Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter seventeen

My father came home one day and he and my mother went into their bedroom, closed their door, and began talking. I couldn’t hear the words, but it sounded like a very serious discussion. I wasn’t used to being shut out of my parents’ deliberations. We talked about everything—or at least I thought we did.

When they emerged my mother was crying. Daddy wanted to take a job as dean of students at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, sixty miles from Birmingham. My mother, whose life had been spent in Birmingham and whose recently widowed mother was there, did not want to move. My parents had finally bought property, a plot of land adjoining one owned by my uncle Alto and his wife. They were planning to build there in a kind of family compound. Moreover, Mother was gaining more and more acclaim for her cultural productions at school and for the excellence of Westminster’s choir. And, she told my father, “Tuscaloosa is in the boondocks.”

I wasn’t thrilled with the idea of moving either. What about my piano lessons at Birmingham-Southern? What about my friend Velda Robinson, whom I saw at school every day, and Margaret and Vanessa, with whom I played in the neighborhood every evening?

My father was unmoved. Daddy wanted desperately to get out of the pulpit and into college work and he was determined to take this opportunity. This was, for him, a logical extension of his commitment to youth in his ministry. So when Stillman called he felt it was time to go.

I was shocked to learn that he had already decided to accept the job before asking my opinion. I challenged him about it, saying that it was my life too. He actually apologized but said that it was time to leave Birmingham. We would come back every Wednesday so that I could continue my lessons at Birmingham-Southern. And I could call Velda every night if I wanted to.

Several days later we went down to visit Tuscaloosa. My mother was reassured when she was offered a job teaching at Druid High School. Daddy had been given a large house on Geneva Drive on the small, quiet campus. Pretty soon Mother set about having it redecorated, clearly impressed with the fact that it was much nicer than our little manse in Birmingham.

Life in Tuscaloosa was very different, largely because our lives revolved around the college. Stillman was a small college then, of about 650 students, but it had a very nice, well-appointed campus. For the first time, I could wander about unaccompanied because the campus was isolated and safe. I would often walk the quarter mile to the student union, where there was a bowling alley, or over to my father’s office on the main quadrangle. My father even took advantage of the isolation of the campus to teach me at the age of eleven to drive along some of the back roads.

Stillman had no football team but an excellent basketball team, which we followed passionately. We occasionally went to see the University of Alabama play football and began to develop an affinity for the Crimson Tide, which survives with me to this day.

The University of Alabama, just a few miles from Stillman, also provided a whole new range of educational activities. My parents made certain that I spent a good deal of time on the newly integrated campus, attending the university’s speakers series and touring science labs and the library. Sometimes after school we would just go up to the campus and walk around. The speakers series was particularly stimulating. We saw both Robert F. Kennedy and David Brinkley, our family’s media hero, at the university’s new field house.

When it came to my formal schooling, however, things were more complicated. In my last year in Birmingham, I’d been one of a few sixth graders who’d been merged into the seventh-grade classroom. We did our sixth-grade work but joined the seventh graders for their math, science, and reading curriculum. But when we moved to Tuscaloosa, there was no such program. Placing me in seventh grade would have meant repeating much of the curriculum. Yet skipping a grade meant that I’d be eleven in eighth grade until November and then only twelve.

My parents were worried because there is a huge difference between eleven-year-old girls and thirteen-year-old girls. Arguably, seventh grade was the worst possible one to skip. We discussed the issue as a family. It was the first time that I heard about something called puberty, my parents saying that I’d be behind my classmates in both physical and social development. I can remember sitting on the living room sofa, waiting patiently while my parents fumbled for the right words to explain what they meant. There were long pauses during which they’d look at each other. My father, who was one of the most articulate people I knew, was, for the first time in my experience, tongue-tied. He looked down and stopped trying. So Mother took up the task, delivering a rather opaque and disjointed lecture on sexuality. I was bemused, taking from her remarks something about needing to stay away from boys and their raging hormones, whatever those were. I didn’t ask questions. I felt bad for my folks because they were so clearly embarrassed by the whole discussion. I didn’t bother to tell them that I knew quite a bit about all of this from another source, my friends’ older siblings. At the end I just said okay, and the conversation ended.

Ultimately, I decided to go to eighth grade. I could tell that my parents wanted me to, but they really didn’t push. They didn’t have to because it was an easy decision for me. I had always wanted to be one of the “big kids.”

It turned out, though, that fitting in was not as easy as I had imagined. I had only recently stopped playing with Barbie dolls, and now all my friends wanted to talk about were their boyfriends. I experienced early puberty, but I was still underdeveloped compared to my classmates. Eventually, though, I adjusted. I found a new best friend in Donna Green, who, like me, loved watching Dark Shadows on television after school.

In fact, my parents were a bit concerned when I suddenly announced that I had a boyfriend too. His name was Darrell Bell and he was a drummer in the Druid High School band. My parents felt better when they learned that he was the son of the school guidance counselor. I guess they decided that with that parentage, Darrell couldn’t get too far out of line.

I came to enjoy Druid and did well academically. I became less conscious of the age difference with my classmates. But for my mother, things were not working out as well. The school principal, Mr. Hughes, and my mother clashed repeatedly. When my mother was assigned one of the classroom annexes, actually a trailer, on the field next to the lunchroom, she took this as another affront, and she and the principal got into a loud argument. I recognized Mother’s shrill voice immediately as she screamed at Mr. Hughes, “Don’t you ever come into my classroom unannounced and complain about my teaching!”

Mr. Hughes almost ran out of the room, yelling as he left, “That Rice woman is crazy!”

The kids in the lunchroom were laughing uncontrollably. I laughed too. Maybe I should have been embarrassed, but I loved it when my mother stood up for herself, even if she made a bit of a spectacle in doing so.

Obviously, Mother’s relationship with Mr. Hughes was irrevocably broken after that. The next year, Tuscaloosa was opening two new middle schools, Woodlawn and Tuscaloosa Middle School, and the pressure was growing to integrate the schools and particularly the teaching staff. As it happened, my mother was assigned to the white school, Tuscaloosa. She was excited to be going there, breaking the color barrier and teaching in a new environment. But before the school year started, she was reassigned to the black school, Woodlawn, without explanation. She was crestfallen, feeling that she’d been demoted. But she tried to make the best of it. She started a new arts program at Woodlawn and was put in charge of the opening ceremonies and cultural presentation for the school’s inauguration. Still, working in a middle school was not nearly as fulfilling for her as teaching at Western-Olin had been.

Daddy’s career was flourishing in Tuscaloosa, however. He was right that college work suited him. Easily the most popular figure on the Stillman campus, he was also one of the movers in the city of Tuscaloosa. He was asked to speak everywhere, and everyone from the mayor to the leadership of the University of Alabama consulted him. Daddy struck up a friendship with the vice chancellor of the university, a man named John Blackburn, who would figure heavily in Daddy’s career advancement for years to come.

I remember how busy my father was in those days. Daddy was determined to take advantage of the numerous new “Great Society” programs sponsored by the federal government. He was the acting director and a counselor in the Upward Bound program at Stillman, less than a year after the Higher Education Act of 1965 created it. And Daddy’s church had housed one of the first Head Start programs back in 1965, so now in Tuscaloosa he was asked to chair the advisory board of the program. I could tell that he was a very important man in the community and I was very proud of him.

Yet John W. Rice Jr. was never one to grow complacent, and Daddy decided that Stillman’s students were hearing too little about the social and political events of the day. Daddy received permission from the new president, Harold Stinson, to start a speakers series. Dr. Stinson was shocked when he learned that Daddy had invited as the first speaker Stokely Carmichael, the firebrand radical leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Alabama had just begun to settle down from the upheavals of the past years. Not surprisingly, the thought of having Stokely Carmichael in Tuscaloosa was jarring. Stokely belonged to the new breed of radical black leaders. It was a time when the Black Panthers were a real and violent force on the West Coast and Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were coming into their own. Stokely was making waves with incendiary language about the Vietnam War and white America. These were not people in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr., who believed in integration and the U.S. Constitution. They spoke in terms of revolution and blood, not in the language of nonviolence and civil disobedience.

A couple of days before Stokely was to speak in the Stillman College gymnasium, the Tuscaloosa chief of police called my father and asked to see him. “Reverend,” he said, “Tuscaloosa just isn’t ready for Stokely Carmichael. What if he starts some kind of riot? I don’t want to stir up the rednecks either.” Daddy reassured him. He’d talked with Mr. Carmichael, who wanted only to be heard. It would be good for the students, and any University of Alabama students who wanted to come were welcome too. After Stillman agreed to some extra security arrangements, the chief of police decided to let the lecture go forward. “Reverend Rice,” he said, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.” When he came home, Daddy told my mother and me that he’d assured the chief that he did indeed know what he was doing. Then he said, “I sure hope I do.”

On the night of Stokely’s appearance, the gymnasium was filled to capacity. Students had come from the University of Alabama, but none were white. Stokely, dressed in green fatigues, gave a stirring critique of American policy in Vietnam, adroitly displaying his rhetorical skills. The speech was radical. At one point he said that he had told the draft board to go ahead and draft him. “But don’t expect me to use the gun on Vietnamese,” he told the audience, implying but not saying that he might shoot American soldiers instead. “They classified me 4-F,” he said, making reference to the draft category that meant “unfit to serve.”

At the end, the place erupted in applause. We went backstage to see Carmichael. He was calm and courteous and told my father that Stillman College had been the first historically black college that had asked him to speak. Daddy replied that he believed in letting people speak, and he invited Stokely to come back the next year. It was the beginning of what would become a long and unusual friendship.