The Color of Water

by James McBride

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.