The Color of Water

by James McBride

The nuts and bolts of raising us was left to Mommy, who acted as chief surgeon for bruises (“Put iodine on it”), war secretary (“If somebody hits you, take your fist and crack ‘em”), religious consultant (“Put God first”), chief psychologist (“Don’t think about it”), and financial adviser (“What’s money if your mind is empty?”). Matters involving race and identity she ignored.

My parents’ marriage was put together by a rov, a rabbi of a high order who goes to each of the parents and sees about the dowry and arranges the marriage contract properly according to Jewish law, which meant love had nothing to do with it.

You couldn’t just walk into America. You had to have a sponsor, someone who would say, “I’ll vouch for this person.”

But a child in my family didn’t ask questions. You did what you were told. You obeyed, period.

But there was a part of me that feared black power very deeply for the obvious reason. I thought black power would be the end of my mother.

She and my father brought a curious blend of Jewish-European and African-American distrust and paranoia into our house.

My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

Most white folks I knew seemed to have a great fear of blacks. Even as a young child, I was aware of that.

Rev. Owens’s sermons started like a tiny choo-choo train and ended up like a roaring locomotive. He’d begin in a slow drawl, then get warmed up and jerk back and forth over the subject matter like a stutterer gone wild:

“God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

All my siblings, myself included, had some sort of color confusion at one time or another,

“Look at them laughing,” he’d say in Yiddish. “They don’t have a dime in their pocket and they’re always laughing.” But he had plenty money and we were all miserable.

“Am I black or white?” “You’re a human being,” she snapped. “Educate yourself or you’ll be a nobody!” “Will I be a black nobody or just a nobody?” “If you’re a nobody,” she said dryly, “it doesn’t matter what color you are.”

They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind.

She played each note separately, as if they had no connection to each other, and they echoed through the house and landed on the walls like tears.

they’d call her an “abused woman” today. Back then they just called you “wife.” And a man could do anything he wanted to his wife in the South.

Black males are closely associated with crime in America, not with white Jewish mothers, and I could not imagine a police officer buying my story as I stood in front of the Jewish temple saying, “Uh, yeah, my grandfather was the rabbi here, you know

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That’s all.

That man was the finest preacher I’ve ever heard to this day. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus. You never heard anything like him. He was not fire and brimstone. He brought God into your everyday life in a way that made you think heaven was right next door.

Being mixed is like that tingling feeling you have in your nose just before you sneeze—you’re waiting for it to happen but it never does.

Being caught between black and white as a working adult was far more unpleasant than when I was a college student.

She’s always been slightly out of control, my mother, always had the unnerving habit of taking the ship into the air to do loops and spins, then fleeing the cockpit screaming, “Someone do something, we’re gonna crash!” then at the last dying second slipping into the pilot’s seat and coolly landing the thing herself, only to forget the entire incident instantly.