The Colour of Water is a delightful, rewarding read. The story of James McBride, a black American, and his mother, a white Jewish refugee, it is a remarkable exploration of family, of identity, of race and of faith. With an honest, engaging style, McBride tells his story of growing up.
He was one of twelve siblings, in the all black neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. The boisterous household of orchestrated chaos was short of food, clothes and money but is described by McBride with no sense of being needy. On the contrary, McBride’s memories portray a wealth of family love and experience.
“We snuck into each other’s rooms by night to trade secrets, argue, commiserate, spy and continue chess games and monopoly games that had begun days earlier. Four of us played the same clarinet, handing it off to one another in the hallway at school like halfbacks on the football field.”
The “commander in chief” of this family, big enough for a baseball team, was his mother, Ruth, who, with fierce determination, steered her twelve children toward a better life, firmly founded on education and faith.
By working nights, doggedly seeking scholarships for the best schools throughout New York city and instilling rock solid values in her family, Ruth McBride saw every one of her children college educated: doctors, professors and leaders in their own right.
Ruth’s own story is skilfully woven into James McBride’s autobiography. With a graceful and gentle touch, McBride brings his mother’s voice into the telling, revealing through her narrative the complex and painful childhood of a Jewish immigrant in the Southern States of America in the 1930s.
As an outsider in the white community, Ruth gravitated towards the “black folks”, finding acceptance and friendship. “That’s what I liked about black folks all my life: they never judged me”, she said. At 17, she fled her strict father for New York and defied social taboos by mixing with black community, living and working in Harlem. She cut all ties to the Jewish world a few years later when she married a black Christian minister, Dennis McBride.
Ruth and Dennis started their life together in a little room “smack dab in the middle of all the action in Harlem”, listening to Malcolm X making speeches in the street and Duke Ellington playing jazz. Every Sunday they would go to the Metropolitan Baptist Church, lining up on the sidewalk to get into the church that seated two thousand people. Ruth became a Christian in that church, describing the radical step with characteristic simplicity, “I accepted Jesus that day and He has never let me down from that day to this”. This unwavering faith saw Ruth through all her life’s struggles and brought her deep happiness. She and Dennis founded a church from their living room and their love for God was part of everything they did.
James McBride described his own understanding of God’s blessings as coming from his mother’s example and his story is peppered with references to their firm beliefs. With humour he describes his mother’s faith, “Mommy loved God. She went to church each and every Sunday, the only white person in sight, butchering the lovely hymns with a singing voice that sounded like a cross between a cold engine trying to crank on an October morning and a whining washer”.
There was plenty of talk about God in McBride’s childhood, but the question of race was stubbornly ignored. McBride was an adult before he discovered the truth about his mother’s background and The Colour of Water traces this discovery.
As a child, he struggled to understand the constant inner conflict that sprung from looking black and growing up amid the explosion of “black power”, while his white mother consistently avoided any discussion of their racial identity. It wasn’t until, as an adult, he convinced his mother to tell her story that he fully understood the blend of worlds that were his and his mother’s history.
The Colour of Water is extraordinary because of the frank and humorous way it deals with the significant and painful issues of race, poverty and the universal search for identity. It is a weighty contribution to breaking down barriers of prejudice, told in the style of the best kind of kitchen table conversations.
