Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday November 3, 2010
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EXTRAORDINARY, ORDINARY PEOPLE: A Memoir of Family
Condoleezza Rice
Crown
ISBN 978-0-307-58787-9
342 pages
$27
Reviewed by Patricia Sullivan
On Sept. 15, 1963, 8-year-old Condoleezza Rice was in her father's church when a loud thud echoed from the explosion that killed four young girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church across town in Birmingham. In the paralyzing fear of that moment, no one knew if other churches were targeted. The episode revealed the fragility of the protective environment her parents sought to create for her in the South's most segregated city: They were virtually powerless in the face of what Rice describes as the "homegrown terrorism" directed against Birmingham's black children.
Readers looking for insights into Rice's thinking and actions as national security advisor and secretary of state under George W. Bush will not find them here. The subtitle, "A Memoir of Family," describes the focus and scope of this engaging book. While the last third provides a cursory account of the academic and professional trajectory that culminates with her appointment in the Bush administration, the book, at its core, is a coming-of-age story during the final years of segregation and its aftermath. Rice's account of her parents and her family life in Alabama and later in Denver complicates what many think they know about one of the most prominent women in recent history and provides a compelling portrait of the life of a middle-class Southern black family during these transitional decades.
Angelena Ray Rice and John Wesley Rice are the dominant forces in the life of their only child, Condoleezza. Her name reflects her mother's Italian heritage and love of music. Both parents were teachers; indeed they were given to "educational evangelism" focused not only on their daughter but on young people in the larger community. Like many contemporaries, her parents viewed education, Rice writes, as "a kind of armor shielding me against everything -- even the deep racism in Birmingham and across America." They introduced her to their passions early on: She began taking piano lessons at age 3 and as a preschooler accompanied her father to high school football games. Her parents didn't buy a house until Rice was in college because, as her father told a colleague, "Condoleezza is our house."
Rice's world was rocked by the violence and terror that plagued Birmingham and the rest of the South as the civil rights movement approached its greatest victories. Denise McNair, the youngest victim in the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, had been a playmate. Her parents did not join the ranks of nonviolent protest; her father, she writes, "didn't believe in being nonviolent in the face of violence." Instead, he helped organize a neighborhood watch and would sit with a gun on their front porch during the night. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy just months after he introduced civil rights legislation felt "personally threatening," Rice recalls. The passage of the Civil Rights Act the following summer brought liberating changes for her family "almost immediately."
Once legal barriers fell, Rice's parents moved across racial boundaries in their church activities, educational work and social life and exposed their daughter to new opportunities and experiences. She was the first black student to attend the music conservatory at Birmingham-Southern College. After her father became an assistant dean of the nearly all-white University of Denver, he worked to integrate university life. He initiated efforts to recruit black students and faculty, developed plans for a black studies program and brought a remarkable range of speakers to campus, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Charles Rangel, Dick Gregory and Stokely Carmichael, who became a family friend. Reflecting on what attracted her father, a registered Republican and a conservative, to militants like Carmichael, she writes that he "admired the willingness of radicals to confront American racism with strength and pride." Having been adept at "navigating and charting a course for success in the white man's world," she adds, "there was ... a deep reservoir of anger in him regarding the circumstances of being a black man in America." Circumstances for Rice would be different, as she discovered her future in an international politics class taught by Josef Korbel, father of Madeleine Albright.
In "Extraordinary, Ordinary People" Condoleezza Rice offers a memoir of the two individuals most responsible for her ascent to the pinnacle of success and power. Her life has been shaped by possibilities that did not exist for her parents. One is left wondering about the ideas, ambitions and realities that informed Rice's pivotal role in the Bush Administration -- the stuff, hopefully, of a second volume.
Patricia Sullivan teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author of "Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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HI-DE-HO: The Life of Cab Calloway
Alyn Shipton
Oxford Univ
ISBN 978 0 19 514153 5
283 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Alyn Shipton takes the title of this biography from the refrain that Cab Calloway chanted -- and urged his audiences to chant -- while singing "Minnie the Moocher," the most famous and popular of all the innumerable songs he performed in an incredibly long career that began in 1927, when he was 19 years old, and continued until his death in 1994, a month shy of his 87th birthday. The song was, and remains, immensely amusing as well as catchy, but the irony is that it celebrates a culture -- what Shipton calls "the seamy world of narcotics" -- in which Calloway himself declined to participate.
By March 1931, when he made the first of his many recordings of "Minnie," Cab (short for Cabell) Calloway had left his home in Baltimore and set himself up as a singer, dancer and bandleader in Harlem, where he greatly enjoyed the high life. He was a prodigious consumer of alcohol but abstained from marijuana and stronger drugs; indeed, he forbade members of his band to use marijuana, though with only limited success; yet he built his show-business persona around "a Harlem demimonde of Minnie and the drug culture." Shipton writes:
"Cab was to record the song many more times in his career, but this original version became the first million-selling disc by an African-American artist, and Cab was eventually presented with a gold disc in the fall of 1944. The song had achieved overall sales of close to two and a half million for Cab by 1978, a truly remarkable achievement. It became the template not only for further remakes but also for several other numbers that Cab gradually added to his repertoire as the 1930s went on. Some of these were about Minnie and Smokey Joe, the fictional character who introduced her to opium addiction or 'kicking the gong around,' whereas others picked up on the 'hi-de-ho' catchphrase that the original song introduced. All of these pieces were designed to involve the audience in Cab's musical storytelling, by joining in the 'hi-de-ho' responses, and thereby becoming part of the song."
With exceptional skill, in this and many other numbers, Calloway managed to play both sides of the street: Using the jive talk popular among African-Americans, especially those in the big cities, he was able to communicate on a hip, insider level while delighting non-initiates (most of whom probably were white) with the joyfulness and apparent nonsense of his lyrics as well as giving them the pleasure of participating in call-and-response scat choruses. As a result he was a wildly popular performer whose appeal crossed racial lines to an extent rare among black artists of his day.
He led a big band for almost two decades and eventually became known as one of the leading jazz musicians of the '30s and '40s, yet he wasn't really one. He couldn't play any instrument with more than amateur skill, and though over the years he attracted a number of first-rate musicians to his band -- among them Cozy Cole, Jonah Jones, Chu Berry and Dizzy Gillespie -- many of them regarded him with a bit of skepticism:
"It was to be an irony that Cab's desire to improve the band by bringing in a higher quality of musician triggered doubts among his men about his own abilities. To the newcomers his inventive capacities as a dancer, his innovations as a vocalist, his remarkable timing, and his ability to connect with the public were unimportant. Could he sight-read a score? Could he hear tiny harmonic mistakes in the sections or tell if one member of the reeds or brass was fractionally out of tune? Could he beat in a number at precisely the right tempo? These were the measures by which instrumentalists accustomed to playing for so many hours each day sized up the musical abilities of their conductors. By the end of the ('30s) when players like Dizzy Gillespie arrived in the ranks, they were much freer with their opinions, Dizzy holding forth with the view that 'Cab was no musician.'"
That judgment should be taken with a grain of salt, for Gillespie "did not so readily fit into the framework that Cab had established for himself and his men, whether socially or musically." His bebop style had yet to evolve, but he was fully developed as an eccentric who did not take kindly to Calloway and most members of the band. The truth is that, by Gillespie's arrival in 1939, Calloway presided over a true jazz band that could hold its own in the competitions staged between the leading bands of the prewar years. He also presided over what was, at least by jazz-band standards, a reasonably happy crew. He paid well -- only Duke Ellington paid better -- traveled in comfort, stayed in good hotels and gave everyone a vacation at Christmas, which just happened to be his birthday. The other band members "admired his craft, his skills as a performer, and his charisma," and "in return, they would do anything for him." As one of them said: "He was a great performer and he knew what he wanted. His showmanship was carefully arranged. He learned his arrangements and the band played them to perfection. And he was a helluva singer. Cab Calloway had good lungs."
He was a tough cookie whose school had been the streets of Baltimore, but he was also smart and charming. He was married twice and fathered four daughters, one of them out of wedlock, and he had "a reputation as a ladies' man, especially as there were so many lithe, attractive, and available dancers in Harlem's nightlife." He was incredibly energetic, fully capable of playing a full night's set, carousing until the small hours, sleeping off a monster hangover, then doing it all over again.
When the big-band era crashed to a close in the late 1940s, he went through a period of depression, but he rode it out and reinvented himself. Though he stayed on the road for most of the remaining four-and-a-half decades of his life and from time to time led big bands for short engagements, he metamorphosed into a one-man act that proved as popular as his first incarnation. Not merely did he continue to perform "Minnie" and all the other songs that had made him famous, he ventured into stage and film. In 1952 he was persuaded, against his initial skepticism, to take on the role of Sportin' Life in a production of "Porgy and Bess" that played all over Europe and the United States and did much to establish its reputation as serious opera. In 1967, he played Horace Vandergelder in "Hello, Dolly!" with an all-black cast (Dolly was played by Pearl Bailey) that in the opinion of many was better than any before or since. He also did a hugely successful cameo in 1979 in the film "The Blues Brothers" in which, as Shipton notes, a whole new generation discovered him.
Shipton, a British jazz journalist whose other books include biographies of Fats Waller and Dizzy Gillespie, does a workmanlike if uninspired job with Calloway, whose zest and brio shine through only intermittently. That's largely because the private Calloway is hard to pin down, as so often is the case with artists whose huge public images disguise elusive inner lives. Say it for Shipton, though, that he makes a solid case for Calloway as a jazz musician as well as an entertainer, and he certainly makes you want to listen to "Minnie" and all the others, for the umpteenth time in my case and, it is to be hoped, for the first time in others'.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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