Carole Virginia Rodez was born in
Chicago,
Illinois. Her mother, Gladyce (Cunningham) Rodez, was a singer from
New Haven, Connecticut, who had moved to Chicago to search for work with the big bands. There, at the age of 26, she was raped by a "Cuban man named Rodriguez", and became pregnant. choosing to move back to familiar New Haven rather than raise her daughter in a strange city, despite knowing that she would be shame and excluded from her family for having a child out of wedlock. Carole only discovered her history when she was in her mid-thirties. Carole described her mother as having a "terrible, terrible temper", but explained that "when she could manage it, gave her
all."
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, in her book ''I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation'', writes: "Toni remembers sitting on her grandmother's knees by the radio listening to her mother sing, loving the mellow, soothing voice. She aches in knowing that her mother had wonderful talents but was unable to make it as a musician 'because of the circumstances'." Carole knew that her mother considered her to be gifted and tried to nurture her talents, but that she had not wanted to have children. Carole's early life was tumultuous. Her relatives treated Gladyce like "sort of an outcast". Her mother did domestic work but often struggled to find jobs, so Carole was sometimes left with acquaintances while her mother worked out of state. When Carole was seven years old, Gladyce married a cook named Lafayette, whom Carole described as "the meanest man I'd ever known". Carole travelled down to Florida for the wedding, and stayed there for a year with Lafayette's sister Betty. She then returned to New Haven to live with her mother and Lafayette in the projects. Lafayette was cruel and abusive, and Gladyce eventually sent him away. A bright child, she learned to read by reading advertisements on the bus, dismantled her toys to understand how they worked, and performed chemistry experiments with a set she was given for her birthday. In New Haven, she attended public school, and was so far ahead of her peers that her teachers suggested she skip fifth grade. When Carole was twelve, Gladyce enrolled her as a boarder at
St. Frances Academy, in order to provide her with a stable life and a proper education. St. Frances Academy was a Catholic girls' school for "colored girls" grades eight to twelve, run by the
Oblate Sisters of Providence. It was the first school for black children in the city, run by free black Roman Catholic nuns of mainly of Haitian descent: "disciplined, proud impeccable black nuns". According to Lawrence-Lightfoot, Carole "was 'terrified' of being taken to a convent, terrified of the isolation, the mystery, the shroud of secrecy." However, Carole explains that she "ended up loving the place" and in particular the rules, the discipline and the righteousness of the academy. Lawrence-Lightfoot writes: "For the child whose
real mother was in Philadelphia 'floating around someplace' looking for work, St. Frances, with so many motherly holy women, must have felt like heaven. [Carole] seized the opportunity to be mothered and worked diligently and earnestly to be the perfect child." Carole's poverty was a constant source of anguish, since the other girls at school were predominantly middle-class: "I always felt inferior because I always felt poor". Lawrence-Lightfoot explains that she was lonely and shy, keeping herself apart from her peers "because of a constant worry that they would exclude and humiliate her". In an attempt to overcome her shyness, Carole taught herself the guitar, and used it as an icebreaker. Her summers away from the academy were particularly chaotic. In the summer after ninth grade, her mother Gladyce had been fired, so the pair were homeless and destitute, sleeping rough and wandering the streets during the day in search of work and lodgings. They stayed for several months in a hotel run by
Father Divine, a religious figure with a cult-like following, while her mother looked for work. Carole was devastated to learn that they did not have the money to pay the tuition at St. Frances, and that she would have to go to the local school, West Philadelphia School. She wrote to the sisters at St Frances about her grief at not being able to return, and after six weeks they wrote back to offer her a scholarship, on the condition that she work two jobs to earn her keep. "Within twenty-four hours, she was on the bus heading south to St. Frances," Lawrence-Lightfoot writes. She was an excellent student, and graduated high school top of her class. She studied chemistry as a senior, where she excelled, sometimes even running the lab and teaching other students when the teacher was absent. She explained: "I was looking for answers as an adolescent, and chemistry provided them. I was extremely scrupulous." When Carole joined St. Frances Academy, she was an
Episcopalian. However, she was drawn to the nuns, and within months, Carole had decided that she also wanted to be a nun. She converted to
Catholicism after the tenth grade, and was baptised on December 7, 1950. She applied to join the convent, although she decided to hedge her bets by also applying to the air force. On September 8, 1952, at the age of seventeen, she entered the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. At the convent, she followed a daily schedule full of hard manual labour, hours of prayer and imposed silence, but she relished this routine and the structure it provided: "The regularity was wonderful. It gave me the security I always craved.". She was given the name of Mary Antoinette when she became a novice on March 9, 1953, and kept the name for the rest of her life. == Career and education ==