James McBride's autobiography The Color of Water is subtitled "A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother". It gets its name from his mother's answer when, as a young child, McBride asked her what color God was. "God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color." was her reply. McBride alternates chapters based on interviews with his mother — Ruth Shilsky McBride Jordan (1921-2010), who grew up Jewish, married Black men, became a devout Christian, and raised a dozen children — with chapters focusing on his own challenges while growing up. A sample from Chapter 22 ("A Jew Discovered"):

That night I slept in a motel just down the road from the McDonald's, and at about four in the morning I sat straight up. Something just drew me awake. I tossed and turned for an hour, then got dressed and went outside, walking down the road toward the nearby wharf. As I walked along the wharf and looked over the Nansemond River, which was colored an odd purple by the light of the moon, I said to myself, "What am I doing here? This place is so lonely. I gotta get out of here." 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. A penetrating loneliness covered me, lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face. I had no tears to shed. They were done long ago, but a new pain and a new awareness were born inside me. The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate; the ache that the little boy who stared in the mirror felt was gone. My own humanity was awakened, rising up to greet me with a handshake as I watched the first glimmers of sunlight peck over the horizon. There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won't be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children's. I left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing.

Thoughtful, engaging, well-written ... and exploring still-complex issues of religion, race, society ...

_{(cf Interracial Intimacies (2003-02-24), Racial Relationships (2004-01-10), An Hour before Daylight (2004-05-25), Interracial Checkmate (2004-07-20), Race and Love (2004-08-06), ...) - ^z - 2024-12-25}