Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Color of Water by James McBride

     Memoirs are really not my thing, or so I keep telling myself. But maybe I'm wrong because I really enjoyed this one by James McBride. It's a touching, gut-wrenching, beautifully told story of how one black man grew up in a huge family led by a Christian-reformed Jewish mother. Yeah, imagine the stories.
     McBride's mother grew up an Orthodox Jew with an abusive, rabbi father and a handicapped, ridiculed, silent mother. All she ever wanted was to be loved, and she finally finds this love in the American South among the blacks who were just as poor and persecuted as her own family. She eventually falls in love enough to marry one black man, McBride's father, and she willingly moves into a black neighborhood, a primarily black Christian church, and a life where she simply refused to see the colors or religions of others around her. McBride says that before he went to public school, he never even realized his mother was white or different from him. She was simply his mother. This was simply their life.
     This idea that 10 children of mixed heritage living in the heart of New York City could grow up colorblind and committed to God is so wonderfully refreshing and soul-warming that I just couldn't stop reading this memoir. Alternately told in the words of McBride and his mother, the book unfolds easily, almost like a good fairy tale because it is so unbelievable yet real, so lovely and yet so heart-breaking at times, but always full of the great truths that I am trying so desperately to teach my own children. That truth is that all people are equal in the eyes of God, and we are all capable of great things no matter what our backgrounds. If we all took that idea with us to church or to meditation or to silent introspection, we would be better people indeed.

1 comment:

paula1949 said...

Hey Lisa...missed you at book club. I was looking foward to hearing your other comments on this one,