Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter four

One day Granddaddy Ray passed a beautiful young girl drawing water at a well. He introduced himself, but when he learned that she was only sixteen, he refrained from trying to date her. When she was finally old enough, Mattie Lula Parrom and Albert Ray married. Albert was industrious and worked three jobs for most of his life. He labored as an engineer in the coal mines during the week, a profession that saddled him with emphysema and heart disease and gave him a deep admiration for John L. Lewis and the coal miners’ union; he sheared horses in the evening, a skill that he’d been taught by Mr. Wheeler; and on the weekends he built houses. Granddaddy’s day began every morning at four o’clock with Grandmother cooking a big breakfast of steak or bacon and eggs to sustain him through the hard workday ahead.

The Rays were proud people. They settled in Hooper City, Alabama, which in those days was pretty far outside the city limits of Birmingham. Even when I was a child my grandparents’ home felt as though it were in the country, not the city.

Mattie and Albert Ray were landowners who built their house with their own hands. The white wood-framed home was large for its time, on a corner lot with a big pecan tree in the front yard. It had eight large rooms, including a music room where my grandmother taught piano. Grandmother loved fine things, and the heavy mahogany furniture, always purchased with cash, survives in various family members’ houses—including my own—to this very day.

My aunts and uncle remember their parents’ determination to maintain their dignity despite the degrading circumstances of Birmingham. The children were constantly reminded, “You are a Ray!” This was both an admonition to let nothing hold them back and occasionally a rebuke when my grandparents disapproved of their behavior. They were never allowed to use a “colored” restroom or water fountain. “Wait until you get home,” they were told. And my grandparents always made sure that they had a car so that no one had to ride in the back of the bus.

My mother had five siblings. Albert junior, Mattie, and my mother were born very close together in the early 1920s. Uncle Alto and Aunt Genoa, who went by Gee, made their entrance about a decade later. My grandparents were not themselves college-educated, but they were determined that their children would be. As it turned out, this took some doing, but all five eventually finished college.

Both my mother and her older sister, Mattie, went to Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama. They lived at home and drove to college each day. Both were stunningly beautiful. Mattie looked like her mother, sharing her rich brown complexion, high cheekbones, and long, wavy black hair. My mother looked like her father, fair-skinned with the same round face that I have, and she had long, straight brownish hair. As little girls they were favored by adults because they were so cute. One of my most cherished photographs shows five-year-old Mattie and three-year-old Angelena posing for the local barbershop’s calendar.

In college the Ray girls were popular, with outgoing Mattie becoming a majorette and my more reserved mother breaking out of character by becoming a cheerleader. Mattie, who played high school and collegiate tennis and basketball, was a real athlete. My mother, however, was not. In order to fulfill her physical education requirement, she created a scrapbook. Her teacher gave her a B for the beautiful work but told her he just couldn’t give her an A when she didn’t even break a sweat. She was an artist and a lady, and she didn’t really believe that women should play sports or, heaven forbid, perspire. I can’t remember my mother ever picking up a bat or a ball of any kind, and though she later learned to enjoy spectator sports with my father and me, she never fully came to terms with my tomboy tendencies.

After college Mattie and Angelena continued to live at home. My mother and her sister had many friends, but they were clearly each other’s best friend. Life in segregated Birmingham was in some ways pretty simple: family, church, work, and a social life built around black fraternities and private clubs. Mother and her sister became well-regarded teachers at the same high school, though their perpetual tardiness led their father to set the house clocks far ahead to force them to be on time. They’d been taught music by their mother and grandmother, and on Sundays they played organ and piano for Baptist churches—they were Methodists themselves, but the Baptists paid better.

On the weekend, the girls went to fraternity and social club dances in dresses that Mattie, who could sew beautifully, made from whatever material they liked. They loved clothes. My mother once said that her meager teacher’s salary was already owed to fine clothing stores such as Burger-Phillips and Newberry’s the minute she got it. They took trips to shop in downtown Birmingham, where their really light-skinned acquaintances would “pass” as white so that they could go to lunch counters and bring hot dogs out to their waiting, darker-skinned friends, who could not get served.

My mother had been teaching at Fairfield Industrial High for several years when a new athletic director and assistant football coach was hired. Tall, dark-skinned, and extremely athletic, he was powerfully built and had a deep, resonant voice. And he was a preacher who happened to be single. Mother claimed that John Wesley Rice Jr. first saw her walking down the hallway in a red polka-dot dress and red, very high-heeled strappy shoes. He was leaning against the wall, filing his fingernails and hoping to have a chance to say hello. He claimed that it was she who had made the first move, dressing that way to catch his attention.

Daddy had come to Birmingham after finishing Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. He’d started school at Stillman College in Alabama, but when World War II broke out, Granddaddy decided to send him to Smith, where he could attend college and then go on to seminary. Daddy wanted to go into the army but acceded to his father’s wishes. He did do some chaplain’s work for soldiers returning from the front, but I think he always felt a little guilty for not having fought in the war.

In any case, by the time Daddy arrived at Fairfield High School, he had already been pastor of his first church and had worked several jobs simultaneously. On the weekends he played and coached semiprofessional football in Burlington, North Carolina. Sometimes he worked as a waiter to supplement his income, and he even tried opening a restaurant, which failed miserably. Until the day he died he always tipped generously, saying that waiting tables was the hardest work he had ever done.

My paternal grandfather, John Wesley Rice Sr., was born in Eutaw (pronounced “UH-tah”), Alabama. Not many blacks owned land in those days, so my grandfather’s family worked the land of others as sharecroppers. Granddaddy’s father was illiterate, but his mother, my great-grandmother Julia Head, was a freed slave who’d learned to read. It isn’t clear who educated her, since it was illegal to teach slaves to read. But she was apparently a favored house slave, and there is a story that Julia ran Union soldiers off the plantation and protected the horses during the Civil War. Perhaps she thought she’d have to do it again, because until the day she died, she would sit on her porch with a shotgun in her lap and a pipe in her mouth.

According to my father, Granddaddy Rice was not a favored son because, unlike his siblings, he was very dark-skinned. You will notice that I have by now described the skin color of each of my relatives. Unfortunately, it mattered. One of the scars of slavery was a deep preoccupation with skin color in the black community. The lighter your skin, the better off you were. This bias extended to other facial features: thin and “Caucasian” was preferred to thick and “Negroid,” just as straight hair was “good” compared to kinky hair, which was “bad.” The repercussions were significant in my parents’ time, when no self-respecting black school would select a dark-skinned homecoming queen. There was even rumored to be a “paper bag test” for membership in the best clubs—if you were any darker than a paper bag, you needn’t bother to apply.

By the time I came along, skin color and other physical features were less important, though not irrelevant. My father loved that I had my mother’s long hair, despite the fact that mine, unlike hers, was a coarse, thick, and somewhat unruly mop. When I finally cut it in college, it was pretty clear that he thought I’d given up some sort of social advantage. But by then the “black is beautiful” aesthetic and Afro hairstyles had introduced a new concept of what was appealing.

One can imagine, though, what it was like for my very dark-skinned grandfather in the first half of the twentieth century. He was given the worst land to work and not much encouragement from his father. But his mother taught him to read and sent him to school. He had big dreams and loved books. So when he was about nineteen he decided to get a college education. He asked people, in the parlance of the day, how a “colored” man could go to college. They told him about little Stillman College, which was about thirty miles away in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He saved his cotton and paid the school.

After one year, though, Granddaddy Rice ran out of cotton and had no way to pay his tuition. He was told that he would have to leave. Thinking quickly, he pointed to some of his fellow students. “How are those boys going to college?” he asked. He was told that they’d earned a scholarship and that he could have one too if he wanted to be a Presbyterian minister. Without missing a beat, Granddaddy Rice replied, “Well, that’s exactly what I had in mind.” As they would do several times in my family’s history, the Presbyterians educated this young black man.

John Wesley Rice Sr. soon met Theresa Hardnett, a pretty half-Creole from Baton Rouge. The Hardnett family produced educated girls, including two who were among the first black registered nurses to graduate from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. My grandmother, though, left home when she was seventeen and married my grandfather shortly thereafter. She set out with him on his mission of church building and educational evangelism.

While my mother’s family was landowning and settled, Daddy’s family lived the life of an itinerant preacher. As a result, my parents held very different views on the importance of land. Mother always wanted to own a house and sometimes, a little pointedly, reminded Daddy that he’d grown up moving from place to place and living in “other people’s houses.” Her family, on the other hand, had owned land. Daddy didn’t really care and felt a bit tied down by the financial responsibility of home ownership. While they did eventually own property and a house, their differences on this matter remained a source of some conflict throughout their marriage.

In any case, Granddaddy Rice worked mostly in Louisiana, founding a church and a school next door. Sometimes he found it necessary to work in Mississippi and Alabama, leaving the family behind for a few months in Louisiana. Granddaddy’s churches were successful because he was a powerful speaker. His sermons were intellectually sound and biblically based. He made it clear that he’d studied theology in seminary and was a fully ordained minister. In his sermons, there was none of the “whooping and hollering” emotion of the Baptists across town, who had no formal training. Granddaddy apparently delivered his sermons without notes. I once told my father that I was grateful that I’d inherited his exceptional ability to speak off the cuff. He told me that he was indeed good but not like Granddaddy. “You should have heard your grandfather,” he said. “He spoke in whole paragraphs.”

The Rice schools were even more successful than the churches. My grandfather believed that his schools could better educate black children than the miserable public schools of the day, and he sought funds from any source he could, whether it meant a few cents from parents in the community or fifty dollars from rich white people across town. Granddaddy Rice once told Daddy that “white guilt” was his best ally in funding his schools. But when a white church collected a bunch of old textbooks and “donated” them to my grandfather’s school, he politely declined. It was important, he explained, that his kids have the most up-to-date reading materials, just like the white students.

Granddaddy’s educational evangelism compelled him to go door-to-door in the poor neighborhoods around him and impress upon parents the importance of sending their kids to college. Then he would go to colleges—usually Presbyterian schools such as Stillman, Johnson C. Smith, and Knoxville College in Tennessee—and “make arrangements” for the kids to go there. In turn, he would recruit young teachers from the historically black colleges with which he had these relationships. He was zealously committed to education because he believed that it had transformed him, and he was determined to spread its benefits.

When it came to his own family, he was even more insistent. My father and his sister, Theresa, attended schools their father had founded most recently. When it came time for high school, Granddaddy placed his kids in Baton Rouge’s McKinley High, which in 1916 had graduated the first class of black students in the state of Louisiana.

Growing up, my father was a very good athlete but not a great student, as he remembered it. It was a struggle to get him to study, and he didn’t love to read, though he loved history and politics. For the most part, Daddy seems to have enjoyed less serious pursuits. He loved to play preacher. One day he and his sister re-created a funeral that their father had just conducted. They went to the church, set their dolls up in the pews, and laid one doll on the altar table to mimic a casket. Theresa was playing the piano, and my father had begun to preach when one of the dolls in the pew fell with a heavy thud. They ran out as fast as possible, sure that they’d somehow awakened the dead.

Daddy was an easygoing personality who didn’t always take life too seriously. He was a popular kid who would become an outgoing adult. His sister, Theresa, by contrast, was reclusive, brilliant, and determined to follow in her father’s intellectual footsteps. She would later go on to become one of the first black women to receive a doctorate in English literature from the University of Wisconsin. Thus I am not even the first PhD in my family.

Aunt Theresa wrote books on Charles Dickens, including one called Dickens and the Seven Deadly Sins. When I was about eight years old, we were visiting Aunt Theresa in Baton Rouge, where she was teaching at Southern University. When I saw that she was reading A Tale of Two Cities, I asked whether she’d ever read that book before. “I have read this novel at least twenty-five times,” she said. I remember thinking that this was a terribly boring way to spend one’s life. For years it soured my thoughts of being a professor, since I associated the vocation with the drudgery of reading the same book twenty-five times.