THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605030746
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
THE COLOR OF WATER
A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
JAMES McBRIDE
Riverhead Books. 228 pp. $22.95.
In November of 1982, James McBride pulled his green Volkswagen into the parking lot of the McDonald's in Suffolk and unfolded a hand-drawn map given to him by his mother. He checked the map, looked out the window and checked again. He had reached his destination. The place where his grandfather's grocery store had once been. The place where his mother grew up.
There was an old house behind the McDonald's, and McBride knocked on the door. It was answered by Eddie Thompson, a 66-year-old black man who had lived there all his life. When McBride explained about his grandfather, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who had operated a small store on the site, Thompson listened closely, then finally asked:
``That means you ol' Rabbi Shilsky's grandson?''
McBride confirmed that yes, he was.
In his joyful memoir of his mother, The Color of Water, McBride recounts the old man's reaction:
``First he chuckled. Then he laughed. Then he laughed some more. He tried to control his laughing, but he couldn't so he stopped, took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.''
Shilsky, a man who spent years cheating and overcharging the black people of Suffolk, a man who hated black people, who once shot a black customer in the stomach for refusing to pay, had a black grandchild.
In fact, he had 12 black grandchildren. They were the progeny of his daughter, Rachel, who fled Suffolk at age 19. Taking a sledgehammer to her past, she moved to Harlem, changed her name to Ruth, adopted Christianity, married a black minister, and when he died, married again ``on the black side,'' as she puts it.
Her children grew up in the all-black housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, knowing nothing of their mother's earlier life but suspecting, despite her adamant denials, that she was white.
The Color of Water is her story. It is also the story of her son and eighth child, James McBride, and his search for his mother's past, his Jewish roots and peace with himself.
A reporter who later became a jazz musician, McBride spent 14 years wheedling details of her past out of his mother and then painstakingly trying to document them.
In this elegant and fascinating book, he lets her tell her own stories and then frames those stories with a warm, unsparing narrative about what it was like to grow up as her child.
Ruth McBride Jordan raised her children in impoverished ``orchestrated chaos.'' She stacked them next to each other at night like logs, fed them food distributed by benevolent agencies and dragged them every Sunday to the Whosoever Baptist Church. She had them bused to predominantly Jewish public schools, insisted on good grades and instructed them to answer ``I don't know,'' to all prying questions from authority figures.
``Mommy's contradictions crashed and slammed against each other like bumper cars at Coney Island,'' McBride writes.
``White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil towards blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard. She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of it. She couldn't stand racists of either color and had great distaste for bourgeois blacks who sought to emulate rich whites by putting on airs . . . ''
Ruth McBride Jordan's voice - quoted in italics throughout the book - has the same bumper-car quality. Alternately contentious, fretful, self-righteous, wistful and matter-of-fact, she describes, among other things, growing up Jewish in 1930s Suffolk, a dangerous, doomed teen love affair with a black boy, her flight to New York and her subsequent disowning by her family.
I loved that boy to death and he loved me, she says of her reckless teenage boyfriend.
. . . He was the first man other than my grandfather who ever showed me any kindness in my life, and he did it at the risk of his own because they would have strung him up faster than you can blink if they'd have found out . have killed him. Half of them were probably in the Klan anyway so it was all the same. You know death was always around Suffolk, always around. It was always so hot, and everyone was always so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off.
In August of 1993, James McBride took his mother back to Suffolk, and then to Portsmouth for a reunion with her only childhood friend. Finally she could face her past.
Writes her son: ``After years of saying, `Don't tell my business,' she reached a point where she now says, `It doesn't matter. They're all dead now, or retired in Florida,' which in her mind is the same as being dead.'' MEMO: Laura LaFay is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
From ``The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White
Mother,'' by James McBride.
by CNB