The Color of Water Read online

  “As lively as a novel, a well-written, thoughtful contribution to the literature on race.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “It’s a story about keeping on and about not being a victim. It’s a love story…Much hilarity is mixed in with much sadness. As McBride describes the chaotic life in a family of fourteen, you can almost feel the teasing, the yelling, and the love.…The book is a delight, a goading, and an inspiration, worth your time and a few tears.”

  —Sunday Denver Post

  “A standout among the current surfeit of memoirs about growing up black in the United States…Mr. McBride’s portrait of his mother is not of a saint, which makes her all the more compelling.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Told with humor and clear-eyed grace…a terrific story…The sheer strength of spirit, pain, and humor of McBride and his mother as they wrestled with different aspects of race and identity is vividly told.…I laughed and thrilled to her brood of twelve kids…I wish I’d known them. I’m glad James McBride wrote it all down so I can.”

  —The Nation

  “A refreshing portrait of family self-discovery…brilliantly inter twine[s] passages of the family’s lives…Mr. McBride’s search is less about racial turmoil than about how he realizes how blessed he is to have had a support system in the face of what could have been insurmountable obstacles.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “James McBride has combined the techniques of the memoirist and the oral historian to illuminate a hidden corner of race relations. The author and his mother are two American originals.”

  —Susan Brownmiller

  “A lyrical, deeply moving tribute.…The Color of Water is about the love that a mother has for her children.”

  —The Detroit News

  “What makes this story inspiring is that she succeeded against strong odds…how she did this is what makes this memoir read like a very well-plotted novel. This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The author, his mother, and his siblings come across as utterly unique, heroic, fascinating people. I couldn’t stop reading the book once I began. McBride is a wonderful writer.”

  —Jonathan Kozol

  “Eloquent…vivid, affecting…McBride’s mother should take much pleasure in this loving, if sometimes uncomfortable, memoir, which embodies family values of the best kind. Other readers will take pleasure in it as well.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Tells us a great deal about our nations racial sickness—and about the possibilities of triumphing over it.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Eye- and mind-opening about the eternal convolutions and paradoxes of race in America.”

  —Chicago Tribune (Tempo)

  “Poignant…a uniquely American coming of age…Ruth McBride Jordan’s anecdotes are richly detailed, her voice clear and engaging. And she has a story worth telling.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Fascinating…superbly written.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Remarkable…a page-turner, full of compassion, tremendous hardship and triumph…McBride’s story is ultimately a celebration delivered with humor and pride.”

  —Emerge

  “A wonderful story that goes beyond race…richly detailed…earthy, honest.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “[A] remarkable saga.”

  —New York Newsday

  Praise for James McBride’s

  Miracle at St. Anna

  “McBride creates an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Searingly, soaringly beautiful…The book’s central theme, its essence, is a celebration of the human capacity for love.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “McBride is adept at describing the wartime state of mind: land and people lying ravaged in the wake of a wild brutality.…His narrative, which is based on a true story, plunges straight to the heart.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “McBride makes an impressive foray into fiction with a multi-shaded WWII tale…a haunting meditation on faith that is also a crack military thriller…strikingly cinematic…With nods to Ralph Ellison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, McBride creates a mesmerizing concoction…a miracle in itself.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “So descriptive that I feel as though I’m an eyewitness to everything that happens emotionally on the frontline.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “James McBride…brings formidable storytelling skills and lyrical imagination to his novel…[He] deftly broadens the landscape of his drama by entering the minds of a range of supporting characters: Italian freedom fighters, white army officers, starving villagers, a clairvoyant, and even a sixteenth-century sculptor.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Great-hearted, hopeful, and deeply imaginative.”

  —Elle

  “McBride has taken a bold leap into fiction. [He] goes deep into each character and takes you with him. His rich description of the landscape…transports you into this world. It’s a great piece of storytelling. I cried. I laughed. I hated finishing this book.”

  —Albuquerque Tribune

  “Full of miracles of friendship, of salvation and survival.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Riveting.”

  —Newsday

  “A sweetly compelling novel. McBride combines elements of history, mythology, and magical realism to make this a story about the little things like life and forgiveness and shared experience.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Miracle at St. Anna powerfully examines the horrors of history and finds an unexpected wealth of goodness and compassion in the human soul.”

  —Newark Star-Ledger

  “The miracles of survival, of love born in extremity, and of inexplicable ‘luck’ are the subjects of this first novel. [Miracle at St. Anna] is true to the stark realities of racial politics yet has an eye to justice and hope.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Roars ahead kicking and screaming to the finish, lightning-lit with rage and tenderness.”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  “A powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind.…Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A tale of hardship and horror as well as nobility and—yes—miracles, during the Italian campaign in World War II.”

  —Philadelphia Daily News

  “World War II provides a dazzling backdrop for James McBride’s first novel.”

  —Savoy

  “A brutal and moving first novel…McBride’s heart is on his sleeve, but these days it looks just right.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by James McBride

  MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA

  SONG YET SUNG

  The Color

  of Water

  A BLACK MAN’S TRIBUTE

  TO HIS WHITE MOTHER

  James McBride

  Riverhead Books, New York

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, N
ew York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 1996, 2006 by James McBride

  Readers Group Guide copyright © 2006 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Cover design copyright © 1996 by Honi Werner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Riverhead hardcover edition: January 1996

  First Riverhead trade paperback edition: February 1997

  First Riverhead trade paperback 10th Anniversary Edition: February 2006

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows;

  McBride, James.

  The color of water: a Black man’s tribute to his white mother / James McBride.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4406-3610-3

  1. McBride-Jordan, Ruth, 1921– 2. McBride, James, date. 3. Mulattoes—New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 4. Mothers—New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 5. Whites—New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 6. Mulattoes—New York (N.Y.)—Race Identity. I. Title.

  F130.N4M38 1996

  974.’100496073’0092—dc20 95-37243 CIP

  [B]

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

  I wrote this book for my mother,

  and her mother, and mothers everywhere.

  In memory of Hudis Shilsky,

  Rev. Andrew D. McBride,

  and Hunter L. Jordan, Sr.

  Contents

  1.

  Dead

  2.

  The Bicycle

  3.

  Kosher

  4.

  Black Power

  5.

  The Old Testament

  6.

  The New Testament

  7.

  Sam

  8.

  Brothers and Sisters

  9.

  Shul

  10.

  School

  11.

  Boys

  12.

  Daddy

  13.

  New York

  14.

  Chicken Man

  15.

  Graduation

  16.

  Driving

  17.

  Lost in Harlem

  18.

  Lost in Delaware

  19.

  The Promise

  20.

  Old Man Shilsky

  21.

  A Bird Who Flies

  22.

  A Jew Discovered

  23.

  Dennis

  24.

  New Brown

  25.

  Finding Ruthie

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Thanks and Acknowledgments

  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. Her children became doctors, professors, chemists, teachers—yet none of us even knew her maiden name until we were grown. It took me fourteen years to unearth her remarkable story—the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, she married a black man in 1942—and she revealed it more as a favor to me than out of any desire to revisit her past. Here is her life as she told it to me, and betwixt and between the pages of her life you will find mine as well.

  The Color

  of Water

  1.

  Dead

  I’m dead.

  You want to talk about my family and here I been dead to them for fifty years. Leave me alone. Don’t bother me. They want no parts of me and me I don’t want no parts of them. Hurry up and get this interview over with. I want to watch Dallas. See, my family, if you had a been part of them, you wouldn’t have time for this foolishness, your roots, so to speak. You’d be better off watching the Three Stooges than to interview them, like to go interview my father, forget it. He’d have a heart attack if he saw you. He’s dead now anyway, or if not he’s 150 years old.

  I was born an Orthodox Jew on April 1, 1921, April Fool’s Day, in Poland. I don’t remember the name of the town where I was born, but I do remember my Jewish name: Ruchel Dwajra Zylska. My parents got rid of that name when we came to America and changed it to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and I got rid of that name when I was nineteen and never used it again after I left Virginia for good in 1941. Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live.

  My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat shiva. That’s how Orthodox Jews mourn their dead. They say prayers, turn their mirrors down, sit on boxes for seven days, and cover their heads. It’s a real workout, which is maybe why I’m not a Jew now. There were too many rules to follow, too many forbiddens and “you can’ts” and “you mustn’ts,” but does anybody say they love you? Not in my family we didn’t. We didn’t talk that way. We said things like, “There’s a box in there for the nails,” or my father would say, “Be quiet while I sleep.”

  My father’s name was Fishel Shilsky and he was an Orthodox rabbi. He escaped from the Russian army and snuck over the Polish border and married my mother in an arranged marriage. He used to say he was under fire when he ran off from the army, and his ability to slick himself out of anything that wasn’t good for him stayed with him for as long as I knew him. Tateh, we called him. That means father in Yiddish. He was a fox, especially when it came to money. He was short, dark, hairy, and gruff. He wore a white shirt, black pants, and a tallis on his shirtsleeve, and that was like his uniform. He’d wear those black pants till they glazed and shined and were ripe enough to stand in the corner by themselves, but God help you if those pants were coming your way in a hurry, because he was nobody to fool with, my father. He was hard as a rock.

  My mother was named Hudis and she was the exact opposite of him, gentle and meek. She was born in 1896 in the town of Dobryzn, Poland, but if you checked there today, nobody would remember her family because any Jews who didn’t leave before Hitler got through with Poland were wiped out in the Holocaust. She was pretty about the face. Dark hair, high cheekbones, but she had polio. It paralyzed her left side and left her in overall poor health. Her left hand was useless. It was bent at the wrist and held close to her chest. She was nearly blind in her left eye and walked with a severe limp, dragging her left foot behind her. She was a quiet woman, my sweet Mameh. That’s what we called her, Mameh. She’s one person in this world I didn’t do right by….

  2.

  The Bicycle

  When I was fourteen, my mother took up two new hobbies: riding a bicycle and playing piano. The piano I didn’t mind, but the bicycle drove me crazy. It was
a huge old clunker, blue with white trim, with big fat tires, huge fenders, and a battery-powered horn built into the middle of the frame with a button you pushed to make it blow. The contraption would be a collector’s item now, probably worth about five thousand dollars, but back then it was something my stepfather found on the street in Brooklyn and hauled home a few months before he died.

  I don’t know whether it was his decision to pull out or not, but I think not. He was seventy-two when he died, trim, strong, easygoing, seemingly infallible, and though he was my stepfather, I always thought of him as Daddy. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man who wore old-timey clothes, fedoras, button-down wool coats, suspenders, and dressed neatly at all times, regardless of how dirty his work made him. He did everything slowly and carefully, but beneath his tractor-like slowness and outward gentleness was a crossbreed of quiet Indian and country black man, surefooted, hard, bold, and quick. He took no guff and gave none. He married my mother, a white Jewish woman, when she had eight mixed-race black children, me being the youngest at less than a year old. They added four more children to make it an even twelve and he cared for all of us as if we were his own. “I got enough for a baseball team,” he joked. One day he was there, the next—a stroke, and he was gone.

  I virtually dropped out of high school after he died, failing every class. I spent the year going to movies on Forty-second Street in Times Square with my friends. “James is going through his revolution,” my siblings snickered. Still, my sisters were concerned, my older brothers angry. I ignored them. Me and my hanging-out boys were into the movies. Superfly, Shaft, and reefer, which we smoked in as much quantity as possible. I snatched purses. I shoplifted. I even robbed a petty drug dealer once. And then in the afternoons, coming home after a day of cutting school, smoking reefer, waving razors, and riding the subway, I would see my mother pedaling her blue bicycle.

  She would ride in slow motion across our street, Murdock Avenue in the St. Albans section of Queens, the only white person in sight, as cars swerved around her and black motorists gawked at the strange, middle-aged white lady riding her ancient bicycle. It was her way of grieving, though I didn’t know it then. Hunter Jordan, my stepfather, was dead. Andrew McBride, my biological father, had died while she was pregnant with me fourteen years earlier. It was clear that Mommy was no longer interested in getting married again, despite the efforts of a couple of local preachers who were all Cadillacs and smiles and knew that she, and thus we, were broke. At fifty-one she was still slender and pretty, with curly black hair, dark eyes, a large nose, a sparkling smile, and a bowlegged walk you could see a mile off. We used to call that “Mommy’s madwalk,” and if she was doing it in your direction, all hell was gonna break loose. I’d seen her go up to some pretty tough dudes and shake her fist in their faces when she was angry—but that was before Daddy died. Now she seemed intent on playing the piano, dodging bill collectors, forcing us into college through sheer willpower, and riding her bicycle all over Queens. She refused to learn how to drive. Daddy’s old car sat out front for weeks, parked at the curb. Silent. Clean. Polished. Every day she rode her bike right past it, ignoring it.