Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (9 page)

St. Mary’s Academy took pride in its rigorous academics, and as a sophomore, Condi was surrounded by older students who shared her sense of competitiveness. The school had been founded by the Sisters of Loretto in the mid-1800s to bring an education to frontier girls whose families had moved west in the gold rush. This religious order, among the first founded in America, was dedicated to educating children in the new territories. In 1864, three nuns from a Sisters of Loretto convent in Santa Fe were chosen to found the school and made the trip to Denver in a mule-drawn stagecoach. They set up St. Mary’s in a large, two-story house, and in 1875, graduated its first high school senior, Miss Jessi Forshee—granting the first high school diploma west of the Mississippi. Since then both Catholic and non-Catholic families have sent their daughters there to receive a high-quality education and “polish” focusing on the arts and foreign languages, as well as standard academic subjects.

St. Mary’s was just a few blocks away from the University of Denver, along the same boulevard, and over the years, it formed a tradition of educating daughters of university deans. Word spread that there was an excellent private school nearby that many university administrators had chosen for their daughters, and John Rice was no exception. “That seems to be how a lot of people found the school,” said a former principal, “not by realtors but through people at the university. We had a tradition of bringing DU daughters down the street.” Being Catholic was not a requirement, and the school drew girls of all faiths and creeds. Integration was slow in coming to the city, recalled the academy’s Sister Sylvia Pautler. “In the 1940s a friend of mine, a nun who was the principal of an elementary school here, accepted an African-American student only to discover that the Archdiocese had a fit over it. For some reason, the student never enrolled. That was typical of the 1940s. But by the time Condi came, there was a whole bevy of black students.”

When Condi entered St. Mary’s in 1969, the school had recently completed its new high school building, Bonfils Hall. The lower-grade schools were co-educational and the secondary level was an all-girls high school. Although integrated, St. Mary’s—like schools all over Colorado—was primarily white. Of the seventy students in her class, Condi was one of just three blacks. Another dramatically new aspect that Condi had to digest in her first weeks was the fact that her academic prospects were called into question for the first time. During her first term, a school counselor told the Rices that Condi’s standardized test scores showed that she was not college material—never mind her straight-A record or her long list of academic, musical, and athletic accomplishments. Condi was stunned, but her parents—immune to talk of limitation or failure—didn’t flinch. They assured her that the assessment was wrong and that she should just ignore it. Not an easy task for a young woman with a vulnerable ego, accustomed to being on the top of the heap. But Condi trusted her parents and was distracted by the many good things about her new life in Denver. That combination helped her field the blow and move on. “All that I remember is focusing on the fact that I was going to wear a uniform for the first time,” she said. “I probably was so excited to get to Denver, where I could skate year-round.”

In the words of her second cousin Connie Rice, there was more to it than that. There was no space in Condi’s psyche for negative influences to take hold. “Now once you got out into the larger world and you were hit with the first messages from the dominant culture . . . that you could not fly, that in fact you were stupid and you shouldn’t be able to achieve, by that time it’s too late, because you’ve got a fourteen-year-old who believes that she can be anything she wants to be.” That belief was instilled by John and Angelena Rice, parents who set their child’s self-esteem, self-respect, and self-confidence above all else. Looking back, Condi once remarked that a child without enormously supportive parents like hers might not have fared as well after an episode like the one she had in that counselor’s office. A less secure child might have let the message get under her skin and begun to lower her sights. But Condi never for a moment forgot that she is a Rice and a Ray. Three generations of empowerment could not be squelched by one lone voice on one sparkling, autumn day at the start of a new school year when a bright student’s hopes are highest.

The counselor’s analysis did not appear to reach the teachers; at least it did not diminish their respect for her as one of the school’s brightest students. “She was very self-possessed and mature,” recalled Sister Pautler, Condi’s religion teacher. “A lot of adolescent girls go through a tortured time, whether from lack of self-confidence or not being able to understand their maturation process or their family. But she didn’t have any of that baggage; no self-doubt or confusion about growing up or about her family dynamics.”

Therese Saracino, another of Condi’s teachers, described the orderly and high-scholastic environment of St. Mary’s, qualities that made it attractive to parents who were trying to shield their children from some of the chaos of the 1960s. “The Sisters of Loretto were an outstanding teaching order. They were the first order of sisters founded in America, and from day one their mission was to teach young Catholic women. St. Mary’s was a wonderful environment. All of the Catholic schools had a reputation for good academics and strong discipline. The smallness of the school was an important draw for parents, and the fact that it was a safe place during the unrest of the ’60s and fears of drugs and changing values.”

Therese recalled that Condi’s maturity made her unique among the girls at the school. “I was her math teacher, but I know that her interests went far more toward the verbal—English, social studies, history, and that sort of thing,” she said. “Any of us who have raised children know that certain qualities are either there or not there. In the first place she was very, very poised. And she was beautiful even then, and charming, and her manners were impeccable, which is unusual for a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old. I cannot think of any instance that I was in contact with her that she wasn’t a perfect lady. There was a core of her that revealed she knew what she wanted and was willing to make the sacrifices. I think in her mind they were not sacrifices, but things to do that were necessary to keep with her goals.”

Condi continued her mission to be twice-as-good by taking on new challenges in Denver—primarily in sports. In addition to continued private piano study, she took up tennis and figure skating and entered both fields competitively. Her weekday routine now included getting up at 4:30 in the morning to go to the rink and practice her footwork, spins, edges, lunges, crossovers, toe loops, combination moves, and pair skating.

For all of her hours on the ice, piano still took center stage in Condi’s life. She practiced as late as possible at the academy and was also able to use the university’s practice rooms from time to time, but the Rices didn’t want her to be out and about at all hours of the night. They solved the problem by taking out a loan to buy her a used Steinway grand so that she could practice at home as late as she wanted. Condi was awed by her parents’ gesture. “That was a lot of money back then,” said Condi’s friend, Deborah Carson. “I remember her talking about it years later, the amazement still on her face when she told me that ‘they paid
thirteen thousand dollars
for it.’” Every time she looked at it, the piano reminded Condi of the investment her parents were making in her music.

Condi breezed through her classes at St. Mary’s and by the start of her senior year had already finished all the requirements for graduation. Her parents felt she should waste no time and leave the academy to start working on a bachelor’s degree at the University of Denver. But the idea of abandoning high school, even for the best of reasons, did not sit well with Condoleezza. She couldn’t bear the idea of not having a high school diploma, and she wanted to take part in graduation with her class. “It was the first time I ever really fought my parents on anything,” she said, “I just had a sense that socially you’re supposed to finish high school.” So the Rice family formed a compromise: Condi would start college part-time while finishing up her senior year at St. Mary’s. This created a grueling schedule in which she got up before sunrise to take figure skating lessons, then attended two morning classes at the university, followed by a full afternoon at St. Mary’s.

It didn’t take long for Condi to feel she’d moved light years beyond high school and that returning to the cozy grounds of St. Mary’s was more of a nuisance than a necessity. She would much rather have stayed on campus all day and delved into activities with her new sorority sisters, but she kept to the plan anyway. She made heads turn at her senior prom when she waltzed into St. Mary’s Academy on the arm of a college hockey player. Her date was something of a fish out of water among the high school kids. “Poor guy,” she said. “He felt sort of out of place.”

Attending high school and college at the same time is almost a footnote to the musical accomplishments Condi made at age fifteen. She entered a young artist’s competition and won, which allowed her to perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor with the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

Condi was sixteen when she got her diploma from St. Mary’s and was thriving as a piano performance major at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. During her dual year as high school and college student, she studied the bulletins of many colleges and was certain that she would transfer to a different university after she was free of St. Mary’s. One of her top choices was Juilliard, but her father did not want her to limit herself to a conservatory education. By putting all her resources into a performance-oriented degree, there would be little chance of going back to school to learn another profession if she changed her mind about a musical career down the road. “My father was fundamentally against it,” Condi said. The issue didn’t come up again because after two semesters at the University of Denver she was hooked and decided to stay for her entire bachelor’s program. “At first I planned to attend for one year only and then transfer,” she said in a university brochure in 1974. “But I stayed because I found that DU is small enough for people to care about what happens to you—yet not small enough to limit the scope of what you might want to study.” She praised the school for giving opportunities to “all students—regardless of race or sex,” but added that “when you’re black and female you have to work twice as hard.” She felt respected, validated, and challenged as a pianist at the university, and dreams of Juilliard faded beneath the heaps of dog-eared scores she rifled through every night at the family Steinway.

Condi’s excellent grades and high school record paid off when she started at the university. She was awarded an honors scholarship, which was renewed each year of her undergraduate program.

Condi would not find the university to be an oasis of unbiased thought, however. In one of her first classes she found herself in an immense lecture auditorium, one of a handful of blacks in a crowd of 250 students, listening to a professor preach about white superiority. The topic was William Shockley’s theory of dysgenics, which stated that human evolution is on a backward track because populations with low IQs, namely black Americans, are reproducing more quickly than whites. Shockley’s highly controversial ideas had gained national attention by the late 1960s, even though the majority of his scientific colleagues ridiculed and dismissed them. The widespread attention brought to his theories was due to his distinguished background as a Nobel-winning scientist who co-invented the transistor and spearheaded the invention of semiconductors and the computer age. Condi entered the university just as Shockley’s ideas were being hotly debated on campuses throughout the country.

Shockley believed that art, literature, technology, linguistics—all the treasures of Western civilization—are products of the superior white intellect. What went through Condi’s mind as the professor described and appeared to support Shockley’s view of blacks as “genetically disadvantaged”? Rather than crouch down in her seat to avoid the onslaught, she sprang out of her chair and defended herself. “I’m the one who speaks French!” she said to the professor. “I’m the one who plays Beethoven. I’m better at your culture than you are. This can be taught!”

Not only was fifteen-year-old Condoleezza Rice living proof that radical social theorists like Shockley were wrong, she had the self-assurance to say so in front of hundreds of white students and her professor. She has not remarked on the professor’s response, but has said that as she left the class she understood her parents’ strategy for the first time. The Rices recognized that whites expected blacks to be intellectually inferior, and in order to offset that stereotype one had to be far above average. Their goal, from Condi’s birth, was to ensure that she would be able to hold her own in every circumstance. “That had been my mother and father’s strategy,” she said. “You had to be better at their culture than they were. Recognize that you’re always going to be judged more harshly. They made certain I was never going to be found wanting.”

Undaunted by the freshman lecture, Condi continued her twice-as-good strategy and enrolled in honors courses, wrote for the school paper, worked four hours on her skating every morning, and practiced piano every night. She has admitted that she was less-than-perfect when it came to studying. “The truth is that I was a terrible procrastinator,” she said, “so a lot of times I wasn’t all that well prepared.” Years after she was out of college she advised her own students to not do as she had done—cram for a test rather than gradually ingest the material over the semester. She told them about how she had handled one of her freshman classes at the University of Denver, “Great Religions of the World,” and how she came to regret her negligence. “I did the reading at the last minute, passed the test, and immediately forgot everything,” she said. “Fifteen years later I was in Japan, wandering around the temples, thinking, ‘I once read something about this. I wish I could remember what it was.’”