The Color Of Water
“Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul.”
What a beautiful and poignant read. This is McBride's tribute to his white mother. HIs story touches upon issues of racism, socioeconomics, identity and religion. From a young age, McBride struggled to find where he fit into this world as a black man with a white mother. At an early age, trying to find answers, he asked his mother what color is God. Her response, "He is the color of water." The story is juxtaposed along with his mother's, with the challenges they both faced defining themselves. What she impressed upon all 12 children as being most important were education and getting 'religioned.' Despite the circumstances, she ensured this success in her children as she saw all 12 graduate from University. A great read.
The author tells his own story alongside his mother's. To understand himself he had first to understand his mother, Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, from a Jewish Polish immigrant family. The story switches back and forth between mother and son. Each tells their own story, reading as two first person narratives. We see their experiences through their own eyes as the years pass from youth to adulthood. This allows us to feel intimately their disappointments as well as achievements, step by step as they mature. I chuckled at some of the author’s childhood memories and the words used to describe them. I felt both the mother’s struggles and her sense of determinedness. Her hatred of a father who sexually abused her and showed no regard for her disabled mother is poignantly portrayed.
When James McBride was a boy, he asked his mother whether God was black or white. She replied that God is all colors and no colors at the same time – the color of water. But in his family’s everyday life in Red Hook, Brooklyn, race “was like the power of the moon in my house,” he writes. His mother, Ruth Jordan, was white: born the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi in Poland and raised in Virginia, she would over the years have two African-American husbands and raise 12 black children on the verge of poverty. Only as an adult did McBride learn his mother’s full story, drawing her out over many years and rendering her oral history as folksy alternating chapters in this engaging and tender family memoir. I gobbled it up in less than 24 hours.
