The Color of Water

by James McBride

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.

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.

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 ...

We traded information on Mommy the way people trade baseball cards at trade shows, offering bits and pieces fraught with gossip, nonsense, wisdom, and sometimes just plain foolishness. “What does it matter to you?” my older brother Richie scoffed when I asked him if we had any grandparents. “You’re adopted anyway.” 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.

“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” he sniffed. “Mommy’s not your real mother. Your real mother’s in jail.” “You’re lying!” “You’ll see when Mommy takes you back to your real mother next week. Why do you think she’s been so nice to you all week?” Suddenly it occurred to me that Mommy had been nice to me all week.

She and my father brought a curious blend of Jewish-European and African-American distrust and paranoia into our house. On his end, my father, Andrew McBride, a Baptist minister, had his doubts about the world accepting his mixed family. He always made sure his kids never got into trouble, was concerned about money, and trusted the providence of the Holy Father to do the rest. After he died and Mommy remarried, my stepfather, Hunter Jordan, seemed to pick up where my father left off, insistent on education and church. On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education. 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.

“You have to fight the system!” she’d yell. “Fight the Man!” This would set off a barrage of laughing commentary from my elder siblings, gurus of life and wisdom who had seen and done it all. “Yes, but is the Man you? Or are you the Man?” “Do you mean the Man, or the Wo-man!” “Who is the Man…?” “But are you the Main Man…?” (Sung) “When a maaan loves a wooomannnn!!” These goof sessions, which almost always ended as earnest talks on civil rights, often went on until Mommy got home from work.

Rosetta was the eldest sister and the smartest of all my siblings. From her perch atop her bed—a bed, incidentally, that she shared with no one—Rosetta sat regally on a throne of bed pillows, legs crossed Buddha fashion, while drinking ice water, listening to her favorite public radio station, WBAI, and giving commands all day.

My older brothers wore their hats sideways and talked in low voices about Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali, but not even the boldest of them, not even eldest brother Dennis, to whom we all bowed low, fooled with Rosetta.

The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable. Mommy kept us at a frantic living pace that left no time for the problem. We thrived on thought, books, music, and art, which she fed to us instead of food. At every opportunity she loaded five or six of us onto the subway, paying one fare and pushing the rest of us through the turnstiles while the token-booth clerks frowned and subway riders stared, parading us to every free event New York City offered: festivals, zoos, parades, block parties, libraries, concerts.

In summer she was the Pied Piper, leading the whole pack of us to public swimming pools, stripping down to her one-piece bathing suit and plunging into the water like a walrus, the rest of us following her like seals, splashing and gurgling in terror behind her as Mommy flailed along, seemingly barely able to swim herself until one of us coughed and sputtered, at which time she whipped through the water and grabbed the offending child, pulling him out and slapping him on the back, laughing. We did not consider ourselves poor or deprived, or depressed, for the rules of the outside world seemed meaningless to us as children. But as we grew up and fanned out into the world as teenagers and college students, we brought the outside world home with us, and the world that Mommy had so painstakingly created began to fall apart.

“And nobody’ll give a damn neither!” Chicken Man snapped. “Everybody on this corner is smart. You ain’t no smarter than anybody here. If you so smart, why you got to come on this corner every summer? ‘Cause you flunkin’ school! You think if you drop out of school somebody’s gonna beg you to go back? Hell no! They won’t beg your black ass to go back. What makes you so special that they’ll beg you! Who are you? You ain’t nobody! If you want to drop out of school and shoot people and hang on this corner all your life, go ahead. It’s your life!”

Mommy had never driven before as far as I knew. She was afraid to drive. She was a certified dyed-in-the-wool New York City transit passenger who could tell you what subway train went anywhere, which stop to get off at, and how far it was to the next one if you missed your stop and had to walk back. Depending on public transportation meant she was late for everything—for work, for open school nights, for picking us up whenever she had to. Every summer when I returned home from Fresh Air Fund camp, the yellow school buses would drop us off in Manhattan and I’d mournfully watch three hundred hugging, kissing, slobbering happy reunions between campers and parents while the counselors flipped coins to see who would wait with me, at which time Mommy would finally turn the corner at Forty-second Street—I could spot her bowed legs a mile away—and run up breathlessly, hugging me as the counselors looked on with looks that said, “I had no idea!” But those days were gone. We needed a car. It was time for Mommy to drive. “I hate this,” she said, as we climbed in.

Looking back, I see it took about ten years for Mommy to recover from my stepfather’s death. It wasn’t just that her husband was suddenly gone, it was the accumulation of a lifetime of silent suffering, some of which my siblings and I never knew about. Her past had always been a secret to us, and remained so even after my stepfather died, but what she had left behind was so big, so complete that she could never entirely leave it: the dissipation of her own Jewish family, the guilt over abandoning her mother, the separation from her sister, the sudden, tragic death of her first husband, whom she adored.

While she never seemed on the verge of losing her mind, there were moments when she teetered close to the edge, lost in space.

She rode her bicycle. She walked. She took long bus rides to faraway department stores and supermarkets where she’d window-shop for hours and spend fifty cents. She could not grasp exactly what to do next, but she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did. She ran, as she had done most of her life, but this time she was running for her own sanity. She operated on automatic mode, rising each morning and chasing us off to school as if things were as they always were, but she could make no decisions.

Even the simplest choice, like whether to have a Touch-Tone telephone or a rotary one, required enormous, painstaking deliberation.

She’d disappear from the house for hours and come back with no explanation as to where she’d been. About a year after my stepfather died, her best friend, a wonderful black woman named Irene Johnson, passed away and Mommy teetered at the edge again, standing over the kitchen sink washing the same pot for hours, sniffling back her tears, and snapping, “Get away from me!” when we approached her. “You only have one or two good friends in life,” she used to preach at us, and for her, Irene was one of those. She and Irene went back to Harlem in the forties when Ma first came to New York. Irene understood how far she had come. Irene had helped her raise her older children and had been like a sister to her.

Yet she refused to go to Irene’s memorial service.

“I’m done with fu...

The irony was that Mommy knew how to drive before she was eighteen. She drove her father’s 1936 Ford back in Suffolk, Virginia. Not only did she drive it, she drove it well enough to pull a trailer behind it full of wholesale supplies for her family’s grocery store. She drove the car and trailer on paved and dirt roads between Norfolk, Suffolk, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, and North Carolina. She could back the trailer up with the goods in it, unload it at the store, back the car into the yard, unhook the trailer, and park the car in the garage, backing in. But she had left her past so far behind that she literally did not know how to drive. Rachel Deborah Shilsky could drive a car and pull a trailer behind it, but Ruth McBride Jordan had never touched a steering wheel before that day in 1973, and you can make book on it.

This is the book. This life takes a toll on you.

“Let me think about it again,” she said. She sat down on the couch and immediately dropped off to sleep, snoring away while the rest of us argued. My mother is the only individual I know who can fall asleep instantly for two minutes—deep REM sleep, complete with snoring—only to be awakened instantly by certain select noises. A hurricane won’t move her, but the sound of a crying baby or a falling pot will send her to her feet like a soldier at reveille. When she awoke, she wandered off saying nothing. Days passed. Finally she announced: “We’re staying.” Cheers from the girls. We slowly began to unpack. The very next day she barked: “We’re moving!” Cheers from the boys.

Unlike New York, where Ma could stretch a dollar for a mile and lead her troops to the promised land of Macy’s, Gimbels, and Ohrbach’s, entertaining them for free at museums, parades, block parties, and public concerts, Wilmington was a land of suburban shopping malls, high school marching bands, blond prom queens, small-town gossip, and an inner city from which whites were fleeing as fast as their Ford Pintos could take them. We were shocked by the racial division of the city and surrounding county, where most of the black kids attended understaffed and underfunded city schools while whites attended sparkling clean suburban schools with fantastic facilities.

The segregated schools came as a complete surprise to Mommy, who had not even considered that problem, and the southern vibe of the city—anything south of Canal Street in Manhattan was the South to us—brought back unpleasant memories for Mommy. She hates the South.

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.

For forty years New Brown, located in the Red Hook Housing Projects, one of the largest and most neglected housing projects in New York City, has stood strong. For forty years the parishioners have struggled. For forty years they have persevered and spread God’s word. This is Mommy’s home church. This is the church where I got married. This is the church my father Andrew McBride built. He never lived to see his dreams fulfilled, but when I thumb through his old brown briefcase filled with his paperwork from forty-five years ago, the notes and papers he left behind reveal a man in constant thought: references to Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jackie Robinson, and notebooks upon notebooks filled with sermons and Bible

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. It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous “white man’s world” wasn’t as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals’ problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too. Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle. In order to clear it, my solution was to stay away from it and fly solo. I ran for as long as I could.

After I graduated from Oberlin College in 1979 and received my master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1980, I began a process of vacillating between music and writing that would take eight years to complete before I realized I could work successfully as a writer and musician. I quit every journalism job I ever had. I worked at the Wilmington News Journal and quit. The Boston Globe. Quit. People magazine, Us magazine, the Washington Post. Quit them all.

This was before the age ...

I wandered around the cities by day, stumbling into the newsroom at night, exhausted, to write my stories. I loved an empty city room, just the blinking terminals and a few deadbeats like myself. It was the only time I could write, away from white reporters, black reporters, away from the synergy of black and white that was already simmering inside my soul, ready to burst out at the most inopportune moments.

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

I’d hear black reporters speaking angrily about a sympathetic white editor and I’d disagree in silence. White men ruled the kingdom, sometimes ruthlessly, finding clever ways to gut the careers of fine black reporters who came into the business full of piss and vinegar, yet other white men were mere pawns like myself.

Most of my immediate editors were white women, whom I found in general to be the most compassionate, humane, and often brightest in the newsroom, yet they rarely rose to the top—even when compared to their more conservative black male counterparts, some of whom marched around the newsrooms as if they were the second coming of Martin Luther King, wielding their race like baseball bats. They were no closer to the black man in the ghetto than were their white counterparts.

They spoke of their days of “growing up in Mississippi” or wherever it was, as proof of their knowledge of poverty and blackness, but in fact the closest most of them had come to an urban ghetto in twe...

was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream. I had no true personal life in those years. Few dates, few dinners, no power lunches.

Since I had no personal life outside of journalism other than music, I soared as a reporter, but I always parachuted out in the end, telling my white editors after a year or two that I had to leave to “find myself, write a book, play my sax,” whatever the excuse was. Most black folks considered “finding myself” a luxury.

I was always moderately successful, and later in life much more so, winning the Stephen Sondheim Award for musical theater composition, working with Anita Baker, Grover Washington, Jr., Jimmy Scott, Rachelle Ferrell, and many others, but the eighties were hard times for me as a composer, and each time I hit a dry spell I’d scurry back into journalism—until February 1988, when I was working for the Washington Post Style section and thinking of quitting to go back to music in New York. The Post Style section is the top of the line, the elite, the haute cuisine, the green, green grass of heaven for newspaper feature writers, and quitting there is not something you do lightly, not even for a seasoned quitter like me. As I pondered it, Ma called me out of the blue, smelling trouble. “I know you!” she snapped. “You’re getting steady money now. And a lot of it. Don’t quit that job!” But I did quit, partly because I got tired of running, and partly because the little ache I had known as a boy was no longer a little ache when I reached thirty.

I had to find out more about who I was, and in order to find out who I was, I had to find out who my mother was.

The subject was not broached again until I met Al Larkin, then Sunday Magazine editor at the Boston Globe in early 1982. Al talked me into writing a Mother’s Day piece, which the Philadelphia Inquirer was kind enough to run simultaneously, since Ma was living in Philly at the time. The public response to the piece was so overwhelming I decided to delve further, partly to get out of working for a living and partly to expel some of my own demons regarding my brown skin, curly hair, and divided soul. I asked Mommy if she would be interested in doing a book and she said no.

I told her it could make me a million bucks.

She said,...

I can’t describe what a shock it was to hear words like “Tateh” and “rov” and “shiva” and “Bubeh” coming from Mommy’s mouth as she sat at the kitchen table in her Ewing home. Imagine, if you will, five thousand years of Jewish history landing in your lap in the space of months. It sent me tumbling through my own abyss of sorts, trying to salvage what I could of my feelings and emotions, which would be scattered to the winds as she talked. It was a fascinating lesson in life history—a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction marvel, to say the least. I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

After years of saying, “Don’t tell my business,” she reached a point where she now says, “It doesn’t matter. They’re all dead now, or in Florida,” which in her mind is the same as being dead. “I’ll never retire to Florida,” she vowed.

Ma settled in to get her college degree in social work from Temple University at age sixty-five. She enjoyed the intellectual back-and-forth, the study, reading different authors—I’d forgotten how bright she was. The constant learning and yearning for knowledge was what helped her finally move away from the bustle of Philadelphia to settle into the quieter, safer suburb of Ewing with my sister Kathy.

Every day she rises, spirits her two grandchildren off to school, and drives around central New Jersey, haggling with merchants at flea markets, taking yoga classes in sweats and Nikes, tooling along in a 1995 Toyota at twenty-seven miles an hour in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone, holding up traffic on Route 1 listening to Bernard Meltzer on WOR-AM or the Howard Stern show. (“Grandma laughs when Howard Stern talks dirty,” my niece Maya whispers.)

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.

She wouldn’t recall it for you if you showed her pictures of herself doing it.