The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute To His White Mother (1997) - Plot & Excerpts
If Cheaper By the Dozen, by Frank Gilbraith Jr., and The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, ever somehow met and had an "I like you as a friend, not a lover" child, The Color of Water would be it - race and a ridiculous amount of kids. The concept is compelling, and I would recommend this book to anyone who was disappointed that Run, Ann Patchett's most recent book, didn't deal more directly with race issues in a mixed-race family. Nominally, this book is a tribute to James McBride's mother, who was an unarguably interesting person. McBride's personal issues with his mother clouded her story, however, and his inability to emotionally separate from her enough to treat her as a character left me feeling that he bit off more than he could chew when he decided to write this "tribute". McBride reflects that his mother was not comfortable having her story told and preferred not to discuss her past with him, which leads me to ask whether "tribute" is an appropriate word to put in the title of this book. It would have been a stronger narrative if McBride had openly written The Color of Water as his own story, not his mother's.Toward the end of the book, McBride admits that he experienced more emotion hearing his mother's story than his mother did telling it. This comes through awkwardly within the narrative. For example, he names his mother "Mommy", and that continues as the name of her character throughout the entire story. Though he reminds his reader four or five times that Mommy's name changed from Ruchel Dwarja Zylska in Poland to Rachel Deborah Shilsky in America to Ruth McBride Jordan (after her marriages and renouncing of the Jewish faith), and though his sisters seem call her Ruth or Ruthie, he continues to refer to her as Mommy. His character rebels, grows up, becomes a successful journalist, but still his mother's character is "Mommy".At first, when I read The Color Purple, Mr._______'s name was awkward to me. I didn't know how I was supposed to say it. I honestly wondered a little bit if Walker couldn't come up with a name for him, so she just left it out. By the end of the novel, the genius of both robbing Mr.________ of the right to a name, and calling him something that effectively gives him the potential to be Everyman deepens the novel. Not so with Mommy. McBride writes a specific woman, not a stock character. Mommy "waddles", likes her privacy, and doesn't like to do housework. While with Mr._______ I eventually hope that my last name never fills that blank, with Mommy I know it doesn't. She's not my Mommy, so do I have to call her that? Does McBride still think of her as he did when he was a small child?McBride divides this book a' la The Grapes of Wrath, with alternating chapters that are vignettes from Mommy's point of view and chapters that are a continuing story from his point of view. His mother's vignettes are at times very lovely, but at some point his chapters started repeating hers as though the stories had not been told already. This was not in an artistic, Rashamon way, but rather seemed like bad editing or, worse, some kind of psychological disassociation with his mother's story that needed to be dealt with before writing the book. At first, Mommy's story is supplemental to his memories of her from when he is a child. Later, however, one chapter tells a story from her point of view, and then the next, from James McBride's point of view, repeats the same story by recalling the circumstances of her telling that story to him. That's not necessary.Also, who is his "sister Jack"? I officially do not understand what her relation to the family is if she is not literally his sister. I will be sad if I find out he explained that and I missed it, when I didn't miss the many times he described his mother's name change and who her childhood best friend was.Unfortunately, while The Color of Water has the potential to be a truly great American story, it does not live up to that potential. McBride's ambivalence as to whether to tell his story or his mother's story sabotaged it and left me feeling uncomfortable - like neither he nor his mother were well represented. I read this for a book club, and many of the people in the club were not distracted by the way McBride told the story. To them, the fascinating life his mother led and his psychological journey in learning about her were not conflicting storylines that distracted from each other, both stories were part of united by the larger journey of him learning to forgive his mother. I think they could stay with the story because they were rooting for the mother/son relationship. I, on the other hand, am more interested in being entertained than other people's psyco-health. It's shallow, but true. Basically, McBride failed me as an entertainer.
"What color is God?" asks the young James of his mother, confused by all the white images of Jesus that surround him and his black father and mother. "God's not black. He's not white. . . . God is the color of water," is the wonderful response of Rachel, an astonishingly gifted and driven woman who despite numerous adversities managed to raise, often on her own, twelve amazing children. They all grew up to be doctors, lawyers, nurses, a chemistry teacher, social worker or other kind of professional. That she was a white Jew –at least initially, she later converted to Protestantism and started her own Baptists church with her second husband –living in a black ghetto with little income and virtually no support from her family makes it even more remarkable. Two voices complement each other in this moving narrative: Rachel, James' mother, writes about growing up and the Jewish family that ultimately rejected her, and James, her musician and composer son, who describes his own journey from the ghetto to middle class society. Rachel, who almost became a prostitute at one point to support herself, had the good sense to marry two very dedicated black men. Unfortunately, both died young, leaving Rachel to care for an enormous household of children. Their two accounts are suffused with the issues of race, identity and religion. All of these issue are transcended by the force of Rachel's will and her unshakeable insistence that education and religion were paramount. James was puzzled by his mother's whiteness. She was the only white in the neighborhood who was disdained by other blacks who saw her as an interloper, and whites who disliked her for being a white person surviving in a black world. The question of race was always in the background during this time of racial struggle, the civil rights movement, and Black Power. One of the older brothers became an activist; James drifted into truancy and drugs. Finally, after moving to Delaware, he discovered music in the hands of a talented white teacher at an otherwise all black school. Rachel shrewdly used the busing system to have her children attend schools in neighborhoods where learning was a priority. She took them to every free cultural event she could find it certainly helped living in New York. To top things off, Rachel went back to school herself and earned a bachelor's degree in social work. She ignores her children's pleas to stay out of the ghetto and enjoys walking around the Red Hook Housing Project that was her family's old stomping grounds. This book is a testimony to a mother's love and to education's value in overcoming adversity.
What do You think about The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute To His White Mother (1997)?
Such a gem to me. McBride is a black journalist, novelist, and jazz musician who recognizes what a wonder his mother Ruth was when she raised him and 11 siblings and gets her to open up about her secretive past. The book is lyrical and tender, tough and heartbreaking, and suffused with tales of courage balanced with humor. McBride alternates skillfully between Ruth talking about her early history and his own perspective from the inside of the family she nurtured in Brooklyn and Queens in the turbulent 60’s. James struggles to find a path to his black identity, taking a short tour of juvenile delinquency. He comes to understand his grounding in how his mother never saw things in black and white. When asked by her children about how it is she is not black, she just deflects the question by saying she is light-skinned and nagging them to get back to their education. Somehow the values she upheld was an anchor that contributed to all 12 kids getting a college education and most advanced degrees. When McBride as an adult gets her to submit to taped interviews, her marvelous voice finally comes through about her hidden past as a Polish Jew with a tough upbringing:I’m dead.You want me to talk about my family and here I have been dead to them for fifty years. Leave me along. Don’t bother me. They don’t want no parts of me, I don’t want no parts of them. Hurry up and get the interview over with. I want to watch Dallas. …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 am concerned. She had to die for me, the rest of me, to live.From that introduction, you can see the trove of heritage McBride's quest for roots gets into through his mother’s story. Her father was an iterant rabbi, who came to run a store for a black neighborhood in rural Virginia in the segregated south. His brutality toward her mother and her was one reason Ruth ran away to Harlem; the other was that she had fallen in love at 15 with a black boy and was shunted to New York for family help with an abortion. Ruth finds a niche in the black community after being shunned by aunts and uncles. She gets a job at the Apollo Theater and enjoys the music scene. She ends up marrying a kind-hearted man, Andrew McBride, and having 8 kids with him, including James as the last, born after he died. His future stepfather, Dennis, came to their aid in the aftermath of the tragedy and soon charms her into marriage:He came from a home where kindness was a way of life. I wanted to be in this kind of family. I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me.The welcoming feeling she got from Dennis’ mother in North Carolina (“God bless you, Ruth, because you’re our daughter now. Marry that man”) is consistent with the community she felt with blacks, accounting for why James had a white mother:That’s how black folk thought back then. That’s why I never veered from the black side. I would never even have thought of marrying a white man. Ruth’s journey seems so improbable, but it still epitomizes a theme from the river of stories that frame the immigrant experience in America. The blending of culture and race made some lovely blooms. Just because a book is a memoir doesn’t mean it can’t have the wonderful architecture of great fiction. I don’t read a lot of memoirs and recognize I should read more. My five stars puts this one up there with “Angela’s Ashes” and “The Glass Castle” (and with more joy, less torment), and for my reading pleasure it was a notch above “The Road from Coorain” and “Growing Up.”
—Michael
إن لم تكن تعلم فلا بد أنك قرأت شيئا أو سمعت عن تلك المعضلة في زمن الستينات والسبعينات وما قبلهمامشكلة البيض والسود العنصرية والتضييق المعيشي على كل من هو أسود في مجتمع البيضوكره كل من هو أبيض في مجتمع السودأضف على هذا الموضوع رشة يهودية أو فلنقل رشة دينية ..التناوب في سرد السيرة الذاتية لحياة شخصين أحدهم أبيض والآخر أسودكان جميلا وممتعا يجذبك الحديث لتعرف كيف عاش كلا من الطرفين تحت ظل تلك الظروفذلك الصخب الذي حوته حياة جيمز مؤلف الكتابوتلك الشجاعة التي تحلت بها راخيل إو روث والدة جيمزوفكرة انجابها لاثني عشر طفلا في زمن كذاك وظروف كتلك الظروف دليل شجاعة ايضا..اعجبتني المنطقية في ردودها على تساؤلات ابنها عندما كان يسألها هل هو أبيض أم أسودفتقول له: لون بشرتك غامق ولون بشرتي فاتحعندما سألها عن لون الله فقالت له:لون الله هو لون الماء،والماء ليس له لونومن هنا اشتقت الرواية أسمها..ربما في أمريكا قد تخلصوا هذه المعضلة وان ظل بعض ضيقي الأفق يصنفون الناس إلى أبيض وأسودلكن هذه العنصرية في بلادنا لا تزال قائمةوشخصيا عانيت منها أو فلنقل بأسلوب ألطف رأيت ملامحها ترتسم في معاملات البعض..عنصرية الهوية او الجنسية عنصرية غبية لا معنى لها وليس لها في الدين أساسوأستغرب كثيرا وحقا من تلك العقول التي تمارسها وكأنها حق ولا مستنكر لما يُرى إلا فيما ندرالوحدة العربية التي يحلمون بها لن تتحقق مادامت بعض العقول السخيفة ترى أنها عرق أعلى من غيررهاكونها تنتمي لبلد ما أو لقبيلة ما -.-..نسأل الله الهداية
—هالةْ أمين
رغم اني انهيت الرواية في يومين لكن تركت في نفسي اثر و اسئلة ستبقى معي لفترة ما هو لون روح الله؟ ليس لها لون . لون الله هو لون الماء و الماء ليس له لون"كان هناك عالمان يتفجران داخلي و يحاولان الخروج و كان علي ان اكتشف اكثر هن هويتي و من اجل ذلك كان علي ان اكتشف من هي أمي"رواية لون الماء هي سيرة ذاتية لعازف السكسفون و الصحفي "جيمز ماكبرايد" و من بين صفخاتها ستجدون صفحات عن حياة والدته روث اليهودية كتبت بلون اغمق و تفاصيل عن واقع الحياة الامريكية في فترة الستينات و السبعينياتلا تتحدث الرواية عن التمييز العنصري بسبب اللون و انما ايضا الدين ايضا فوالدة الراوي اليهودية و التي عانت من التفرقة الدينية في امريكا بالاضافة الى المعاملة القاسية من والدها "الحاخام اليهودي" مما جعلها تهرب من دينيها و تعتنق المسيحية و تتزوج من قسيس مسيحي و تدفن ماضيها اليهودي كما دفونها اهلها و تنكروا لها ملاحظاتي حول الروايةاولا : التفرقة العنصرية لن تختفي بامريكا و لا زالت الى يومنا هذا حتى مع وصول رجل اسود "اوباما" الى الرئاسة " فأنا اشعر بإحباط لأني أعيش في عالم يعتبر لون الوجه بمثابة موقف سياسي فوري شئت أم أبيت"ثانيا: فلسفة الام في تربية ابنائها "العلم" فبالعلم وحده يستطيع الانسان ان يثبت نفسه لا بالدين و لا بالعرق و لا بالمال بتركيزها دائما على مقولة " ما نفع المال اذا كان عقلك فارغا" و في كل مرة يسألها ابنها لماذا انا اسود؟ لماذا انت بيضاء؟ كانت ترد انت انسان و هذا يكفي . ثقفّ تفسك و الا ستكون شخص بلا قيمةثالثا: رغم هروب الام من يهوديتها و تنصلها من ماضيها الا انها ربت لبناءها على الطريقة اليهودية البحتة و هذا ما اعترف به ابنها ايضا .. ربما لان من شبّ على شيئ شاب عليه او اننا لا نملك ان نربي ابناءنا الى بنفس الطريقة التي تربينا عليها "ربما"رابعا: قواعد العالم الخارجي كانت تبدو لنا كأطفال لا معنى لها , غير اننا أدخلنا العالم الخارجي الى منزلنا عندما كبرناما جعلني اضع للرواية 5 نجوم . جملة قالها جيمز ماكبريد تُلخص حياته و سعيه المستمر للبحث عن هويته " هناك فرق كبير بين الموت و الحياة و ان اعظم هدية يمكن ان يعطيها انسان لاخر هي الحياة و ان اعظم خطيئة يمكن ان يرتكبها الانسان بحق شخص أخر هي سلبه للحياة الى جانب ذلك فان جميع القوانين و الاديان تصبح شيئ ثانوي مجرد كلمات و معتقدات يختار الانسان الايمان بها و الكره و القتل باسمها" بالفعل تستحق 5 نجوم و اكثر
—Mona
