“As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from – where she was born, who her parents were. When I asked she’d say, ‘God made me.’ When I asked if she was white, she’d say, ‘I’m light-skinned,’ and change the subject. She raised twelve black children and sent us all to college and in most cases graduate school…yet none of us knew her maiden name until we were grown.”
So opens The Color of Water, a book that took 14 years to write because he was not only unearthing the truth about his enigmatic mother, but also trying to make sense of himself. Caught between two passions, which caused him to fluctuate between two careers, James McBride realized that in order to bring peace to the war within, he needed to discover the truth about the one he loved the most – his mother.
Ruth McBride Jordan, born Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, is from an immigrant Jewish family and raised within a corrupted patriarchy where her father, a rabbi, was consumed with control, degrading his wife and daughters at every chance. She escapes to the vibrancy of 1940s Harlem where she falls in love with a black Christian man, an unforgiveable offense in the eyes of her family, who write her off as dead. She marries him, they are dirt poor, but are able to start a church in the housing projects that, as far as I’m aware, still exists today. Her beloved husband passed away when she was pregnant with the author, her 8th child. She keeps the family together, eventually remarries another black man and has 4 more children, only to be widowed again.
With epic resiliency, she raises all 12 mixed-race children in an era where being biracial was a no-man’s land. She saw to it that every one of them graduated from college, many going on to post-graduate degrees. In the process of telling her story, James McBride offers his own autobiography of confusion, rebellion, apathy and coming of age within his unyielding devotion to his mother.
The author has put in his time as a journalist and its apparent in the style his story is told. But it isn’t the Associated Press give-me-the-facts-ma’am type of journalism. Its the real thing – the ability to move a reader’s emotions without divulging much of your own. Presenting the facts not in pure chronology, but in a way that enable the reader to make a little more sense of the world. His sentences are lyrical. His insight softened the sharp edges of my own adolescent and early adult years.
But the last chapter … oh, that last chapter. When you know the story is culminating and want to rush forward and at the same time linger because the last page is coming too quickly. I can’t tell if his journalistic style breaks and his emotion poured into me, or if my own emotions had slowly swelled throughout the novel, to topple down on me in the final pages. I had already decided that the book was tremendous, worthy of the 2 years it was on the NYT bestseller list, but the last chapter makes the book an opus. I immediately turned to the first page to read it all again.
The Color of Water is common required reading in sociology classes, college discussions on race or religious issues, the socio-cultural turbulence of the mid-twentieth century, and book group studies about the ways a woman can run and hide, yet still live, after growing up in a nightmare.
But for me, those elements are only the backdrop for the real story. James McBride’s coming of age radiates within the story of the woman he loves as Mommy. The angst of his youth makes sense when painted on the canvas of his mother’s life:
“It was typical Mommy neurotic behavior, and I didn’t fully understand it till I learned how far she had come. For her, her Jewish side is gone. She opened the door for me but closed it for herself long ago, and for her to crack it open and peek inside was like eating fire. She’d look in and stagger back, blinded, as the facts of her own history poured over her like lava. As she revealed the facts of her life I felt helpless, like I was watching her die and be reborn again (yet there was a cleansing element, too), because after years of hiding, she opened up and began to talk about the past, and as she did so, I was the one who wanted to run for cover. I can’t describe what a shock it was to hear words like “Tateh” and “rov” and “shiva” and “Bubeh” coming from Mommy’s mouth as she sat at the kitchen table in her Ewing home. Imagine, if you will, five thousand years of Jewish history landing in your lap in the space of months. It sent me tumbling through my own abyss of sorts, trying to salvage what I could of my feelings and emotions, which would be scattered to the winds as she talked. It was a fascinating lesson in life history – a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction marvel, to say the least. 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.”
Some argue that nothing was resolved, that his mother never did come to terms with her past, and that he never really became comfortable in his own two-toned skin. I would say they are right, but instead of detracting from the power of the story, it adds to it. This isn’t historical fiction, or the biography of a person who is now dead. It is the story of two people who are still in process, who have braided together a few loose ends but there are still threads dangling. The author brings you to the present moment, and then has to let you go because he doesn’t know what comes next, either.
My recommendation: Buy the thing. Prop your feet up, pour a good glass of wine, and read it. Then read it again. And spend some time on his website while your at it. Best author website ever.
This review is pure, unadulterated Kate. No one has paid me or compensated me in any way. The book was loaned to me by a friend. Neither the author nor the publisher know I exist. Sad, I know. To think of what they’re missing.
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