The Color of Water

by James McBride

  “Why not?” she said. “It’s cheap.” She had bought a small house in town for less than twelve thousand dollars, which is what she could afford.

  We knew nothing about Delaware. Mommy had an old friend from Harlem who lived there. “You’ll do fine in Delaware,” Ma’s friend said, but from the moment we parked our U-Haul in front of our new home we were completely lost.

  We thought we’d function in Wilmington as we had in New York, catching subways and buses and living off public transportation and the groove of the city. But Wilmington had no subway and only the very poor took the bus, which stopped running at about nine P.M. Unlike New York, where Ma could stretch a dollar for a mile and lead her troops to the promised land of Macy’s, Gimbels, and Ohrbach’s, entertaining them for free at museums, parades, block parties, and public concerts, Wilmington was a land of suburban shopping malls, high school marching bands, blond prom queens, small-town gossip, and an inner city from which whites were fleeing as fast as their Ford Pintos could take them. We were shocked by the racial division of the city and surrounding county, where most of the black kids attended understaffed and underfunded city schools while whites attended sparkling clean suburban schools with fantastic facilities. The segregated schools came as a complete surprise to Mommy, who had not even considered that problem, and the southern vibe of the city—anything south of Canal Street in Manhattan was the South to us—brought back unpleasant memories for Mommy. She hates the South.

  A few months after we arrived, a group of Delaware state troopers stopped a group of us on a dark highway one night after my older brother David, who was driving, made an illegal U-turn. The troopers were tall, arrogant, and unsympathetic. They surrounded the car full of black kids and white mother, shone flashlights everywhere, and made David, then a doctoral student at Columbia University, stand outside in the cold without his coat while they questioned him pointedly. They then hauled him into night court while the rest of us followed, frightened and angry. Mommy was furious that her shy, intellectual son—she was always so proud of David and would literally have carried his books to school for him if he had asked her to—was placed before a judge, who asked him to announce whether he was “guilty” of the traffic infraction or not. She immediately jumped into F. Lee Bailey mode. “Don’t say guilty!” she cried. “They’ll lock you up!”

  “Please, Ma,” David said, trying to calm her as the judge looked on.

  “No, no!” she shouted. “You’re not guilty—of nothing!”

  Looking back now, the whole incident was only a routine stop, ticket, and trip to night court, and when I later covered cops as a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal, I saw a much better side of the Delaware state police. But Mommy did not have that insight, and from that moment on she hated Delaware. “We’re really moving back to New York now,” she said. “We haven’t sold the house yet. We’ll get out of that contract.”

  My sisters loaded the northbound Amtrak train at Wilmington, carrying their possessions in shopping bags. Contingency plans were made. Appointments were drawn up. Promises were struck: “Y’all follow us with the truck.…We’ll enroll in school…talk to the principal for me, okay?…See you in New York.” And they were off.

  Two hours later I talked Ma out of it. “What’s back in New York?” I asked her. “There’s nothing back there for us. It’s over. You can’t afford that house.” Regretfully, she agreed. The girls called up from the city and she ordered them back home.

  She was spinning in crazy circles only because she was trying to survive, and movement was always her modus operandi when things got tough. She was a fifty-four-year-old widow living off a small pension and social security with five kids still left to raise. She had never been on her own in terms of moving, checking out neighborhoods, buying houses, driving cars. It was a lot for anyone to do alone. Her job through two marriages—the first for sixteen years, the second for fourteen—had been to mother her children; but now she had to run a family, and she was learning late. She also was drained emotionally and felt tremendous guilt about moving us out of New York. She often sat at the kitchen table in the evening, brooding, “What have I done? What was I thinking?” staring off into space, holding a cup of cold, untouched coffee.

  Prayer turned her around. That and the public school system, which forced her hand. When she saw the tattered books we brought home from school, she rose up like the Mommy of old. “You’ll be a nothing, with this kind of education,” she said. She bought an old, used Toyota for nine hundred dollars, took a driving course, and despite the fact that the driving instructor was a dirty old man who, in her words, “got fresh” with his hands, got her driver’s license within two weeks. She opened up the phone book, ran her finger down the list of private and Catholic schools, called the schools, found out which ones had scholarships, and drove me up to one. The headmaster interviewed me for four hours. He gave me a writing test, a geography test, then laid a bunch of math on me which stumped me. If I hadn’t missed so much school the previous two years, I might have smoked those tests, but I had barely passed the eleventh grade and was lucky to be a senior. The man wasn’t sympathetic. He said because I’d be entering his school as a senior, I might not be able to adjust. The school turned me down.

  I went to the all-black public Pierre S. Du Pont High School with my sisters Kathy and Judy and liked it fine. The kids called me “New York” like folks did in Louisville, but now I kept away from the hang-out crowd and dealt with my music, focusing on tenor sax and trombone, which I picked up in order to play in the marching band. The change was good for me and I gave up weed and drinking for the discipline of music with the help of the school’s outstanding music teacher, a black man named C. Lawler Rogers. Overall, the schoolwork in Delaware was ten times easier than the work in New York and I was selected to travel to Europe with the American Youth Jazz Band, which was organized by a very kind white music teacher from New Castle County named Hal Schiff.

  The American Youth Jazz Band trip to Europe wasn’t free. You had to pay for it, which I could not. My trip was paid for by a well-to-do couple from nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, named David H. and Ann Fox Dawson who had donated a good part of their lives and resources to inner city kids for many years. Mr. Dawson was a tall, trim gray-haired man who was senior vice president at the Du Pont company. He and his wife were the band’s main sponsors, giving scholarships to needy musicians. In exchange, you had to work on their estate on weekends and during the summer, so in the space of a year I went from getting high on a street corner in Louisville to butlering parties for old-money blue bloods in cheeky Chadds Ford. I combed my Afro down, dressed in a suit and bow tie that Mrs. Dawson loaned me, and carried trays of hors d’oeuvres around—me and Pearl, the black woman who had done Mrs. Dawson’s cooking and housework for years. Pearl lived in Wilmington like I did, and one day I pulled her aside and asked her, “Why do you work for these white folks?” She looked at me like I was crazy. She and Mrs. Dawson were quite close. She said, “You out here too, ain’t you?” and that shut me up. At the Dawson affairs, I quietly served chuckling white folks—the president of Du Pont and the governor of Delaware, among others. These people were nothing like me or my mother or anyone else in my family, but I had no anger toward them. My anger at the world had been replaced by burning ambition. I didn’t want to be like them, standing around sipping wine and showing proper manners and acting happy when they weren’t—I’m similar to my mother in that way—but these people had done nothing to me. I could see they were willing to help the band and indirectly me, because I was dying to go to Europe, so I was grateful to them. My expectations of them went no farther than that.

  I was the clumsiest, worst party butler Mrs. Dawson ever had, and to her everlasting credit, she did not fire me right away. I wrinkled people’s coats as I collected them, crushed their hats, spilled drinks, and dropped hors d’oeuvres everywhere. Mrs. Dawson was constantly saying, “James, carry the tray this way…no, this way…now put it o
ver here.…Now straighten the tie…put the towel on the arm like this.…Hold the tray up, up…oh my!” Crash! Down went the tray. I liked Mrs. Dawson, despite the fact that I often made her cross. She was a demanding, witty, spry woman who was the first white person I ever had an ongoing dialogue with about music and literature, which she enjoyed greatly. She turned me on to classical composers and literary writers whom I had never heard of, tried to correct what she considered to be my poor speech and manners, which I did not like at all, and often made me sit with her and read poetry, the words of which later in life would suddenly pop into my memory out of nowhere, as if someone had planted them there, which she in fact had: James James/Morrison Morrison/Weatherby George Dupree/Took great care of his Mother/Though he was only three….

  Catering her parties wasn’t my only job. I wasn’t a total house Negro, so to speak. Most of my work was in the field. The estate was a huge piece of land, acres, encompassing a horse barn, a large vegetable garden, and a pool, tended by a young white caretaker named Harry. We cut grass, trimmed trees, cleaned the barn, ran a gerry tractor, and kept busy all day. Harry was a hillbilly and a smart dude who liked to hunt deer, and he kept a supply of beer and a long shotgun behind the seat of his pickup truck specifically for that purpose. I liked Harry and kept him laughing all day. He marveled at how I got out of doing all the dirty work Mrs. Dawson wanted me to do.

  “James, you’re a lazy guy,” he told me one afternoon, “and if you don’t tighten up, Mrs. D will find you out.” I paid him no mind, but not long afterward his prophecy came true. I had to get up at five A.M. to catch a bus to Mrs. Dawson’s from Wilmington and was often exhausted when I got there. One hot afternoon Mr. Dawson caught me sleeping in the strawberry patch that I was supposed to be weeding and told Mrs. Dawson about it. She got angry and fired me on the spot. “How can you fire me!” I said. “I’ve got to go to Europe!”

  “I’m sending you to Europe,” she said, “but you’re fired anyway. You, boy, have to learn to work.” Well, when she said I was going to Europe, I hugged her. I did mind her calling me boy but I didn’t mind her firing me. She had done me a favor. I kept in touch with her for many years. She helped me through college and helped me get into graduate school as well; she didn’t pay my way, but if I had an emergency, she would help. One morning a couple of years later when I was at Oberlin College, I went to my mailbox and found a letter from her telling me that her husband had died suddenly of cancer. Later that day I was standing on the street with a group of black students and one of them said, “Forget these whiteys. They’re all rich. They got no problems,” and I said, “Yeah, man, I hear you,” while inside my pocket was the folded letter holding the heartbroken words of an old white lady who had always gone out of her way to help me—and many others like me. It hurt me a little bit to stand there and lie. Sometimes it seemed like the truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.

  By the time I began my senior year in high school, I knew I wanted to go to college and be a musician of some kind. I couldn’t see myself hanging around Wilmington working at a 7-Eleven, gigging in a pop band that played the VFW and other seedy country joints, which is what I was doing. I did have an urge to stay out of school and study saxophone and jazz composition like the old-timers I admired—Bird, Coltrane, Clifford Brown—but I was afraid I might never get out of Delaware. Ma wanted me out of Delaware too, but she had no escape. She was the unhappiest I had ever seen her. It was like her legs were cut out from under her. The day before Thanksgiving in 1974, her old Toyota broke down and she had no money to fix it, which meant we had to take a bus to some godforsaken distant supermarket to find a turkey we could afford. We found the bird, but when we got on the bus to go home the paper bag holding the frozen turkey burst; it fell out of the bag and rolled all the way down the aisle to the front of the bus, where the driver grabbed it. The passengers and driver laughed, but to Ma this episode epitomized her entire experience in Delaware, that darned turkey rolling down the darned aisle in front of all those darned people. She had few friends there. The black folks found her to be awkward. The white folks bored her. But there was no quick and easy escape.

  College was my way out. My eldest brother’s wife, Becky, had gone to Oberlin College in Ohio and she told me I should apply because they had a great liberal arts school, a conservatory of music, and most of all, scholarship money. My high school grades were sour, my SATs low, but my musical and writing abilities were strong and I had good recommendations. To my utter amazement, the school accepted me. Mommy was completely happy when I told her the news. She hugged me and beamed, put the acceptance letter in her shoebox under her bed, and bragged to anyone she saw, in the supermarkets, at the library, “My son’s going to Oberlin. You never heard of Oberlin? Oh, let me tell you …” I was the eighth straight child she sent to college. The seven before me all graduated and most went on for higher degrees.

  On a cloudy, rainy day in September 1975, I packed everything I owned into an old green duffel bag and Ma drove me to the Greyhound bus station. As usual, she was broke, dumping single dollar bills, change, pennies on the counter to pay for the one-way ticket to Ohio. As I stepped on the bus she squeezed a bunch of bills and change into my hand. “It’s all I have,” she said. I counted it. Fourteen dollars. “Thanks, Ma.” I kissed her and got on the bus quickly to hide my own tears. I felt I was abandoning her—she hated Delaware and I had talked her into staying there, and now I was leaving. Yet she wanted me to go. As I sat down on the bus and looked for her through the window, it occurred to me that since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away from her just as she’d pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college. She would not hear of it when they applied to schools that were near home. “If you stay here, you’ll fool around,” she’d say. “Go away and learn to live on your own.” Yet she’d wipe her eyes with the back of her hand and watch silently through the living room window as they smiled and waved goodbye from the sidewalk, straining under the weight of the same cheap duffel bag that now lay in the belly of the Greyhound bus, holding my things. She always cried when they left, though never in front of us. She’d retreat to her room for that. I was actually worried she would cry when I boarded the bus, but when I looked at her through the window I was relieved to see she wasn’t crying at all. She was pacing, puckering her lips, frowning, making faces. She paced this way and that, hands in her pockets, as the wind blew swirls of leaves and discarded paper cups about her feet. She was wearing a brown raincoat and a scarf over her head, a lone white woman marching back and forth on a dim street in front of the dilapidated bus station in Wilmington, Delaware, beneath a rumbling Amtrak train trestle and a cloudy sky. She seemed so agitated and jumpy I remember wondering if she had to go to the bathroom. As the bus engine rumbled to life, she didn’t wave but rather gave a quick flip of the hand that said, “Go! Go on!” and hurried away. The bus pulled off and she was out of sight for a moment, but after we turned the corner I saw her from the window across the aisle and she had broken down. She was leaning on the wall beneath the train trestle, head bowed, one hand squeezing her eyes, as if the tears that flowed out of them could be squeezed into oblivion.

  19.

  The Promise

  After my adventures with Rocky I was done with the fast life. I got a job at a diner serving food to customers, and after a couple of weeks Dennis called on me again and we started going out. He was a real serious man, thoughtful and solid, different from Rocky and the other men I had seen in Harlem who hung around Small’s Paradise. Dennis was a violinist who had come to New York from High Point, North Carolina. He came to New York in his middle twenties, which was a late age for most folks to leave home in those days, but he was an only child and his mother, Etta,
didn’t want him to leave home. She’d had a few miscarriages and Dennis was her only son, but he went to New York because he wanted to pursue music. He played violin and read music and composed it, mostly classical and religious music. Your father came from the same town and went to the same high school as John Coltrane, but he was ahead of Coltrane in age. Dennis used to sit around with stacks of sheet music when I first met him, scribbling at it and scoring it out. He played the violin beautifully and I’d often ask him to play various songs for me. He also was a good singer and sang in the Metropolitan Baptist Church choir in Harlem.

  Dennis almost starved to death fooling around with that music, which is why I never wanted you fooling around with it when you decided to make a living at it. They wouldn’t hire a black man for the orchestras or anything like that in those days and he scuffled around and slept in flophouses. What saved him were some friends from his hometown in High Point, Curtis and Minnie Ware. Curtis worked as a superintendent in an apartment house in Manhattan and he and Minnie were well-off compared to most black folks who came up from the South, because they lived rent-free. Curtis and Minnie housed and fed whole families that had migrated north from High Point, but Dennis was too proud to look them up. Only after he was starving and sleeping in flophouses did he tell them, “I’ve got no money and noplace to go,” and they were angry with him. They said, “You should have come to us sooner.” They had four other friends and a sister from the South, all crammed in their apartment. At mealtimes there was a huge round table, filled with all kinds of southern cooking, baked goods, and cold drinks. After Dennis got on his feet and got a job at my Aunt Mary’s leather factory and we started going out, he brought me by there and said, “I want y’all to meet a friend of mine,” and their eyes kind of popped out when I walked into the room.