The Color of Water

by James McBride

My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control. I told Richie I didn’t believe him.

There was something inside me, an ache I had, like a constant itch that got bigger and bigger as I grew, that told me. It was in my blood, you might say, and however the notion got there, it bothered me greatly. Yet Mommy

In 1966, when I was nine, black power had permeated every element of my neighborhood in St. Albans, Queens. Malcolm X had been killed the year before and had grown larger in death than in life. Afros were in style. The Black Panthers were a force. Public buildings,

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. I had swallowed the white man’s fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole.

“Black power! Black power! Black power!” while the crowd roared. It frightened the shit out of me. I thought to myself, These people will kill Mommy. Mommy, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned. Her motto was, “If

doesn’t involve your going to school or church, I could care less

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.

White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet

to go

Blacks could be trusted more, but anything i...

was probably slightly substandard. She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of it. She couldn’t stand racists of either color and had great distaste for bourgeois blacks who sought to emulate rich whites by putting on airs and “doing silly things like covering their couches with plastic and holding teacups with their pinkies out.” “What fools!” she’d hiss. She wouldn’t be bothered with parents who bragged about their children’s accomplishments, yet she insisted we strive for the highest professional goals. She was against welfare and never applied for it d...

I remember when a white man shoved her angrily as she led a group of us onto an escalator, but Mommy simply ignored him. I remember two black women pointing at us, saying, “Look at that white bitch,” and a white man screaming at Mommy somewhere in Manhattan, calling her a “nigger lover.” Mommy ignored them all, unless the insults threatened her children, at which time she would turn and fight back like an alley cat, hissing, angry, and fearless.

“You don’t need money. What’s money if your mind is empty! Educate your mind! Is this world crazy or am I the crazy one? It’s probably me.”

He placed his kid’s bags in the back of the bus and when the kid went to step on the bus, instead of hugging the child, the father offered his hand, and father and son did a magnificent, convoluted black-power soul handshake called the “dap,” the kind of handshake

“Where’d you learn that handshake?” someone asked the kid. “My father taught me,” he said proudly. “He’s a Black Panther.” The bus roared to life as I panicked. A Black Panther? Next to Mommy? It was my worst nightmare come true. I had no idea who the Panthers truly were. I had swallowed the media image of them completely.

When they were out of sight, I turned to the Black Panther’s son sitting behind me and punched him square in the face with my fist. The kid held his jaw and stared at me in shock as his face melted into a knot of disbelief and tears.

The biggest event Suffolk had seen in years was a traveling sideshow that came through town on the railroad tracks, with a stuffed whale in a boxcar. The folks loved that. They loved anything different, or new, or from out of town, except for Jews. In school the kids called me “Christ killer” and “Jew baby.” That name stuck with me for a long time. “Jew baby.” You know it’s so easy to hurt a child.

Hobbies? I had none. Running. That was my hobby. Sometimes when Tateh wasn’t home, I’d tear out the door of the store and run. Just run anyplace. I would run down the back roads where the black folks lived, across the tracks to where the white folks were. I loved to sprint, just to feel the wind blowing on my face and see things and not be at home. I was always a running-type person.

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: “We…[silence]…know…today…arrhh…um…I said WEEEE…know…THAT [silence] ahhh…JESUS [church: “Amen!”]…ahhh, CAME DOWN…[“Yes! Amen!”] I said CAME DOWWWWNNNN! [“Go on!”] He CAME-ON-DOWN-AND-LED-THE-PEOPLE-OF-JERU-SALEM-AMEN!” Then he’d shift to a babbling “Amen” mode, where he spoke in fast motion and the words popped out of his mouth like artillery rounds. “Amens” fired across the room like bullets. “It’s so good AMEN to know God AMEN and I tell you AMEN that if you AMEN only come AMEN to God yourself AMEN there will be AMEN no turning back AMEN AMEN AMEN! Can I get an AMEN?” (“AMEN!”) And there

“Your father,” she often mused, “he’d give anybody his last dime.” She did not like large churches with political preachers, nor Pentecostal churches that were too

“Why do you cry in church?” I asked her one afternoon after service. “Because God makes me happy.” “Then why cry?” “I’m crying ‘cause I’m happy. Anything wrong with that?” “No,”

thought it was because she wanted to be black like everyone else in church, because maybe God liked black people better, and one afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white. A deep sigh. “Oh boy…God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit.”

“Does he like black or white people better?” “He loves all people. He’s a spirit.” “What’s a spirit?” “A spirit’s a spirit.” “What color is God’s spirit?” “It doesn’t have a color,” she said. “God is the color of water. Water

doesn’t have a color.”

few more embarrassing seconds passed. Finally Deacon McNair said, “Well, you don’t have to tell us a Bible story, Billy. Just recite a verse from the Bible.” “Any verse?” Billy asked. “Any verse you want,” the deacon said. “Okay.” Billy faced the church again. Every face was silent, watching him. “Jesus wept,” he said. He took his seat. Dead silence.

way

and one of them said, “Forget these whiteys. They’re all rich. They got no problems,” and I said, “Yeah, man, I hear you,” while inside my pocket was the folded letter holding the heartbroken words of an old white lady who had always gone out of her way to help me—and many others like me. It hurt me a little bit to stand there and lie. Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him. By the

Dennis was the one who shook me out of it. He kept saying. “You’ve got to forgive yourself, Ruth. God forgives you. He’ll forgive the most dreaded sin, the most dreaded sin.” But I couldn’t listen, not for a long while, I couldn’t listen. I was so so sorry, deep in my heart I was sorry, but all your “sorrys” are gone when a person dies. She was gone. Gone. That’s why you have to say all your “sorrys” and “I love yous” while a person is living, because tomorrow isn’t promised. Lord, I was burning with hurt. I hung on to Mameh’s passport and carried it everywhere. I didn’t think she was dying when I left home, but she knew it. That’s why she gave me that passport. I’ve always held that to this day, that guilt, that I left Mameh, because all her life I was the one who translated for her and helped her around. I was her eyes and ears in America, and when I left…well, Sam had gone, and Bubeh had died, and her husband treated her so bad and divorced her, and her reasons for living just slipped away.

began to listen to what he said

about God forgiving you, and I began to hold on to that, that God will forgive you, will forgive the most dreaded sin, because I felt Mameh deserved better from me, and that’s when I started going to Metropolitan Church in Harlem with Dennis to hear Rev. Brown preach. It helped me to hear the Christian way, because I needed help, I needed to let Mameh go, and that’s when I started to become a Christian and the Jew in me began to die. The Jew in me was

dying anyway, but it truly died when m...

waited ten years to come back, and when I called on him again he had died. I kept the tape with his greeting to Mommy on it for years, and while I never played it for her, thinking it might be too emotional for her to hear it, I played it for myself many times, thinking, wishing, hoping that the world would be this open-minded, knowing that God is: Ruth, this is Aubrey Rubenstein. I don’t know if you remember me or not, but if you do, I’m glad to meet your son and I see you’ve accomplished a great deal in your life. If you’re ever down this way stop on by and say hello to us. We all remember you. We wish you the best.

“Whatever I’m looking for, I’ve found it.” I got in my car and drove back to the McDonald’s where the store had been. I walked around the grounds once again, as if the earth would speak to me. But it did not. It was just a cement parking lot.

There’s such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won’t be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children’s.

My husband loved me and I loved him, that’s all I needed. We were sitting in Ruth’s house having coffee at our reception and my husband (oh, I was proud to say it too—“my husband”) said to me, “We have to be strong. You know what people will say about us, Ruth. They’ll try to break us up.” I said, “I know. I’ll be strong,” and over the years we were tested, but we never split up or even spent a night apart except when he took the kids to North Carolina to see his parents. I never could go south with him because of the danger. The first time I went south with him was the last time, when I took his body down there to bury him.

“If it’s a boy, we’ll call him James after my Uncle Jim.” And that’s how you got named. See, I didn’t think he was going to die. I had no idea, but he knew, because he named you, and he’d make remarks like, “I know the Lord Jesus Christ will take care y’all should anything happen to me. Don’t worry, Ruth. Just trust in God.”

“Mr. McBride just passed away.” I said, “That’s impossible. He wasn’t that sick.” The doctor said, “He had cancer,” and hung up. That’s the first time they told me he had cancer. That’s the first I ever heard of it. I stood there and looked out the window over the projects. It was April 5, 1957, I remember

Part of me died when Dennis died. I loved that man more than life itself and at times I wished the good Lord would have taken me instead of him, because he was a much better person for living than me. He just had so much more to give the world than me. He brought me new life. He revived me after I left my family, brought me to Jesus, opened my eyes to a new world, then passed on himself.

“That is my husband and I’ve come here to bury him and he is with me.” It caused a little commotion but he gave us no trouble and signed it over to me and Uncle Jim and we buried Dennis in the Burns Hill Cemetery. I was thirty-six then and had been with Dennis nearly sixteen years and I’d never functioned without him. I remember walking through the projects with my seven kids, crying—I’d just break out in tears in the middle of the day sometimes—and your sister Helen, she was about nine years old then, she said, “Don’t cry, Ma. Daddy’s up in heaven,” and it just made me cry more. It was a hard, hard time.

and when I told Grandma Etta I was thinking of marrying again, she said, “God bless you, Ruth, because you’re our daughter now. Marry that man.” That’s how black folks thought back then. That’s why I never veered

from the black side. I would have never even thought of marrying a white man. When I told your stepfather about how my sister and Aunt Betts treated me, he spoke about them without bitterness or hate. “You don’t need them to help you,” he said. “I’ll help you for the rest of my life if you’ll

Sometimes without conscious realization, our thoughts, our faith, our interests are entered into the past, he wrote. We talk about other times, other places, other persons, and lose our living hold on the present. Sometimes we think if we could just go back in time we would be happy. But anyone who attempts to reenter the past is sure to be disappointed. Anyone who has ever revisited the place of his birth

after years of absence is shocked by the differences between the way the place actually is, and the way he has remembered it. He may walk along old familiar streets and roads, but he is a stranger in a strange land. He has thought of this place as home, but he finds he is no longer here even in spirit. He has gone on to a new and different life, and in thinking longingly of the past, he has been giving thought and interest to something that no longer really exists. This being true of the physical self, how much more true it is of the spiritual self.…He

children, but he helped establish the groundwork for Ma’s raising

But everyone can’t be like Bob, or Rev. McBride, or even Ruth McBride. People are different. Times change. Ministers change. Mommy knows this and despite her personal differences with the new minister, she didn’t want to see what amounted

She takes a deep breath: “I want you to know you are looking at a witness of God’s word. It’s real,” she said. “It’s real!” “Amen’s” roar across the room as she turns and walks away from the pulpit, the pep back in her stride now, the waddle gone, seventy-four years of life dropping off her like snowflakes as she stands behind her seat on the podium facing the audience, overcome. “God bless you all in the name of Christ!” she shouts, striking at the air with her fist and sitting down, her face red, nose red, tears everywhere, in my own eyes as well.

“That’s why you better get to know Jesus.” If it takes as long to know Jesus as it took to know you, I think, I’m in trouble. It took many years to find out who she was, partly because

never knew who I was. It wasn’t so much a question of searching for myself as it was my own decision not to look. As a boy I was confused about issues of race but did not consider myself deprived or unhappy. As a young man I had no time or money or inclination to look beyond my own poverty to discover what identity was. Once I got out of high school and found that I wasn’t in jail, I thought I was in the clear. Oberlin

During the rare, inopportune social moments when I found myself squeezed between black and white, I fled to the black side, just as my mother had done, and did not emerge unless driven out by smoke and fire. Being mixed is like that tingling feeling