Excerpt of Extraordinary, Ordinary People by Condoleezza Rice

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 inter-actions 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 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.