The Color of Water

Life can throw us a curve ball, if we allow it.  In The Color of Water by James McBride, Rachel Deborah Shilsky aka Ruth McBride Jordan, mother of 12 children, born a white, Jewish young woman, faces life on the move during her early years and then grows up in Suffolk, Virginia, working for her abusive father as a store clerk while attending school.  Rachel, who changes her identity when she leaves home, is exiled from others because she is Jewish in “WASP” country.  Her only refuge is to fall in love with a young black man from the area.  She gets pregnant, is sent away to her mother’s family in NYC, has an abortion and begins to be born as a young woman.  When she returns back to meet with her “first love” Peter, it is learned he has impregnated another young girl, this time a black girl, and Rachel is devastated.  Though she has the pull to stay and help her crippled mother and her younger sister, she cannot bear to stay around the physically abusive father, a town griped in racial strife, and not having a life of her own.  Rachel “dies” in her family’s eyes when she marries a black man in NYC.  Ruth, as she is now called, marries a staunchly religious, albeit, Christian man who helps her to find peace in Christ.  The most interesting piece to this beautiful true life story, is that each chapter is written from two perspectives and finally intertwine at the book’s conclusion.  James, the protagonist, is writing the even chapters, while reading a letter from his mother in the odd chapters about her life, something he did not learn about until he was well into his twenties.  James McBride is a former journalist (this story in fact is a great example of his work trying to find the story and replay his mother’s other life prior to her marriage to his father).  Additionally, he has written music for famous singers like Anita Baker and Grover Washington, Jr.  His family story is amazing – how a poor family (with a white mother and black father, who dies when James is 8) struggles to succeed day to day, yet through the encouragement of a mother who is committed to education, has all 12 children graduate college (and then some!).  What a wonderful heroine for all women to aspire in Ruth McBride who never seemed to fear the color divide in a time that the Ku Klux Klan rules the area in the late 1930s.  Two days, two great heroines!  Read the book.  Great read.  And oh yeah, James McBride…Distinguished writer in residence… NYU!  Wow, isn’t that cool!