Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter twenty-three

After the housing incident we did indeed stay in a university-owned home for another year. Mother was hired by the university as an admissions officer and threw herself into this new opportunity with great enthusiasm. She was good at it, too, receiving reams of thank-you letters from prospective candidates and their parents whom she helped. I was so happy for her because finally she had her professional life back.

Daddy earned accolades for his work at the university as well. My father’s touch with young people easily translated across racial boundaries, and he became at Denver, as he had at Stillman, one of the best-known figures on campus. The university administration relied on Daddy for difficult tasks. When the shootings of students protesting the Vietnam War took place at Kent State University in 1970, Denver, like virtually every other campus, erupted in protests and sit-ins. My father became the university’s liaison to the students, helping to calm the situation. I wasn’t particularly caught up in the political fervor but did attend one rally on Carnegie Field where my father proclaimed to the crowd, “It seems to me as if we need a demonstration to end all demonstrations!” Somewhere there is a picture of me sitting with the student demonstrators looking up at him on the stage.

The truth is that music majors were so busy with practice, rigorous and difficult theory classes, and performance demands that there wasn’t much time for anything else. When I accepted a post as news editor of DU’s student newspaper, the Clarion, I quickly learned that I simply didn’t have enough time for extracurricular activities—I couldn’t stay at the paper all night with my colleagues, reading copy and producing the paper. Eventually I quit, or perhaps I was fired. I quite honestly can no longer remember the circumstances.

I constantly clashed with the music faculty, which rightly didn’t think me single-minded enough in my devotion to piano. After one fairly poor performance before the entire piano faculty, my teacher suggested that I rededicate myself to the piano by going to the Aspen Music Festival School that summer of my sophomore year. I did, and I knew I’d become a far better pianist that summer. And I also knew that no matter how much better I became or how hard I worked, I’d never be good enough. The many prodigies studying there, some not yet into their teens, gave me a glimpse of the barriers to a concert career. I left Aspen having experienced a crisis of confidence and returned home to Denver set on finding a new path.

I asked to talk to my parents. We sat in the living room, they on the sofa and I on the piano bench. I told them that I wanted to change my major. I hated the single-minded focus of the piano program and had determined that I’d never be good enough to rise to the top of the profession. “It’s not good enough to have a career teaching thirteen-year-olds to murder Beethoven,” I told them.

They knew me better than anyone else, but they hadn’t seen this coming. At first my dad suggested that I change my major from the very demanding bachelor of music (the performance degree) to the broader bachelor of arts in music, which meant that I could take a number of courses in other departments. I explained that this wasn’t just about the narrowness of the degree. “I’ve played the piano since I was three,” I said. “But I don’t love it enough to end up as a music teacher, and that’s where I’m headed.”

“What are you changing your major to?” Daddy asked.

“I don’t know. Just not music,” I said.

“You’re going to end up as a waitress at Howard Johnson’s because you don’t know what you want to do with your life,” he responded. I don’t know why he picked on Howard Johnson’s, and after all, he’d once waited tables himself, but this was as powerful a rebuke as he could muster. I was accustomed to having my parents support me in everything I did, so my father’s response was truly shocking.

“I’d rather be a waitress at Howard Johnson’s than teach piano. And after all, it’s my life.”

“It’s our money,” Daddy retorted.

Mother intervened. “Come on, Rice, that’s not fair.” She looked back at me. “What your father is saying is that you’re already a junior in college and you don’t know what you want to do. You need to find a major or you won’t graduate on time,” she said calmly.

That evening I asked Mother why she wasn’t upset about my decision. More than anyone else, she’d been responsible for my love of music and my pursuit of a career in it. I would never fulfill that dream. Mother just smiled and said, “Do you remember when I told you that you weren’t old enough or good enough to quit?” I laughed, recalling that moment. “Now you are old enough and good enough. For the rest of your life your piano will always be there for you.” When I had the chance many years later, as national security advisor, to play with the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and then as secretary of state, for the Queen of England, I knew how wise my mother had been.

I did eventually find a major. After false starts in English literature and political science with a focus on state and local government, I was getting pretty desperate by the spring of my junior year. That’s when I wandered into an introductory course on international politics taught by a man named Josef Korbel. Korbel had been a Czech diplomat during World War II and had successfully mediated the 1948 Kashmir crisis for the United Nations before settling in Denver and founding the Graduate School of International Studies. He opened up an entirely new world to me. I loved his stories about the work of diplomats. He was a specialist on the Soviet Union, and I was quickly drawn into his tales of the byzantine intrigue of Josef Stalin. At the end of the quarter, I asked to see him and told him that I wanted to be a Soviet specialist and study international politics. He encouraged me to do so, saying that he had a daughter who was studying at Columbia. Her name was Madeleine Albright and perhaps we could meet someday.

When I went home and told my parents that I’d found what I wanted to do, they were really happy. If they had any doubts about the wisdom of a nice black girl from Alabama studying the Soviet Union, they didn’t express them, though in retrospect I’m sure they had plenty. “Jump on it with four feet,” my father said. And I did. I declared myself a political science major and started studying the Russian language. I had found my passion, or more accurately, it had found me. In any case, I finally knew what I loved, though I frankly didn’t know where it would lead me. I remember being particularly conscious of starting down a path that was very different from anything in my parents’ experience. They had always been there for me and always would be. But I would have to navigate my professional life on my own. That brought an unexpected sense of maturity and newfound freedom.