The Color of Water

by James McBride

  “Because God makes me happy.”

  “Then why cry?”

  “I’m crying ‘cause I’m happy. Anything wrong with that?”

  “No,” I said, but there was, because happy people did not seem to cry like she did. Mommy’s tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a place far away, a place inside her that she never let any of us children visit, and even as a boy I felt there was pain behind them. I thought it was because she wanted to be black like everyone else in church, because maybe God liked black people better, and one afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white.

  A deep sigh. “Oh boy…God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit.”

  “Does he like black or white people better?”

  “He loves all people. He’s a spirit.”

  “What’s a spirit?”

  “A spirit’s a spirit.”

  “What color is God’s spirit?”

  “It doesn’t have a color,” she said. “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

  I could buy that, and as I got older I still bought it, but my older brother Richie, who was the brother above me and the guy from whom I took all my cues, did not. When Richie was fourteen he’d grown from a tittering, cackling torturer of me to a handsome, slick high school kid who was an outstanding tenor sax player. He got accepted at Music and Art High School in Manhattan and had reached a point in his life where jazz was the beginning, the end, and the middle. He took to wearing a leather jacket and a porkpie hat like legendary tenor man Lester Young, joined a neighborhood R&B band, and Ma had increasing difficulty in getting him to go to school. The dudes in the neighborhood called him “Hatt” and respected him. The girls loved him. He was bursting with creative talent and had ideas he acted upon independently without the approval of, or the knowledge of, Ma. A few blocks from our house was an eight-foot-high stone with a plaque on it that commemorated some civil historic event, and one morning on the way to the store, Mommy noticed that the rock had been painted the black-liberation colors, red, black, and green. “I wonder who did that,” she remarked. I knew, but I couldn’t say. Richie had done it.

  All my siblings, myself included, had some sort of color confusion at one time or another, but Richie dealt with his in a unique way. As a boy, he believed he was neither black nor white but rather green like the comic book character the Incredible Hulk. He made up games about it and absorbed the character completely into his daily life: “I’m Dr. Bruce Banner,” he’d say as he saw me eating the last of the bologna and cheese. “I need a piece of your sandwich. Please give it to me now or I’ll get angry. I must have it! Please don’t make me angry. Give me that sandwich!!! GIVE ME—Oh no! Wait…ARRHHHHHHGGGHHHH!” and thereby he’d become the Hulk and if I hadn’t gobbled my sandwich by then, well, the Hulk got it.

  One morning in Sunday school Richie raised his hand and asked Rev. Owens, “Is Jesus white?”

  Rev. Owens said no.

  “Then how come they make him white here in this picture?” Richie said, and he held up our Sunday school Bible.

  Rev. Owens said, “Jesus is all colors.”

  “Then why is he white? This looks like a white man to me.” Richie held the picture high so everyone in the class could see it. “Don’t he look white to you?” Nobody said anything.

  Rev. Owens was stuck. He stood there, wiping his face with his handkerchief and making the same noise he made when he preached. “Welllll…ahh. Wellll…ahhh …”

  I was embarrassed. The rest of the kids stared at Richie like he was crazy. “Richie, forget it,” I mumbled.

  “Naw. If they put Jesus in this picture here, and He ain’t white, and He ain’t black, they should make Him gray. Jesus should be gray.”

  Richie stopped going to Sunday school after that, though he never stopped believing in God. Mommy tried and tried to make him go back, but he wouldn’t.

  Mommy took great pride in our relationship to God. Every Easter we had to perform at the New Brown Church, playing our instruments or reciting a story from the Bible for the entire church congregation. Mommy looked forward to this day with anticipation, while my siblings and I dreaded it like the plague, always waiting till the morning of the event before memorizing the Bible story we would recite. I never had problems with these memory-crunching sessions, but one year my older brother Billy, whose memory would later serve him well enough to take him through Yale University Medical School, marched to the front of the church wearing suit and tie, faced the congregation, started out, “When Jesus first came to …” then blanked out completely. He stood there, twitching nervously, dead in the water, while my siblings and I winced and held our breath to keep from laughing.

  “Oh, that’s all right now …” murmured my godfather, Deacon McNair, from his seat on the dais next to the minister, while Mommy twitched in her seat watching Billy, her face reddening. “Try it again,” he said.

  “Okay,” Billy said, swallowing. “When Jesus first came to…No, wait.…Um. Jerusalem was…Wait a minute. …” He stood there, stalled, gazing at the ceiling, biting his lip, desperately trying to remember the Bible story he had memorized just a half hour before, while the church murmured, “Oh it’s all right now…just keep trying,” and Mommy glared at him, furious.

  A few more embarrassing seconds passed. Finally Deacon McNair said, “Well, you don’t have to tell us a Bible story, Billy. Just recite a verse from the Bible.”

  “Any verse?” Billy asked.

  “Any verse you want,” the deacon said.

  “Okay.” Billy faced the church again. Every face was silent, watching him.

  “Jesus wept,” he said. He took his seat.

  Dead silence.

  “Amen,” said Deacon McNair.

  After church, we followed Mommy as she stalked out, and my godfather met her at the door. “It’s all right, Ruth,” he said, chuckling.

  “No it’s not,” Ma said.

  When we got home, Mommy beat Billy’s butt.

  7.

  Sam

  Our store was at an intersection at the edge of town on a long, sloping hill. If you stood in front of the store and looked right, you saw the town—the railroad tracks, the department stores like Leggets and Woolworth. If you looked straight ahead, you saw the courthouse, the jailhouse, the county clerk’s office, and the road to Norfolk. To the left was the Jaffe slaughterhouse and the wharf where the Nansemond River met the Main Street Bridge. The wharf was huge and dark. Boats from all over the world would stop there to lay over or make repairs, and often the sailors would come into the store and invite me and my sister Dee-Dee to see their boats. “No, no thank you,” my mother would say. She couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but as soon as they’d say, “Come with us,” she’d hop out of her chair by the door and stand in front of those big sailors shaking her head. “No, no, go away. Tell them to go away,” she’d say in Yiddish. She’d never take her eyes off them.

  We were right at the intersection where the road from Norfolk and Portsmouth came into Suffolk. That intersection always had a lot of traffic on it. I don’t mean traffic like you see today. In those days, two or three cars was traffic. Or people on foot. Or farmers leading mules hauling peanut crops on a wagon. Or soldiers on trucks from the bases in Norfolk. Or men in chain gangs. People got about any way they could in those days.

  I was sitting behind the counter of the store one afternoon and a car full of men wearing white sheets drove past. They had white hats covering their faces, with two little eyeholes cut out so they could see. They were driving those old black tin lizzietype cars, the Model A types, with two men in the open section up front and two in the cab section behind. Car after car of them drove by, so many it was like a parade. We came from behind the counter and stood outside the store to look at them. “What the heck is that?” Dee-Dee asked. “I don’t know,” I said.

  That was the Ku Klux Klan riding through.

  I didn’t know t
he Ku Klux Klan from Cracker Jacks, but our black customers slipped out and dashed into their homes as soon as they caught sight of them. They kept out of sight and low key, very low key when the Klan showed up. The Klan would ride right up Main Street in broad daylight and no one did a thing about it. It seemed to me death was always around Suffolk. I was always hearing about somebody found hanged or floating in the wharf. And we were uneasy too, my family, because in the South there was always a lot of liquor and drinking, and Jews weren’t popular. Tateh kept a loaded pistol underneath the counter next to the cashier. He cleaned that gun more than he cleaned his own trousers, and he had it ready for anyone who tried to fool with his money. He trusted no one. He thought black folks were always trying to steal from him. He’d sit my mother next to the door and say in Yiddish, “Watch the shvartses.” He was robbing these folks blind, charging them a hundred percent markup on his cheap goods, and he was worried about them stealing from him!

  I was always worried that Tateh’s gun would go off and accidentally kill him while he was cleaning it. Although I was afraid of him, I didn’t want anything to happen to him. We had a neighbor, Mrs. Brown, a white woman who had a puffed-up middle finger from some infection she had gotten—in those days, folks got infections and lost their fingers and teeth like it was lunch. In fact, my mother and father both had false teeth. My mother got ‘em first, and later ol’ Tateh, he snuck off and got him a pair. He barked an order at me one day, something like, “Pick up those soap bars,” and I looked in his mouth and saw a brand-new set of white chompers. I said to myself, “I knew he was sounding funny.” Anyhow, Mrs. Brown was one of the few white folks in Suffolk that was nice to me. She had a daughter named Marilyn and a son named Simon. Simon was an alcoholic who used to come teetering home at night. He got killed by a drunk who climbed onto his porch and drove a knife down his neck. Marilyn, she worked downtown and her boss was cleaning his pistol in his office and accidentally shot himself to death, and Marilyn had to step over his body to get out of there. That shook her up bad, and it shook me up too, because Tateh was always cleaning his gun, and if it went off and accidentally killed him I sure wasn’t gonna step over his body to get out. I’d jump out the window first and he’d have to lay there and gather flies till somebody else got him. I never did like dead people and I never did like guns. That’s why I never let my children play with toy guns.

  But in those days, people used guns to hunt and live. This was the thirties, the depression, and folks were poor and they used guns and fishing rods to survive. If you got sick, God help you because you just died. Tuberculosis and double pneumonia were raging in those days, and Mameh had a great fear one of her kids would catch that, because in Europe one of her brothers died in a flu epidemic. But after we got that store going we made money and could afford a doctor. Black folks, our customers, they’d come into the store and buy BC powder, fill up on that, that was their doctor. That was the old powder you bought and took like aspirin. It was a brand name. BC powder. It cost twenty-five cents and came in a little blue-and-white packet. Folks said it made them feel better and pepped them up. Of course it had cocaine in it back then, but folks didn’t know that. They’d take BC for any ailment. In fact, if somebody came in buying too much of it for his wife or child, you got concerned, because somebody taking that much BC was mighty sick and probably dying. Folks got sick and died back in them days like it was a new dance coming out. Plop! Dead as a doornail.

  I wish some of these black kids today could see how the black folks in Suffolk lived then. Lord, you wouldn’t believe it. Shacks with no running water, no foundations, no bathrooms, outhouses. No paved roads, no electricity. Sometimes Mameh and I would walk down those dirt roads behind the store and so many of those roads dead-ended into woods. That’s how life was for blacks down there. A dead end.

  They didn’t complain about it. Who would they complain to? The cops? The cops wouldn’t ride back there, you crazy? They were scared to or didn’t want to. But what always struck me about black folks was that every Sunday they’d get dressed up so clean for church I wouldn’t recognize them. I liked that. They seemed to have such a purpose come Sunday morning. Their families were together and although they were poor, they seemed happy. Tateh hated black people. He’d call the little children bad names in Yiddish and make fun of their parents, too. “Look at them laughing,” he’d say in Yiddish. “They don’t have a dime in their pocket and they’re always laughing.” But he had plenty money and we were all miserable. My brother Sam, he couldn’t take it and ran off as soon as he got big enough.

  Sam was like a shadow. He was short and stocky, with a heavy head of hair, thick eyebrows, and heavy arms and legs. Because he was two years older than me, he had plenty power over me and Dee-Dee, yet he didn’t use his older-brother status over us. He was quiet and submissive. Mameh doted on him, but Tateh put the fear of God into him. Every evening after supper Tateh would sit me and Sam down and make us study the Old Testament. Dee-Dee was too young for that, but me and Sam weren’t. He’d read the words to us and make us repeat them back to him. The book of Ecclesiastes was Tateh’s favorite. “I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked; for there is a time for every purpose and every work.” That’s Ecclesiastes. I still know those verses, but I learned them out of…not out of love for God but just out of …what?…I don’t know. Duty. My father was a rabbi, right? Shouldn’t his kids know the Old Testament? We hated those sessions. Tateh had no patience, and he’d often stop you in the middle of your verse to scold or slap you if you showed disinterest in the Bible. Sometimes the scolding made you feel worse than the hitting. “You’re stupid. You’re nothing but a fool. A sinner. You’re unredeemed before God,” he’d say. Sam was his main target. He’d make Sam sit in the corner for hours and read Hebrew. He never showed any love toward his son.

  You know, any rabbi who visited town, we’d have to put him up and feed him. Tateh would say, “You go show such and such around town,” and we’d have to drag this old rabbi, some old fart, around and do what he told us. We hated that. Of course the alternative was Tateh would pull his belt off and skin you alive.

  I liked to play dominoes with Sam when we were little, but as he got bigger, he had no time to play. Tateh worked Sam harder than me and Dee-Dee. Sam worked like a man when he was a boy. We’d open up the store at seven A.M. and Sam would saw lumber, cut ice, stack the meats out, stock the shelves, feed the cow in the backyard, all before we left for school. He hated that store. After school he went right to work. When he wanted to get out of working in the store, he wouldn’t show up after school until almost dark, and Tateh would scold and punish him by making him work even longer hours. Sam had poor grades in school and low self-esteem from all that treatment. He had few friends because he was shy, and even if he did make a friend, we weren’t allowed to have gentile friends. That was forbidden, aveyre.

  He got bar mitzvahed when he was thirteen. They put a picture of him and Tateh in the paper and Mameh was proud of him. That was the only time I ever remember seeing him smile, because he made his mother happy. Then a couple of years later he ran off. This was around 1934. He just left home and never came back. He was about fifteen or so. He went to Chicago and wrote Mameh a letter from there. The letter was written in English, which Mameh didn’t read or speak, but I read it for her. It said, “I am fine. I got a job working as a clerk in a store.” He got a job working for Montgomery Ward or J. C. Penney, one of those stores. He didn’t know a soul in Chicago and made it there on his own. Mameh was beside herself with that letter. “Write him back,” she told me. “Write him back now and tell him to come home.” So I did. I wrote Sam and told him to come home, but he never did come home and I never did see him again.

  He joined the army and got killed in World War II, my brother Sam. I didn’t find out what happened to him till long after the fact, when your daddy died in 1957. I had seven kids and was pregnant with you and I called one of my aunts to ask for help and she sa
id, “Your brother died in the war.” I asked her what happened, and she said, “Stay out of our lives. You’ve been out. Stay out.” And she hung up on me, so there was nothing I could do for Sam but pray for him.

  8.

  Brothers and Sisters

  Mommy’s house was orchestrated chaos and as the eighth of twelve children, I was lost in the sauce, so to speak. I was neither the prettiest, nor the youngest, nor the brightest. In a house where there was little money and little food, your power was derived from who you could order around. I was what Mommy called a “Little Kid,” one of five young’uns, microscopic dots on the power grid of the household, thus fit to be tied, tortured, tickled, tormented, ignored, and commanded to suffer all sorts of indignities at the hands of the “Big Kids,” who didn’t have to go to bed early, didn’t believe in the tooth fairy, and were appointed denizens of power by Mommy, who of course wielded ultimate power.