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.

When he was young, James McBride's mother, Ruth, wouldn't talk about her own life. He knew there was something different about her, but when he tried to figure out why he was the only black kid he knew with a white mom, she would brush him off by telling him she was light-skinned. Eventually, though, she relented and told him her story, of how a little girl born Jewish in Poland, the daughter of a rabbi, came to marry a black man, have eight kids, become a widow, marry another black man, have four more kids, and then become a widow again, leaving her with twelve children, all of whom graduated from college despite the family's poverty. McBride sets her story against his own recollections of his childhood in his memoir, The Color of Water.

They're both extraordinary stories: Ruth's for its sheer improbability, and James's for being the kind that you'd think would end up one way that actually ends another. James' story has plenty of struggle and heartbreak, but Ruth's is just heartbreaking. Everytime you think it can't get much worse for her, there's another twist and worse it gets. And somehow it ends well, with Ruth being the last in her family to finally get the chance to go to college and graduate and James as an acclaimed writer. It's a testament to resilience, of refusing to let your lowest moments define and drown you, of defying the voices that would dismiss you and discount your worth.

But it's also just very good writing. McBride's juxtaposition of his experience of his childhood against his mother's early life is balanced, neither story feels as though it is given the short shrift in favor of the other. He renders his mother's story in what feels like essentially her own words, not flinching from the difficult parts, of which there are many. Much of this is heavy stuff (interested potential readers should know there's sexual abuse, abortion, death, and racism herein), but while he doesn't sugar-coat it, neither does he dwell on it in the way that books about hard lives sometimes do. Ruth is a woman who came through a lot of terrible things and carved out happiness for herself in a world that did not want to give her any. And though he was raised with much more love and care than his mother was, McBride's own upbringing was still challenging and he managed to come through it, too.

Memoir can be a hit-and-miss category, for me. Not everyone's life story is all that dynamic or engaging for anyone outside of it, and even if it is, so much depends on the skill of the telling of it. But when executed well, as this is, it can be an enlightening window into a realm of experience outside of our own. I don't necessarily know that this is a book for every reader...there's a lot of darkness here, and while it does end well, there's not necessarily a sense of triumph and uplift to counterbalance it. For me, this is part of why this book works, because it doesn't seek to lionize its subjects or turn itself into a paint-by-numbers tale of conquering adversity, but for other readers that might be hard to deal with. But I do think it's a book that should be read, and I do recommend it, so if what I've written here intrigues you, definitely pick it up!