Tough Love Read online

  In 2006, Senator Obama asked me to speak on a panel at his Hope Fund conference in Chicago and to comment on the foreign policy chapter in his forthcoming book, The Audacity of Hope. After reading it, I gave him my unvarnished opinion, saying, “You’re giving too much credit to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, while being comparatively ungenerous to Bill Clinton.”

  There was a pause and then he asked me to continue.

  As we talked through my critique, he acknowledged the imbalance and ultimately made some minor adjustments, giving greater weight to Reagan’s failings (like Iran-contra) while treating Clinton’s tenure more analytically and less subjectively. Most revealing during our exchange was the extent to which, much like me, Obama was by nature a pragmatist—more a foreign policy “realist” than a woolly eyed idealist. Yet his pragmatism neither rendered him cold nor tempered his high aspirations for America’s capacity to do better at home and abroad. Barack Obama’s fervent belief in our fundamental equality as people and in the goodness of our nation is what I think led him to community organizing, teaching, and ultimately to public service.

  This is the same America in which my family, the Dicksons and the Rices, believes. These are the values that my parents and grandparents instilled in me. They raised me to remember where we came from. To honor the richness of my inheritance, value myself, do my best, and never let others convince me I can’t. With good fortune came responsibility, they taught me; therefore, my duty was to serve others, in whatever way best suited my talents.

  It seemed like the biggest car ever. A massive, yellow Pontiac Bonneville station wagon, which our family drove each summer in the late 1960s and early 1970s for ten long hours from Washington, D.C., all the way up to Portland, Maine. For my younger brother, Johnny, and me, these trips were much anticipated and never disappointed.

  We piled into the station wagon stuffed with our luggage and some toys. Dad drove. Mom issued instructions, often without finesse, and smoked cigarettes constantly as we plied the endless route, elongated by the New Jersey Turnpike with its smelly refineries and countless rest stops. If we got lucky, we could persuade our parents to stop at one of several Howard Johnson’s for burgers or hot dogs and fries. By Boston, we could begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And finally, in Portland, when we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa Dickson’s house, we were rewarded with the incomparable smell of Grandma’s signature square-shaped molasses and sugar cookies that wafted through their big, old, musty, beautiful house.

  We referred to my grandparents’ home by its address, 51 Melrose Street, a place that looms large in my memory as the summer gathering spot for my mother’s family. In the early 1960s, before my brother and I were born, my grandparents, with help from their children, managed to purchase this spacious, off-white, clapboard New England house with big porches and a widow’s walk. It was close enough to “Back Cove” to smell the saltwater and, when the winds were unkind, the unrivaled stench of a nearby paper mill.

  My childhood summers there were carefree. If Johnny and I weren’t chasing our older cousins through the nooks and crannies of the antique house or poring over old photographs and mementos we found stashed in the attic, we were playing outside. My Grandpa David, a believer that children should be seen and not heard, would guide us through the tall corn of his prolific garden plot that spanned the lot just across the street. My uncle Leon and aunt Val taught us how to bait our hooks and cast to catch both small fry in Sebago Lake and bigger Atlantic fish off the rocks at Two Lights State Park on Cape Elizabeth. Johnny always seemed to reel in the foot-long, heavy fish while I’d fume over my puny haul of two-inchers—an early sign of my relentless competitiveness.

  We swam in the frigid ocean at Crescent Beach, built sandcastles with our cousins, and marveled as my octogenarian grandfather—despite his Jamaican origins—braved the North Atlantic chill. We played kickball on the side lawn, and my right elbow still bears the keloid scar of a bad cut I sustained backpedaling to catch a fly ball. We rode bikes to Deering Ice Cream on Forest Avenue where I always got my Maine favorite: colorful, creamy rainbow sherbet.

  In the evenings, we had lively family dinners, often with friends like “the boys,” Chester and George, the kind gay couple up the street who kept close watch on my elderly grandparents during the harsh winter months, and with Aunt “Moo-Moo,” an overly perfumed, colorful woman, another rare émigré from Jamaica. At these dinners, Johnny and I learned the rich family lore and how to consume the entire contents of a lobster, leaving no portion unmolested. We listened rapt, if a little cowed, during the high-decibel battles my father and my mother’s brothers would get into over just about everything. My father and living uncles were highly educated black men who first crossed paths in the segregated Army Air Force during World War II at Tuskegee, and they each carried the rarefied arrogance and wit of those proud black men of their generation who achieved way more than society expected or appreciated.

  Their intense arguments, peppered with “God dammits!” and pithy ad hominem zingers, were about all manner of issues, particularly race and politics. Hearing their raucous debates taught me the merits of fierce, often cocky contention. Arguing with a firm command of the facts, combined with dead certainty, whether feigned or real, I would discover, was an effective means of besting your opponent. My elders’ bull sessions, along with constant debates at the dinner table, bequeathed me an early comfort with verbal combat and a relish for righteous battle. Raised not to fear a fight or shy away from advocating for a worthy cause, this aspect of my upbringing often (but not always) served me well in later years—whether on political campaigns, in policy debates, or during difficult negotiations with foreign adversaries.

  More than anything, I was fascinated by the stories heard around my family tables—both in Maine and during trips to South Carolina to visit my dad’s family. I grew up infused with the legacies of my elders—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Despite their very different histories and experiences—the immigrants on one side and the descendants of slaves on the other—the Dickson and Rice families shared common values, high expectations, and the compulsion to rise. As people who came from humble roots, their professional accomplishments outdistanced any constraints that institutional bias aimed to place on them, and they never failed to inspire me. They were New Englanders and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, who made great strides—with each generation exceeding the achievements of the last.

  There was no single path for all, though two elements run consistently through my family tree: education and service. For my family, education is of utmost importance, worthy of every sacrifice, because it is the key to upward mobility and to securing the American Dream. (There was never any question as to whether my brother and I would go to college and graduate school. In our household, it was mandated, if not preordained.) The corollary to education—service—was embedded in my genes and seared into my soul. My forebears on both sides heeded the call to serve, to pay back far more than they were grateful to receive.

  With a good education, economic stability, and physical security, my parents assured me I had everything needed to thrive—if not always a happy family life. Given these blessings, rare for many, but particularly for an African American girl, I was expected to give back, especially to those less fortunate than myself. Service could take many forms. It needn’t be in the military or government. It could be in the nonprofit world, journalism, law, academia, medicine, business, or elsewhere. But I had to do for the larger community, the many, not just myself—as my parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and great-grandparents had long exemplified.

  My recollections of our earliest trips to Maine are mostly impressionistic, many of them crystallizing in my memory around the age of seven. But I vividly recall how my grandparents—gentle yet imposing—towered over our extended family, despite being notably small of stature. From my petite grandmother Dickson, I inherited my five-foot-three-inch frame, even though my parents were m
uch taller and my brother dwarfs me by a full foot.

  My grandfather David Dickson was a man of few words, but those he spoke carried weight. Though kind and restrained with his youngest grandchildren, in his prime he was a strict disciplinarian who wielded a razor strap, a swath of leather, to beat his boys. For lesser offenses, my uncles had to go fetch a switch—a thin tree branch—for their own whipping. Years later, whenever any of us kids were behaving badly, my mother would warn half in jest, “Don’t forget Grandpa’s razor strap is still hanging in the pantry.”

  As much as our grandfather appeared to be the ultimate authority in the family, my grandmother really called the shots in their household of five children—four sons, born between 1913 and 1921, and one daughter, my mother, Lois Ann, born in 1933. Ever warm, cheerful, and talkative, Grandma Mary Dickson was the salve that soothed the wounds and calmed tempers when they flared. To her children, Mary taught culture and refinement, making sure each played musical instruments, learned the details of their Jamaican heritage, and were thoroughly steeped in the Episcopal faith. She was also there for her children in more simple ways—like the times she’d wait up for Lois to come home from her dates in high school, to ask how they went, offer a snack, and tuck her into bed.

  For her success in rearing five accomplished children, my grandmother was named “Maine State Mother for 1950” by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule, and thereby a candidate for the national “American Mother” award. In a full-page, photo-filled spread in the Portland Sunday Telegram, Mary Dickson was lauded for her industriousness, piety, skills as a cook and gardener, and, above all, devotion to her children. On that same page, my seventeen-year-old mother wrote a tribute to Grandma Mary:

  Mother has a quiet, unassuming but unshakeable faith in God’s beneficence. She has an assurance, frequently put to the test, that if she and her family lived as best they knew in keeping with the will of God they would be protected against all adversity and find true happiness and peace of mind.

  Beyond the love I always felt from my grandparents and the fun I had visiting Maine every summer, what sticks with me about Mary and David Dickson is how much they made out of so little. They came to this country as immigrants with nothing but faith, pride, and a strong work ethic. Here, they raised a tight-knit family, educated their children, built a nest egg, and gave back to their community without ever forgetting where they came from. As my uncle David wrote of my grandparents in his memoir: “They were Republican in politics, conservative in spending, dedicated to clean living, the gospel of hard work, home owning, the family unit and very proud of the freedom and economic opportunity of the U.S.A.”

  Their story epitomizes the American Dream.

  As an adult, I have come to realize how profoundly my grandparents’ and parents’ journeys have shaped my own.

  Grandpa David Augustus Dickson was born in 1887 in Mandeville, Manchester Parish, Jamaica. With little formal education, managing only to complete a few years of secondary school, my grandfather was trained as a cobbler and worked as a clerk in the British woolens department at Sturbridge’s clothing store. His frustration with his limited educational opportunities fueled his determination to do better, especially by his eventual children.

  Grandma Mary Marguerite (Maude) Daly was born in 1890 in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica. One of eight children, Mary was the daughter of a well-heeled Irish landowner and a mother who, according to family lore of uncertain reliability, was born in Calcutta, India. My great-grandfather Daly died at fifty, when my grandmother was ten, leaving his large family in economic peril and subject to the exploitation of his stingy millionaire brother. Mary was shunted off to live with distant cousins, the Millers, and perform menial tasks in their household. She never received much education beyond middle school and always resented that her circumstances were far inferior to that to which the Dalys’ wealth should have entitled her.

  David and Mary met at a confirmation class at the Mandeville Parish Anglican Church, and a committed courtship began. My grandfather would pedal his bicycle six miles uphill to visit with Mary on the front porch or walk her through the local market square. The Millers were not fans of my grandfather, because he was darker-skinned than they and hailed from the countryside rather than the more refined town.

  Lured to the U.S. by an American hotelier who offered him a job in Harpswell, Maine—promising him the fruits of the American Dream—David set out by ship for Portland, Maine, and arrived in New York on May 16, 1911. David never made it to Harpswell, instead finding his first work in Portland as a janitor. A severe injury to his hand prevented him from plying his Jamaican trade as a cobbler.

  Once he was settled, Grandpa David sent for Mary. Defying the Millers, in October 1912 my grandmother boarded a ship bound for Boston. A major hurricane interrupted the voyage, forcing her to disembark in Philadelphia and make her way alone to Portland. I still wonder at the bravery and resolve that would propel my tiny grandmother, at age twenty-two, to leave the only family she knew, sail alone, and find her way hundreds of miles across a strange land to reach her fiancé.

  Devoted Anglicans, David and Mary were married on Christmas Day 1912, in the Emmanuel Chapel of their beloved Cathedral Church of St. Luke in downtown Portland. After sixty-six years of marriage, their funerals, which I would attend, would be held two years apart in the same chapel.

  Hardworking and penny-pinching, my grandparents managed to eke out a decent living. Mary labored as a seamstress and laundress for affluent families. For nearly four decades, David worked as a porter, janitor, piano refinisher, and shipping clerk at Cressey & Allen’s music store in Portland. He also moonlit as a bartender. Later, after the company went out of business, Grandpa would work another fifteen years as a janitor until age eighty at the Blue Cross and Blue Shield building.

  To improve his lot, David took courses at Gray’s Business College in Portland. Despite his innate intelligence and additional schooling, race prevented his advancement even to becoming a clerk at the music store. The owner, George Cressey, came to respect David deeply and told him years later that, had he been white, he would have enabled him to buy a share in the business and become a partner.

  David read voraciously, with a passion for history and poetry, insisting his children do the same. In public, Grandpa always wore a well-tailored suit and tie. He made sure his kids had the finest clothes, if few to their name. A man who tracked every dime spent, he never bought a car, declaring that public transportation would suffice; yet he stocked the household with the highest quality of food—meat, fish, fruit, and, on special occasions, Maine lobster.

  Soon after their arrival in America, Mary and David managed to become naturalized U.S. citizens and later buy a three-story, two-family home in a working-class area on Portland’s Munjoy Hill. The neighborhood in which my mother grew up was inhabited by a mix of Irish, English, Jewish, and a cluster of black families, including several from the West Indies. Maine has long had very few blacks—according to the 1930 census, there were just 268 blacks in Portland (or 0.4 percent of the city’s population). In that era, the Ku Klux Klan was active and the local NAACP chapter fledgling. For decades, my grandparents aspired to move into a better neighborhood, but realtors consistently refused to sell to blacks. My very light-skinned grandmother would sometimes be shown nice places, but when my brown-skinned grandfather showed up, suddenly none was available.

  As Jamaican émigrés of different hues, my grandparents had complex views on race. My grandmother, while fully conscious of her second-class status as “colored,” knew she had little discernible African blood. Half Irish and a quarter East Indian, with gray-blue eyes and faintly olive skin, she appeared only to the acute eye something other than typically white. Yet she identified as black, not least because her husband and children were unmistakably black. Like most West Indian immigrants, my grandparents were steeped in the British/Caribbean racial caste system, in which the whiter you were the better you were and the more
opportunity you would likely have. Upward mobility was everything to them, and they viewed darker skin as a drag on one’s future prospects. Because of their Jamaican origins, it seemed to me that my grandparents felt superior to darker American blacks and those, like my father, who descended from slave stock. I detected that subtle prejudice in them early on and perceived that they instilled in their own children at least a small measure of the same condescension.

  Paradoxically, I also knew that the Dicksons were proud of their race and committed to its advancement. My grandfather founded and chaired Portland’s “Negro Community Forum,” which brought distinguished speakers to Sunday meetings and dinners in the Dickson home. David was active in the local NAACP and helped establish the USO Marian Anderson Club for “colored” troops stationed in Portland during World War II. After the war, he hosted Anderson in Portland and fought for blacks to be granted equal access to the white USO facility.

  As a child, I didn’t fully appreciate the extraordinary lengths to which my grandparents went to ensure that their children went to top colleges, but over the years, with each telling of their remarkable story, I came to admire their sacrifices and the seriousness with which they approached their duties as parents. Their kids were going to excel—whether they liked it or not.

  As soon as his first son was born, Grandpa David purchased an endowment policy to fund his first year of college. My grandfather later learned of Bowdoin, Maine’s preeminent private college, from his boss, Mr. Cressey, a Bowdoin graduate, who helped him obtain extra work there as a server at weekend parties. David saw Bowdoin’s beauty—its eighteenth-century buildings, classic grassy quadrangle, and clapboard fraternity houses—and knew the caliber of its graduates. When I first visited Bowdoin many years later, I could immediately see why my grandfather resolved that his sons must go there.