McBride, a journalist and musician, explores his mother’s
past, recreating her remarkable story, as well as his own upbringing and
heritage in a poignant and powerful debut novel. He skillfully relates his life
story and his coming to terms with his mixed ethnic and religious heritage,
with chapters conveying his mother’s travails and development into a fervent
Baptist.
His mother, born Rachel Shilsky, who changed her name to
Ruth to be more American, is a story of a woman whose parents fled the
anti-Jewish pogroms of Central Europe and landed in a Suffolk, Virginia, a violently
racist small southern town, there to be faced by new anti-Semitism and racial prejudices
and develop a few of their own. Her
father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept
his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers, and
ultimately abandoned his wife.
However, her grim upbringing is left behind when she moves
to Harlem, marries Dennis, a black minister, fervently adopts Christianity, and
raises eight children. When she fell in love with Dennis, she said “He came
from a home where kindness was a way of life.
I wanted to be in this kind of family.
I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me.” However, they
experienced a certain degree of prejudice as a result of their interracial
marriage. They opened the New Brown
Memorial Church together. Then Dennis
fell ill with lung cancer and died just before James was born.
Widowed, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her
family. Then she remarried to Andrew McBride, another black man, and raised
four more children before he also died.
James reports that he grew up in “orchestrated chaos”, with
his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. As a
child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around
him. She was white, and she kept
secrets. It is her voice, unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic, that
is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.
In the answer that gives the book’s its title, she says
“God’s not black. He’s not white. God is
the color of water. Water doesn’t have a
color.” She schemed shrewdly to have all her children buses to schools
predominately in Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there.
James was pleasantly surprised when he
learned during his senior year in high school that he had been admitted to
Oberlin College. He and his eleven
siblings all completed college and led successful careers.
The triumph of the book is that race and religion are
transcended in these interwoven histories of family love, the sheer force of a
mother’s will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really
mattered: school and church, a respect for education and religion. Issues of
race and identity took secondary importance to her beliefs.
At 65, Ruth went back to school and earned a college degree
in social work. She remains in close
contact with her children, holding holiday gatherings where everyone sleeps on
the floor or rugs in shifts, double or triple in bed – just like the old times.
The Color of Water
will make you proud to be a member of the human race. This moving and
unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths. The two stories, son’s and mother’s,
beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note, particularly at this current
time of racial polarization.—Kenneth N. Johnson
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