The Color of Water

I became a fan of James McBride's writing when I read The Good Lord Bird several years ago. When a friend of mine handed me The Color of Water two weeks ago (when I asked her for something uplifting to read while I was recovering from illness), I was excited to read it, but I had no idea what an emotional wallop I was going to receive.

James McBride describes being mystified and somewhat disturbed as a child that his mother didn't look like the mothers of his friends, but she brushed his questions off, or redirected his attention to topics she considered more important than her history or her racial identity: education or other things he should be doing to make something of himself.

This book tells the story of his mother's life up to the point when she became his mother, and his own process of growing up with her as his mother, learning about her past and coming to terms with what it meant for his own life. Chapters alternate between his mother's voice, describing what it was like to grow up the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, and his own voice, describing what it was like to be the son of this formidable woman.

Ruth's story is heart-wrenching. Her father, a not very successful rabbi who moved his family around as his contracts with congregations were not renewed, was an abusive brute. Her mother, disabled by childhood illness, was quiet and passive, “a good Jewish wife,” who didn't speak English. Ruth and her siblings ran her father's general store, endured his abuse, and watched their father beat and berate their mother. When Ruth finally made the move to leave her family for her own preservation, she was plagued by guilt. She married a black man named McBride who worked for her aunt in New York, which caused her whole extended family to expel her. “You're out of the family,” her aunt told her when she called at one point to ask for help. “Stay out. We sat shiva for you.”

Letting go of her family was the beginning of a new life for Ruth. She converted to Christianity and helped her husband start a new church in their apartment living room. She had seven children with him, and when he died, she remarried and had five more children with her second husband. Although Ruth was financially poor, she was full of energy and resourcefulness for raising her family and building community. She had lifelong friends in the majority black community where she lived and among the families of her two husbands. She kept moving.

The chapters where James McBride describes his attempts to distance himself from his embarrassing, mysterious mother are painful to read. He doesn't gloss over the fact that he was courting danger. He credits some close calls with violence and some serious talks with black men who had spent significant time in prison with helping him begin to care more about the direction his life was taking. He describes gradually reentering the life of his family, and his description of his mother putting him on the Greyhound bus to send him to college is understatedly touching.

Although it was surely a practical decision for Ruth to close the door to her past for a long period of her life, re-opening it for her son turned out to have surprising, healing consequences for both of them. It sounds trite, but this is such a powerful, affecting story. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.