Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twelve

Because I so wanted to emulate the older kids, my parents found it rather easy to discipline me. I can only remember being spanked once. That was when I ignored my parents’ order not to climb up on a chair to get my Halloween costume from the top shelf of the closet and almost fell. Usually, though, they only had to say something about being “disappointed” in me. I hated that phrase because I did not want to let them down. They could also say simply, “You’re acting like a child.” I hated that even more. Perhaps, as an only child, I was driven to be more like the adults with whom I spent so much time. I even refused to eat the “child’s plate” in restaurants. Obviously, “You’re acting like a child” was a real insult.

I was taught by superb teachers, particularly in the fourth and fifth grades, 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. 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. 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 curtains 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.

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 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, and enrolled me in Saturday lessons with a teacher down the street.

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.

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—I’d taken one look at the big white man with a beard (likely the first one I had seen up close) and 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.