My reading goes through phases. Novels give way to philosophy and metaphysics which lead to books about health and then perhaps a historical novel or two with a detour into biography.

Recently I read two wonderful memoirs back to back and cover to cover. Once I finished them I realized a common thread. Both were written by women of color who came from strong and fiercely loving families. Both prevailed over bigotry and prejudice, forging thier own paths to remarkable lives.

It wasn’t until I read Condoleeza Rice’s memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, a Memoir of Family, that I learned she had grown up in Birmingham, Alabama.  Two years her junior, I realized that when I was visiting my Birmingham grandparents, she was also there.. Her loving triad of father-mother-daughter echoed that of the bond between my grandparents and me. My grandfather was fighting the Klan at the very time the white-hooded murderers set off bombs in Rice’s neighborhood. She never learned to swim because in 1961 Birmingham’s mayor, Art Hanes, and the city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, shut down every city park rather than obey a federal court decision that Birmingham’s racially segregated parks, golf courses, and playgrounds were unconstitutional. Connor was ousted two years later via a referendum calling for the adoption of the mayor-council form of government. My grandfather together with other attorneys and civil rights activists led the action.

That’s pretty much where our (invisible) connection diverged. I grew up to be me and she grew up to become an expert in Soviet and Eastern European affairs, playing a leading role in U.S. policy as the Iron Curtain fell and the U.S.S.R. crumbled along with it. Accomplished pianist, the nation’s Security Advisor under President George Bush, the first black woman to hold the office of Secretary of State, and currently a professor at Stamford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, Condoleeza Rice is a force. I’ve wished more than once that she would have run for President.

I chose her memoir out of the many biographies written about her because I was drawn to her title: Extraordinary, Ordinary People a memoir of family. I was less interested in how she built her CV than in how her parents built the kind of family that enabled her to succeed to such heights. Rice writes with such love and gratitude for her upbringing. Her candor about the ugliness and violence of the segregation that gripped Birmingham gives way to poignant descriptions of her mother’s battle with cancer, her father’s mid-career crises and the roadblocks she faced in community organizing on behalf of underserved children. Education, valuing the strength of family, and faith in God used to be the ordinary ingredients that, while they couldn’t guarantee a good life, at least pointed one in that direction. I would love to meet Ms. Rice and talk about life.

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Noodling around various book sites I came across a review of Marra B. Gadd’s memoir The Color of Love and ordered it straightaway from our library.  Gadd was three-days-old when a white Jewish couple from Chicago adopted her. Fearful that no Jewish couple would adopt her mixed race-infant, Marra’s birth mother negleted to inform her adoption agency that the father of her child was black. The agency’s suggestion that their clients didn’t have to go through with the adoptoin was immediately and emphatically rejected. Marra was their daughter. What they saw when they looked at her was what all newly-smitten parents see: beauty, wonder at the miracle before them, dreams coming alive in the offing.

What they couldn’t imagine was how their relatives and others would view their daughter: a “mixed-raced Jewish unicorn.” Within days of her adoption the author writes that the reactions of  her father’s family’s were so callous and offensive that the break was immediate and irrevocable. Family and friends were informed that, “(Marra] was simply their daughter, and that if that wasn’t good enough, they didn’t need to come to the house again.” The author poignantly shares that the family’s circle of true friends and family became small indeed.

Her relationship with her great aunt Nette, her mother’s favorite aunt, caused Marra the most heartache and ultimately became a great source of healing as well. Nette was dramatic, jewelry smitten, perfectly coiffed and dressed. She  “…liked getting married so much that she did it five times.” Nette, who “sparkled like the diamonds that adorned almost all of her fingers” also played favorites, each year sending for Gad’s sister Ilyse (born to their parents within a year after Marra’s birth), treating her to shopping trips and gifts from her sizable jewelry collection. For Marra, she had nothing but a double-strand length of excuses.  “It’s a strange thing to want so badly to be close to someone who does not want to be close to you but who is working very hard to keep that hidden. But that was the dynamic set between Nette and me from the moment we met.”  That dyanmic was tolerated until the day of Ilyse’s wedding when Nette leveled a comment at her great-niece that resulted in a fifteen-year estrangement.

Never, not once in her memoir, did the author respond to her tormentors how you might think. Surely she deserved to level a comment or two of her own. But  this is what makes The Color of Love so beautiful and expemplary.  Gad learned early and often that responding with love is the better, and most self-preserving, choice when others’ ugliness came her way. Her parents modeled it and she took the lesson to heart in the most evolved way possible.

Fate is nothing if not a trickster. When Nette was ultimately diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Gad was the only one in the family capable of caring for her aunt, visiting her in tandem with monthly business trips to L.A., and utimately bringing her home to Chicago to a wonderful facility close to the family. The passages in this part of Gad’s memoir are the most touching, the most healing for the author and by osmosis for her readers.  I’ll leave it at that other than to say in this case Alzheimer’s opened the door to an entirely new relationship with Nette. And for me to say that reading Marra B. Gad’s memoir was a beautiful, beautiful experience.