The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition | James McBride

The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition | James McBride | FIVE STARS NOT ENOUGH TO DISTINGUISH THIS BOOK AS A MASTERPIECE !

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The Color of Water...

	The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition James McBride Riverhead Trade, 2006 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Color of Courage

This book is African-American author and musician James McBride's tribute to his white mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, born in Poland as Rachel Shilsky. Raised by a flawed rabbi and crippled mother in circumstances she hid from her children until late in life, Ruth's courage in raising 12 children of two African-American husbands in poverty is amazing. Her white family disavowed her. Much of the African-American community scorned her as well. If we all viewed God as "the color of water" (her phrase), we'd probably all be better off.

FIVE STARS NOT ENOUGH TO DISTINGUISH THIS BOOK AS A MASTERPIECE !

James McBride is truly an exquisite storyteller and weaver of black and white tributes. He describes his mother's resistance to "come clean" with her story. When she at last agrees, he reveals her personal portrait and testimony of Jewish pride and rejection and ultimate triumph as a Christian woman in a Black world.
McBride beautifully overlaps every other chapter of her story with his unfolding as a boy, then a man, who finds his own Black-Jewish voice through his writing and saxophone playing.
A powerful, gripping story which is at once inspiring and encouraging. It has been an uplifting source for healing and rejoicing my own white and black story!
This book is one of the best out there, from 1996, when it was released to now, 10 years later. Savour it, read it aloud with your book group, your best friends, a support group and your children.
It's spellbinding...
Pie Dumas - Author & Life Coach

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'Color of Water'

One man's respect for his Mother's trials in life, I truly enjoyed this book and have given it as a gift several times.

Unbelievable non-fiction

I have used this book with an Advance Placement Language class in high school. It is an astounding biographical account of both James McBride's mother as well as a semi autobiography of McBride himself. How McBride's mother was able to sustain herself through many difficult and trying early years, and to raise a large mixed race family is the stuff that one assumes can only be found in imaginative fiction. It reads easily and frequently has one gasping, or laughing, at the many recounted incidents over many years in the evolution of this family. It is inspiring, thought provoking and illuminating.

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Race, race, race, and more race

I actually felt somewhat guilty for not enjoying this book more. But I appear to be the sole dissenter here.

Positives first: Mr. McBride is a very graceful writer. His prose is fluid and easy, a breezy read, and he has a gift for description.

And, there is no doubt that the subject of the book, the author's mother, is a remarkable woman and quite a story. She came into the world with terrible odds against her; a foreigner in a foreign land, an outsider by ethnicity and religion, poor, molested by her father, with a disabled mother who was also a victim of abuse, and with no real support for her at any stage. From this impossible situation she remade her own world, she raised twelve remarkable and accomplished children, relying upon nothing other than her will, her faith, and her strength of character.

But the book suffers from the author's absolute obsession with race. Race colors almost every page of this book; What color am I? What color is God? What color is Jesus? Do I feel more comfortable on the "black side" or the "white side?" Why doesn't my mother look like everyone else's? And on, and on, and on.

When it's not race, it's group identity in other manifestations; religious groupings, ethnic groupings, and so on. The author writes about the treatment of blacks by Jews and vice versa, trafficking in group identifications at nearly every turn. He expresses surprise when someone from one group acts differently than he expects, based on his previous internal generalizations. When he interviews someone, he almost invariably remembers and records an observation that is race-related; for example, that his Jewish grandfather regularly cheated black customers to his store.

I found the persistent hammering of racial themes to be relentless and depressing. Not depressing in terms of the difficult circumstances facing the family; that I could handle. I found it more depressing that the author emerged from his childhood seeing almost anything and everything through this prism, clouding others' true individualities, filtering away the presentation of more penetrating ideas. At the end, the author claims that his book is about love, not about race, but that's not the impression given for 200 pages.

It has been observed to me by another person who read the book that, although the race consciousness depicted within it is not nearly as prevalent in the world through which we ourselves move, that this doesn't mean it wasn't very real in the world of the author and his mother. I accept that, and accept that there was (and is) real racism with which they must contend. But it is equally clear from the writing that a great deal of the race-obsession is a function of the author's obsessions, as opposed to his environment.

And, while I hesitate to admit it, admirable though the subject was, there were times when I found her a bit of a twit. She uproots her family and moves to Wilmington almost at the drop of a hat. She can't be bothered learning how to drive properly. She regularly leaves her kids in a state of unsupervised chaos, relying on older siblings to keep order. She can't really prepare food or keep house (I am not creating a sexist expectation here; she was the only parent in the house). And, though having children is obviously everyone's own personal decision, one has to wonder whether a woman in such difficult economic circumstances exercised an occasional forethought about whether it made sense to bear no fewer then twelve of them.

There is no doubt about the result; twelve accomplished, remarkable children, the mother's true legacy. But after reading of her many quirks and the environment in which they grew up, I'm not as convinced as the author that the mother's values and child-rearing skills are solely responsible for the good result. It seems equally likely, based on the descriptions of their chaotic home environment, that passing on some good genes had at least as much to do with it.

Still, the mother did try to impart important values to her children. At one point in the book, the young author asks his mother what color he is. She retorts that he's a human being and if he doesn't focus on his education, he'll be a nobody. One wishes the author had internalized that lesson a little bit better.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6

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