Shirley in Wonderland

By Ruth Brine

UNBOUGHT AND UNBOSSED by Shirley Chisholm. 177 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

Just two years ago, a virtually unknown 43-year-old ex-nursery-school teacher from Brooklyn became the first black woman in U.S. history to be elected to Congress. Her triumph should have been no surprise, as this short, plainly written autobiography and political manual makes clear, for Shirley Chisholm had long operated as a combined gadfly and worker in the ruthless hives of New York ward politics. Slated for easy re-election this month, the tiny, ramrod-straight Congresswoman promises to become increasingly visible as a forthright spokesman for two national constituencies: blacks and women.

Like a surprising number of black politicians, Congresswoman Chisholm is of West Indian descent. Island blacks, she explains, are able to meet whites on an almost equal footing, having less fear and hatred of them than do many American blacks. Mrs. Chisholm herself never heard racial slurs till she was twelve years old, but she absorbed from her father, a passionate disciple of Marcus Garvey, a sense of black pride and responsibility. Shirley got her early schooling in Barbados while living on her grandmother's farm and attending a strict, British-style grade school. The students sang God Save the King every morning, studied British history, and got plenty of floggings. In fact, Shirley received just the kind of upbringing that Spiro Agnew seems to admire.

Back in Brooklyn, her father, Charles St. Hill, worked in a burlap-bag factory. Her mother had to do domestic day-work, but the St. Hill girls were nevertheless strictly supervised. In the early 1940s, if Shirley's high school friends were not out of the house by 10, her mother marched into the parlor in her nightgown and started pulling down the window shades. Sunday meant morning, afternoon and evening services at the English Brethren Church, a small, Quakerlike sect.

Shirley got such good grades at Brooklyn's half-white Girls' High that she won scholarships to Vassar and Oberlin. But she went to Brooklyn College so that she could live at home, and eventually won her master's degree in "early childhood education." In 1949, she married Conrad Chisholm, a Jamaican who worked for a private security bureau. Shirley taught nursery school for years, in 1959 finally became the supervisor of ten New York City day-care centers with a budget of $400,000. Meanwhile she was active in various Democratic clubs and jumped into politics full time when she was elected a state assemblywoman in 1964.

After four years in Albany, she made it to Washington, where she was promptly assigned to Agriculture's Rural Development and Forestry Subcommittee. As the representative of one of the country's worst urban slums, Shirley would have none of it. She telephoned Speaker of the House McCormack. "If you do not assist me, I will have to do my own thing," she announced. "Your what?" the startled septuagenarian asked. "It means I will do what I have to do, regardless of the consequences." Shirley was switched to Veterans' Affairs. Actually, as she well knew, illogical committee assignments are routine for House freshmen. But Mrs. Chisholm has cultivated a winning, if somewhat wily innocence that makes her seem, at least in this campaign-year book, like a sort of Shirley in Wonderland, a lonely creature of common sense, stubborn integrity and imagination battling a world gone awry. Some observers, of course, see her otherwise. "You know, she's crazy!" she overheard one of her colleagues say after she announced in her maiden speech that she would vote no on any bill that provided any funds whatsoever for the Department of Defense.

Mrs. Chisholm has often stated that she has been more discriminated against as a woman than as a black. But her book suggests that her fighting priorities are for her fellow blacks. Racism in the U.S. is so normal that it is invisible, she says, and President Nixon, who deals so grudgingly with the problem, is a symbol of "nearly every one of the deep-seated and tragic flaws of this society." Mrs. Chisholm claims to have been radicalized by her frustrations, but her voice is still that of a reformer. Not that she wants to pass any more legislation for a while. Her recommendation, typically down to earth, is that the U.S. should now enforce the laws it already has.

Ruth Brine

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