Breaking barriers

Commonweal, August 13, 2004 by Don Wycliff

Cooking with Grease

Stirring the Pots in American Politics

Donna Brazile

Simon & Schuster, $23, 322 pp.

Some people grow up wanting to be firemen. Some want to be doctors, or astronauts, or lawyers, or journalists, or even president of the United States. Donna Brazile is the only person I've ever heard of who grew up wanting to be the campaign manager for a presidential candidate.

Not only did she want it; she did it. And not only did she do it, but in the minds and hearts of many, she did it victoriously. There is no disputing that Brazile's Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman won the popular vote in 2000. It lost the Electoral College vote--and thus the presidency--by virtue of a 5-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision that gave Florida's bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated election to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. A great many Americans have never made peace with that result. They still declare that George W. Bush "isn't my president" and vow they'll run him out of the White House in November.

Bitter though the defeat was, Brazile has chosen not to get mad, but to get even. She persuaded the Democratic National Committee to create--and she now directs--a Voting Rights Institute, whose purpose is to educate poor and minority voters--the ones who were intimidated out of their franchise in Florida in 2000--to know and assert their rights.

"I never blamed George W. Bush for the outcome of the election in Florida," Brazile writes. "I did not spend one day hating him or anyone around him. They got out their vote, so did we. The problem is their voters understood their rights. In 2000 we did not teach our voters their rights. We have since then and will never forget the bitter and tragic lessons of Florida."

Cooking with Grease is about the lessons of Brazile's own quite remarkable life, which began on December 15, 1959, in Charity Hospital in New Orleans. She was the third of an eventual nine children in the black Catholic family of Lionel and Jean Brazile of Kenner, Louisiana, a suburb of New Orleans. Lionel was a Korean War veteran who made his living as a construction worker until an accident left him unable to do it any longer. He then became a short-order cook, often working one or two other jobs. Jean, Brazile's mother, was a domestic worker for a wealthy white family in New Orleans. Wealth was never a concern for the Braziles; making ends meet often was.

"Poverty," Brazile writes, "affected nearly every part of my childhood, even my mother's attitudes about playtime. As soon as she came home from work, she forced all of us inside the house.... She made it clear that we could not 'afford to get sick.'" The family had no extra money for doctor bills.

When sickness did strike, Donna and her siblings were treated with one of their grandmother's home remedies. "Grandma"--Lionel's mother--lived with the family and became Donna's best friend and counselor. She taught her all those life lessons that come with age and that wise old heads used to impart to young ones in the course of daily living--before we all became separate atoms spinning in our own orbits, distant from one another.

One of the most important of Grandma's lessons to the young Donna was to be comfortable and at peace in her own dark skin. Donna was darker than all but one of her siblings, and her other grandmother--"Jean's mama"--always made much ado about this. But Grandma "told me it was natural to be dark and reminded me that many of her thirteen children, including my father, were dark. I chose to listen to Grandma instead of Jean's mama."

Donna and the other Brazile children attended public schools in Kenner, which meant, in the early years of her education anyway, attending segregated schools. In 1971, however, as Donna was entering seventh grade, the "push for equality moved into the Jefferson Parish Public Schools."

Brazile's judgment about busing is interesting now, in view of the discussions going on among black civil-rights movement veterans and others in this fiftieth anniversary year of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. "Busing," she writes, "was one of the worst public-policy decisions ever made. We [black children] were bused past schools within walking distance of our homes, miles away into neighborhoods where we weren't welcomed, weren't liked, and often were inaccessible by public transportation." Elsewhere, she writes, "There was a lot of confusion about busing in the black community of Kenner, and it wasn't welcomed as a remedy for generations of segregation in the separate-and-unequal school systems. We loved our local schools. They were located in our neighborhoods. The teachers knew our parents and they lived in the community."

There have been times in the last fifty years when Brazile would have been drummed out of the ranks of polite black society for saying such things. Indeed, some local officials of the NAACP were driven out of the organization for daring to suggest that blacks were not so psychologically needy as the Brown decision depicted them and might be giving up too much to achieve integration. The fact is that many black children were derailed educationally by being uprooted from familiar surroundings and thrust into hostile ones. Not Brazile. After a period during which she lost her straight As, she found her footing and began to enjoy the success for which she seemed destined from the beginning.