Tough Love

by Susan Rice

  Back in those days, Mom lived in Harlem and led an active social life among the close-knit, young black professional community centered around the Riverton Apartments. In contrast to her depictions of their picture-perfect wedding, Mom spoke little about her marriage to Ted Irish, which ended in divorce in 1960. She portrayed Ted as kind, but rather shiftless, their marriage as a benign mistake but by no means a disaster. My sense from her, though never explicit, was that Mom may have concluded that Ted was gay, which rendered an uninspiring marriage untenable. In subsequent years, Mom searched for a more suitable life partner, falling hard at least one time before ultimately meeting my father.

  After the war, Emmett Rice, having completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees, decided to pursue his PhD in economics. Friends he met in the military had assured him that race relations were more open in California. Though skeptical, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where in the late 1940s and early 1950s, blacks comprised less than one percent of the student body.

  At Berkeley, Dad was fortunate to live in International House (known as I-House), a predominantly graduate residence of almost four hundred students, roughly two-thirds foreign, mainly from Europe and Asia. He found the I-House experience broadening, stimulating, and enjoyable. As a former I-House staff member recalled, “Both foreign and American friends sought linkage with Emmett’s social and intellectual orbit.… Discussions with him tended to be philosophical rather than confrontational. The result was that there was more light than heat, and people were drawn to him. Many remember the impact these discussions had on them.”

  Though in many ways a deeply serious man, my father always knew how to have fun. He had a deft charm and broad smile that rarely failed with women. He loved music, dancing, drink, and laughter. With his closest Berkeley buddies, Dad bought a convertible and shared a funky penthouse apartment on the roof of an old warehouse, where the parties were frequent and legendary. He went crazy for jazz while at Berkeley, taking in as many concerts and clubs as his studies allowed, and later instilled in me and Johnny his deep appreciation for jazz and its greats.

  My father regaled us with stories of his years at Berkeley, calling them “the best times of my life.” He made lasting friendships and had more than his share of girlfriends, some white—which was highly unusual in this era, even in California. Dad imbibed the nascent counterculture movement and suffered through the painful McCarthy-era loyalty oath controversy, which bitterly divided the faculty and graduate students. Above all, Emmett proclaimed, he felt liberated: “It was the first living experience… where I did not feel the constant pressure of being black. And the first time I had the experience of people relating to me, not so much as a black person, but as another person.”

  The labor market was a different story. In my father’s experience, “It was much harder to get a job on the West Coast than it was to get a job on the East Coast. There was great reluctance to pass laws out here governing fair employment.” He spoke out vocally on campus about the need for fair employment laws, drawing the ire of the director of I-House, Allen Blaisdell, who reproved him for “making statements like that to foreigners who might not understand.” Years later, Blaisdell dimed out my father to the FBI for disloyalty during one of his initial background checks for work in the U.S. government.

  Emmett initially faced workplace discrimination in California when he moonlighted while a graduate student as a fireman at the Berkeley Fire Department. The first black man to integrate the force, he started as a line fireman, without training, but soon was given the more suitable task of a fire alarm operator and dispatcher. Dad described the reaction of the white firefighters to his arrival: “They did not like the idea of having to have blacks in the department, because firemen live a fairly intimate kind of existence. Still, they seemed to take the view that it was not my fault. After all, they could not blame me for trying to get a better job.”

  My dad’s favorite fireman story involved a little known near catastrophe that threatened the Berkeley cyclotron. One of his proudest and least-heralded successes, which Dad liked to recall for us, was the crisis that occurred when the grass in the Berkeley Hills caught fire near the nuclear reactor. “It was my job,” Dad said, “to decide what resources were needed to fight this serious fire—how many men and trucks would go. Within a few hours, the fire was under control. We had saved the nuclear facility and the town of Berkeley.”

  Guided by great teachers and mentors at Berkeley, Emmett became fascinated by the economic transformation of underdeveloped countries and selected India as the subject of his thesis. Awarded one of the early Fulbright Scholarships to support his doctoral research from 1951 to 1952, Dad flourished in Bombay. As a brown-skinned man in a brown society, he was a foreigner but no longer a visible minority—an experience that afforded him great psychic relief. India’s social hierarchy was structured more by caste than color, and my father was not immediately deemed inferior due to his race. Dad’s strong conviction that race is an irrelevant indicator of a person’s worth was further reinforced by seeing people of various dark hues run a major country.

  Back from India, my father successfully defended his dissertation in 1955, becoming Dr. Emmett J. Rice, and embarked on a new profession as an academic—although he knew his was not a path to prosperity. In the mid-1950s, the constraints imposed by persistent prejudice barred him from opportunities in industry and government. “I could not have worked in the [U.S.] Treasury at that time. I could not have worked at the Federal Reserve,” he observed. Getting a good academic job, however, turned out to be almost as tough, especially on the West Coast. Much to his frustration, “It was possible for a black person to get a job teaching at a major university in the East. But I could not get a job at San Francisco State.”

  So, leaving California, Dad landed his first job at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as an assistant professor of economics in 1954, teaching money and banking and corporate finance. My father was Cornell’s first black economics professor and was hired upon the recommendation of a Berkeley academic who omitted mention of his race. Cornell was surprised and none too happy to discover when Emmett arrived that he was unmistakably black. Despite this inauspicious start, my father enjoyed his nearly six years at Cornell.

  Though we were never told much about how they met, I do know that Emmett and Lois first crossed paths in the early 1960s, after Dad had taken a leave from Cornell to work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a staff economist. Apparently, the two met at a dinner for the New York Fed. Each had recently ended childless first marriages, and both were moving up in their respective fields. They married in New York on November 4, 1962, in what I have gathered was a modest civil ceremony, witnessed by a couple of close friends, and followed by a party.

  Almost immediately after their wedding, my parents moved to Lagos, Nigeria, where Dad had been sent by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as a research advisor to help establish the Central Bank of Nigeria in the wake of the country’s independence. Mom took leave from the College Board and worked for the Ford Foundation as an educational specialist for West Africa. Their two years in Nigeria, punctuated by travel around West Africa and Europe, were, by all accounts, enjoyable. They amassed an impressive collection of Nigerian art, including valuable wooden sculptures that were a visual fixture of my upbringing.

  I was conceived in Nigeria. Toward the end of their stay, Mom became pregnant with me, and I have long amused myself with the hypothesis that my origins in Nigeria, combined with my Irish and Jamaican ancestors, explain a lot both about my temperament and attraction to all things international.

  Dad, who had made it known early on that he did not want kids, greeted the news of Mom’s pregnancy with something far less than enthusiasm, suggesting that Mom had tricked him into fatherhood. My mother hotly disputed this assertion, but in Dad’s view this pregnancy was among the first things to undermine trust in their marriage, which mutually dissipated
over time. Complicating matters, Mom discovered she was bearing twins, a girl and a boy. To the limited extent my dad had any interest in fatherhood, he wanted a boy. As my parents made their way back to the U.S. to ensure Mom delivered the babies on home soil, they transited through Paris. Their TWA flight from Paris-Orly to New York-JFK on May 29, 1964, was more eventful than anticipated.

  On takeoff, the Boeing 707’s front tire blew out. The pilot aborted before reaching full speed, veering off the runway to the right, and crashed the plane nose down into the grass. Dad and Mom (bearing two four-month-old fetuses), along with the 101 other passengers and crew, managed to evacuate safely but were more than a little shaken.

  Back in Washington, the remainder of my mother’s pregnancy grew more difficult, as she was confined to bed with nursing assistance for the last two and a half months. Finally, I was born on November 17, 1964, at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

  My first brother was stillborn.

  By the time it was confirmed for me that I was a twin, around the age of twelve, my relationship with my mother had begun to suffer from more than the typical mother-daughter tension. In a rented condominium in Aspen, Colorado, where my younger brother, Johnny, and I had accompanied Mom to a conference, she and I were in the midst of an argument, when I jabbed with something like, “I always knew you didn’t love me as much as the others…”

  Looking freaked out by this oblique comment, which, combined with previous ones, suggested to her that I had some subliminal knowledge that Johnny was not my only sibling, Mom blurted out: “How long have you known you were a twin?”

  Baffled, I said, “What are you talking about?”

  Realizing she had spilled the beans and that my intuition, if any, was totally unconscious, she recovered to explain calmly, “We didn’t want you to know until you were much older, but you had a baby brother who died in the womb. It was very sad for your father and me, but we were very glad to have you emerge healthy.”

  Anger dissolved into tears as I softly asked, “What happened?”

  “We don’t really know,” my mother replied. “It could have been the trauma of the plane crash. I never liked our first obstetrician—he was always dismissive of my concerns, and I suspect he could have missed something important. Or maybe the baby wasn’t very strong compared to you and couldn’t consume adequate resources.… We just don’t know.”

  These last words landed like a punch in the stomach.

  Is she saying I might have killed my brother? Does she blame me? Am I to blame? I never dared utter those questions aloud but ever since have felt a tinge of guilt. Perhaps from the very start, I was too strong, and Mom never quite forgave me for it? In my mind, this was a question unstated that hung over our relationship for years to come.

  Back from Nigeria, my parents settled in Washington, D.C., rather than return to New York, because in the spring of 1964, my dad was named deputy director of the Office of Developing Nations at the U.S. Department of Treasury—a plum senior civil service position that paid $16,000 (more than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York). It also afforded my father a direct role in advising the secretary of treasury on U.S. financial policy toward the countries of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Taking this job meant effectively closing the door on a return to academia, a choice he never regretted. Mom also quickly jumped back into her career, returning to work just a few months after I was born. From the outset, I had a mother who worked in a professional capacity outside the home—not because she had to work, but because she wanted to work.

  When I was twenty-one months old, my brother, John, was born, on September 1, 1966. Dad got his long-awaited, healthy baby boy. Mom once told me that, “Emmett finally made me feel worthy, by giving him a boy,” allowing her to sense that she had at least partially compensated for whatever he viewed as her earlier failure. It was never clear to me whether that meant having children in the first place or losing their first son.

  I was not so forgiving. When Mom returned from Sibley Hospital, she followed the best parenting advice at the time: Go immediately to the older child and pay no evident attention to the newborn. Even before I recall meeting the little interloper, Mom came to greet me in my crib. I stood up to welcome her—by biting her squarely on the nose. It was very painful, by Mom’s frequent telling, and she responded reflexively by slapping my little face.

  Soon enough, I came to see the merits of having a baby brother. With time, Johnny proved to be a mostly sweet and willing playmate. With chubby cheeks, engrossing brown eyes framed with ridiculously long lashes, and soft tufts of afro, he charmed our parents and made easy friends.

  In the same year Johnny was born, my father was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to be alternate U.S. executive director at the World Bank, a Senate-confirmed role in which he served until 1970, after his stint as deputy and later acting director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Developing Nations.

  My now complete immediate family moved to the leafy, predominantly Jewish Forest Hills neighborhood of Northwest Washington, as I finished the last months of preschool at the prestigious National Child Research Center, NCRC. My parents applied to send me to the Beauvoir School next, hopeful that, if admitted, I would begin my formal education with the best start the city could offer. Though my parents did not qualify for scholarship funds, paying full tuition would prove challenging on their government and nonprofit salaries. Highly competitive and expensive, Beauvoir is a pre-K through third grade, coed Episcopal school affiliated with the Washington National Cathedral. Like its sister and brother schools, St. Albans School for boys and the National Cathedral School for girls, Beauvoir is located on the Cathedral’s fifty-nine-acre campus, known as “the Close,” and enjoys beautiful, sweeping vistas of Washington from its perch atop Mount St. Alban, the highest point in the city.

  My admissions interview got off to a rocky start when Mom took me to Beauvoir for the obligatory testing in a small building at the bottom of a big hill. According to my mother, I was unusually disengaged and diffident during the diagnostic examination. When she walked me slowly up the hill to meet the principal, Mom calmly asked me to be nice and act comfortably. I did not.

  The principal, Mrs. Frances Borders, tried to draw me into conversation. I simply stared at her. She talked with my mother, who, hiding her panic and shame, tried to assure her that I was just being shy but could excel at Beauvoir. Mrs. Borders was polite and surely pretended to be understanding, but Mom knew I had flunked my interview.

  As we were walking out of Mrs. Borders’s office, I paused to observe her big fish tank and noticed a corpse floating on top. Turning around, I shot back, “Hey lady, your fish is dead!”

  Apparently, that blunt, if impolite, insight was enough for them to grant me a spot in the Beauvoir Class of 1973.

  Soon after I began at Beauvoir around age four, when Johnny was still a toddler, my parents took us for the first and only time to Jamaica. The vacation was also an opportunity to track down some of Mom’s relatives. Urban Jamaica was a loud, colorful, chaotic conflagration for the senses, one I found both exciting and overwhelming.

  We stayed mostly on the coast but traveled inland up into the mountains to visit my mom’s first cousin, known as “Uncle Cyril.” As we pressed our way up the muddy, rutted mountain road, the old rental car labored with increasing difficulty. Finally, it quit with a sudden bang as the front hood flew open and smashed into the windshield. We were stuck in the mud on a desolate mountain road. I don’t recall who rescued us after some hours, but it felt like we had been stranded forever.

  Somehow, we managed to make it to our destination, a tropical mountain hollow where my relatives lived proudly among banana trees and flowers in a remote hovel that revealed poverty of the sort I had never seen. I was struck by the incongruity of meeting blood relatives who lived in a rickety wooden structure with a corrugated metal roof and ate from a modest garden plot. Without words, my parents were continuously teaching m
e about our good fortune.

  The time our family spent enjoying the more urbane and touristy parts of Jamaica left us with lasting happy memories. Johnny had long feared swimming pools and any large bodies of water, due to an early encounter with a freezing-cold pool. Yet in Jamaica, he played happily in the sand and impulsively ran without warning into the soothing warmth of the Caribbean waters. Rushing in and out with abandon, Johnny finally ran up to my parents and begged, “Mommy, will you buy me an ocean?” That query has endured as a reliable laugh line in our family, reflecting both Johnny’s adorable naïveté and the sense our parents gave us, even as young children, that nothing was beyond our reach.

  The influence of my hometown of Washington, D.C., and those rapidly changing times, which were punctuated four months before I was born by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, proved almost as important to my personal development as family and schooling. Just as my political consciousness began to form, all hell broke loose in my city and across the country—protests, riots, and killings. My parents made sure Johnny and I faced the world as it was. They wanted us to see and absorb the tumult of that era, even if we could not fully comprehend it.

  When I was three and a half, my mother sat me in front of the television with her to watch the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin make the slow journey from New York to Washington. Another great man was gone, and we were mourning. I barely understood assassination, but its consequences were inescapable. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot two months earlier. Though I hardly grasped why he was so important, I could sense the profundity of Dr. King’s loss.