, but I am not a grind, and I’ve always needed more in my life than success at work. I quickly found that I didn’t belong socially to either St. Mary’s or the university. The final year is supposed to be a bonding year for seniors, but I was rarely around for any of the activities and largely excluded from various committees and class offices. Some of my teachers resented my attending the university, taking it as an affront to the quality of their teaching. When I proudly showed my first college English paper, for which I’d received an A, to a teacher at St. Mary’s, she grumpily dismissed it as not very good or worthy of an A in her Advanced Placement course. St. Mary’s made it quite clear that my college grades wouldn’t be counted toward my academic standing. There was no chance that I would be valedictorian.

  I knew that something had to give, but I was bound and determined not to admit to my parents that they’d been right—especially given the high tuition they were paying. So I decided that I’d complete the hybrid year but that I was going to have to find footing in one world or the other. It would be easier to go forward than to go back, I reasoned. That meant really becoming a college student.

  First I had to free up some time. I was tired of getting up every morning at four-thirty, never being able to go out with my new college friends for pizza or a burger. So I quit competitive skating that spring, continuing to skate but at a greatly reduced level. Second, I started spending what free time I had at the university, going to St. Mary’s only for my classes. Since I had turned sixteen and could now drive, traveling back and forth was much easier. My life began to revolve around the university and my new friends—many of them hockey players, in whom I had more than a passing interest as potential boyfriends.

  St. Mary’s receded more and more into the background. I’d been fifteen at the time of my junior prom and not yet dating. My father had arranged for his secretary’s brother to take me to the dance. He was a nice young man, but I decided that night that I was never again going to a big dance with someone my father had chosen. When senior prom rolled around, I asked one of the hockey players. He went with me, but the poor guy—a college boy—was so uncomfortable at a high school prom that we left early.

  The social strains of being so young and so advanced in school had finally caught up with me. I was now barely sixteen and a freshman in college. My parents were concerned too. They worried that I was suddenly hanging out with a crowd much older and far more mature than I was. Nineteen seventy-one was a time of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. When I announced that I wanted to move to campus for my sophomore year, they came unglued. My father said that I’d never live in the dorms because as a university administrator he knew “what went on in there.”

  My mother added her two cents: “You are just too young to be hanging out with these people. What could they possibly want from you except to take advantage of you?”

  I hit the roof. “This early college enrollment was your idea,” I said. “Now you’re going to have to live with the consequences and trust that I’m smarter than you think I am.”

  This was the biggest fight my parents and I had ever had. Looking back on it, I see that they had set in motion events that challenged me to grow up very fast. I think they believed that I could advance in school and remain their little girl socially. But I was not one of those prodigies who had no social skills and no social life. I loved to have friends, and for better or worse, my friends were now college kids.

  In response to my father’s retort about the dorms, I asked him what he thought of the sorority houses. I don’t think he saw what was coming and said that the Greek houses were a lot better. “Okay, then I’ll join a sorority,” I told them, and I did. I pledged Alpha Chi Omega. I loved the house and spent much of my free time there, learning to play bridge, planning social functions, and becoming a little sister of the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha.

  In time my folks settled down and suppressed whatever continuing misgivings they had about my new life. I felt no connection to high school any longer. When I was selected for the Owl Club cotillion, a debutante ball for accomplished black high school girls, I did not want to participate. I was in college, for goodness’ sake! I eventually did allow my father to “present” me, so as not to embarrass my parents in front of their friends.

  It wasn’t until many years later that I admitted to them that they’d been absolutely right about St. Mary’s. It had been a fine place for me to go to school, but by the winter of 1971 I was done there. One of the truly anticlimactic days of my life was high school graduation. The school didn’t even spell my name correctly on my diploma. My mother, who sixteen years before had put so much work into creating that name, sent the diploma back so that “Condoleezza” would be spelled properly, with two z’s. The diploma was never returned until some members of the State Department press corps, having heard the story, petitioned St. Mary’s for a replacement as a departure gift when I stepped down as secretary of state in 2009.

  My great-grandfather was illiterate, but my great-grandmother, Julia Head, was a favored household slave who had learned to read as a young girl.

  My father at three years old and his sister, Theresa, at five, shown here with my grandparents. Daddy was an easygoing personality and a superb athlete. Theresa was reclusive but brilliant.

  The son of sharecroppers, Granddaddy Rice received a scholarship to study at Stillman College after agreeing to become a Presbyterian minister.

  He was an “educational evangelist,” establishing local schools and impressing upon his students the importance of attending college.

/>   My mother, Angelena (right), at three, and her sister, Mattie, at five. The cute little darlings were featured here as “calendar” girls for the local barbershop.

  My maternal grandmother, Mattie Lula Parrom, had rich-brown skin and very high cheekbones, attesting to an ill-defined American Indian heritage. She is pictured here at her graduation from St. Mark’s Academy, a “finishing” school for well-to-do young black women.

  After running away from home, my maternal grandfather, Albert Ray III, found himself alone in a train station one evening with just one token in his pocket. “Old Man Wheeler,” the patriarch of a white family, brought him home and raised him with his sons.

  Mother (far right), her brother, Alto, and her sister, Gee (far left), were often reminded by their parents to maintain their dignity despite the degrading circumstances of segregated Birmingham. They and their cousin, Kate, are pictured here with my grandfather’s truck.

  Daddy completed college and seminary at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina. Like his father, he would become an educational evangelist and mentor students in Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Denver, and Palo Alto.

  My mother’s students remembered her as an extraordinary beauty but also as a demanding teacher whom they obeyed despite her diminutive stature.