As the white mother of an adopted black son, The Color of Water really resonated with me. James McBride is a Black novelist, journalist, and musician who has written a unique memoir, told in two points of view, his own and that of his mother, and chronicles their respective journeys to find themselves.
Ruth, his mother, was raised in an orthodox Jewish household with an itinerant rabbi father who immigrated from Poland and married her mother, a woman left crippled by polio, simply to achieve citizenship. He was a ne’er-do-well, bouncing from one synagogue to the next until he opened a grocery store in Virginia that catered to blacks. Ruth becomes pregnant by a local Black man and is shipped north to family before her pregnancy became obvious. After an abortion, she returns home but eventually runs away, living in the North on the Black side of town. Her family pronounces her dead and has nothing to do with her from then on. Ruth narrowly avoids a life of prostitution before marrying McBride, her first husband. He dies early, leaving her with seven children and another on the way. She finds a second good Black man who takes on her and her kids. She becomes a Christian and helps establish a church. She raises her family with an emphasis on religion and education. All of her children earned advanced degrees.
McBride, who finds racism an inalienable part of American life, says “I felt frustrated to live in a world that considers the color of your face an immediate political statement.” As a child, when he wonders why his mother isn’t Black and is somewhat embarrassed by her riding her bike through the neighborhood as if she is no different than anyone else. When he asks her if God is Black or White, she replies that God is no color, he is the color of water. McBride goes through several years of delinquency before returning to the straight and narrow, working as a journalist and musician. Eventually, though his mother has always deferred answering his questions about her past and her family, she finally consents to being interviewed by him. As he studies her life, he says, “I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did so, my own life was rebuilt.”
This is a wonderful documentation of American family life and shows the tremendous growth mother and son underwent and their emotional healing.
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The Color of Water (Riverhead Books, February 7, 2006) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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