The Color of Water

by James McBride

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

If you throw water on the floor it will always find a hole, believe me.

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.

See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That’s all. The rest you can deal with. It’s not about black or white. It’s about God and don’t let anyone tell you different.

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.

He meditated every day for fifteen minutes. He did that for years, so that even the children learned to accept that ritual.

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

Given my black face and upbringing it was easy for me to flee into the anonymity of blackness, yet I felt frustrated to live in a world that considers the color of your face an immediate political statement whether you like it or not.

Each time I quit a job, Mommy would do a war dance, complete with chants and dancing, usually beginning with, “Now what are you gonna do!? You had a second chance and you threw it out the window! You need a job!” Like most mothers, she wielded tremendous power and my staunch resolve would crumble like a sandcastle before her frontal assaults, which were like tidal waves.