The Color of Water

by James McBride

When I was a boy, I used to wonder where my mother came from, how she got on this earth. When I asked her where she was from, she would say, “God made me,” and change the subject. When I asked her if she was white, she’d say, “No. I’m light-skinned,” and change the subject again.

“Oh, she felt low, so she went on and married a nigger.” Well, I don’t care. Your father changed my life. He taught me about a God who lifted me up and forgave me and made me new. I was lucky to meet him or I would’ve been a prostitute or dead.

Rev. Owens and his odd style—he once preached a sermon on the word “the”—T-H-E—she had respect for him because his church and preachings were close in style to that of her “home” 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.”

He was robbing these folks blind, charging them a hundred percent markup on his cheap goods, and he was worried about them stealing from him!

I never did like dead people and I never did like guns. That’s why I never let my children play with toy guns.

But what always struck me about black folks was that every Sunday they’d get dressed up so clean for church I wouldn’t recognize them. I liked that. They seemed to have such a purpose come Sunday morning. Their families were together and although they were poor, they seemed happy. Tateh hated black people. He’d call the little children bad names in Yiddish and make fun of their parents, too. “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.

“Helen. I want you to come home. Whatever’s wrong we’ll fix. Just forget all of it and come on home.” From down the hallway, a doorway opened and a black woman watched in silence as the dark-haired, bowlegged white lady talked to the closed door. “Please come home, Helen.” The door had a peephole in it. The peephole slid back. A large black eye peered out. “Please come home, Helen. This is no place for you to be. Just come on home.”

Nobody liked me. That’s how I felt as a child. I know what it feels like when people laugh at you walking down the street, or snicker when they hear you speaking Yiddish, or just look at you with hate in their eyes. You know a Jew living in Suffolk when I was coming up could be lonely even if there were fifteen of them standing in the room, I don’t know why; it’s that feeling that nobody likes you; that’s how I felt, living in the South. You were different from everyone and liked by very few.

I never starved for food till I got married. But I was starving in another way. I was starving for love and affection. I didn’t get none of that.

It was in her sense of education, more than any other, that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us. She admired the way Jewish parents raised their children to be scholastic standouts, insulating them from a potentially harmful and dangerous public school system by clustering together within certain communities, to attend certain schools, to be taught by certain teachers who enforced discipline and encouraged learning, and she followed their lead.

Music arrived in my life around that time, and books. I would disappear inside whole worlds comprised of Gulliver’s Travels, Shane, and books by Beverly Cleary. I took piano and clarinet lessons in school, often squirreling myself away in some corner with my clarinet to practice, wandering away in Tchaikovsky or John Philip Sousa, trying to improvise like jazz saxophonist James Moody, only to blink back to reality an hour or two later.

“Ma, what’s a tragic mulatto?” I asked. Anger flashed across her face like lightning and her nose, which tends to redden and swell in anger, blew up like a balloon. “Where’d you hear that?” she asked. “I read it in a book.” “For God’s sake, you’re no tragic mul—What book is this?” “Just a book I read.” “Don’t read that book anymore.” She sucked her teeth. “Tragic mulatto. What a stupid thing to call somebody! Somebody called you that?” “No.” “Don’t ever ever use that term.” “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.”

I belong to the world of one God, one people.

You know, the thing was, I was supposed to be white and “number one,” too. That was a big thing in the South. You’re white, and even if you’re a Jew, since you’re white you’re better than a so-called colored. Well, I didn’t feel number one with nobody but him, and I didn’t give a hoot that he was black.

Like my own mother did in times of stress, I turned to God. I lay in bed at night praying to Him to make me strong, to rid me of anger, to make me a man, and He listened, and I began to change.

I wanted to give up weed, but I couldn’t. Weed was my friend, weed kept me running from the truth. And the truth was my mother was falling apart.

Jesus gave Mommy hope. Jesus was Mommy’s salvation. Jesus pressed her forward.

That’s why you have to say all your “sorrys” and “I love yous” while a person is living, because tomorrow isn’t promised.

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 …”

The isolation my family had felt, the heartbreak they had suffered, seemed to ooze out of the trees, curling through the stately old brick buildings and rising like steam off the Civil War statue that seemed to point its cannon directly at me as I wandered through the town graveyard.

“She picked that life for herself and she lived it, that’s all. What her reasons for it were I don’t know. But she did a good job. She raised twelve children. She led a good life.”

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.”

It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times, and the loneliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in this lonely southern town—far from her mother and sisters in New York, unable to speak English, a disabled Polish immigrant whose husband had no love for her and whose dreams of seeing her children grow up in America vanished as her life drained out of her at the age of forty-six—suddenly rose up in my blood and washed over me in waves.

Well, I’m a mother of black children, and nobody will ever deny me my children, and they can put that in their Nubian pipe and smoke it. All this Nubian.

The few problems I had with black folks were nothing compared to the grief white folks dished out. With whites it was no question. You weren’t accepted to be with a black man and that was that. They’d say forget it. Are you crazy? A nigger and you? No way. They called you white trash. That’s what they called me.

My world expanded because of Dennis. He taught me about things I’d never heard of. He meditated every day for fifteen minutes. He did that for years, so that even the children learned to accept that ritual. He believed in equal rights, in knowledge, in books; he taught me about people like Paul Robeson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Joe Louis. He loved the Brooklyn Dodgers—Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, and Jackie Robinson, especially Jackie Robinson.

A few Sundays later we were at Metropolitan and they were singing “I Must Tell Jesus,” and the spirit filled me and when Rev. Abner Brown asked if anyone wanted to join Metropolitan in Christian fellowship I stepped into the aisle and walked to the front of the church. Rev. Brown shook my hand and all the deacons shook my hand and I have never turned back since. I accepted Jesus that day and He has never let me down from that day to this.

My husband loved me and I loved him, that’s all I needed.

“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

Me and Dennis weren’t for communism. We were for Jesus Christ.

After that got going good he said he needed to find a church. I said, “How can we afford a church?” With his little salary, we could barely afford to feed our kids—we had gone from four kids to five to six to seven. I mean, after a while they just dropped like eggs and we loved having them, but I couldn’t see how we could afford a church with all these kids. Your sister Helen, I didn’t have one prenatal visit to a clinic or anything when I had her. I just walked into the hospital and dropped her like an egg and went home. How we fed them, well, it was meal to meal. I shopped at Goodwill for their clothes and for their Christmas gifts, and I’d walk them around and let them play outside. I’d keep two in a stroller and two next to me, and the rest, I just kept them close. God just provided somehow.

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.” I wouldn’t hear of such talk and would make him stop it.

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. Lord, it was hard. Very hard to let him go. I was angry at him for dying for a while afterwards, angry that he left me with all those kids, but more than that, I missed him.

When we came back to New York after burying Dennis, I opened up our mailbox and found it full of checks and money orders and cash in envelopes from people in the projects who knew us, and people from Metropolitan Church in Harlem. Dozens of letters with checks and money in them. I’ll never forget that as long as I live.

The old-timers at New Brown used to say God honored Rev. McBride. The man died without a penny, yet his children grew up to graduate from college, to become doctors, professors, teachers, and professionals all. It was the work, they said, of none other than Jesus Christ Himself.

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.

To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem.

“Death is strange, isn’t it?” she wonders. “It’s so final. You know time is not promised,” she says, wagging a finger. “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.

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.

have always been close. Through marriage, adoptions, love-ins, live-ins, and shack-ups, the original dozen has expanded into dozens and dozens more—wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews—ranging from dark-skinned to light-skinned; from black kinky hair to blond hair and blue eyes. In running from her past, Mommy has created her own nation, a rainbow coalition that descends on her house every Christmas and Thanksgiving and sleeps everywhere—on the floor, on rugs, in shifts; sleeping double, triple to a bed, “two up, three down,” just like old times.

She toasts her good luck, knowing that while fame is fleeting, God is forever. “I’m blessed beyond measure,” she says. She says that often.

Love is unstoppable. It is our greatest weapon, a natural force, created by God.