The Color of Water

by James McBride

  I had no true personal life in those years. Few dates, few dinners, no power lunches. My college sweetheart, a mixed-race woman from Hyde Park, Chicago—her mother was black and her father Jewish—was the apple of my eye, but I was afraid of commitment then, afraid to have children because I didn’t want them to be like me. I drifted away from her and let time and distance do the rest. Since I had no personal life outside of journalism other than music, I soared as a reporter, but I always parachuted out in the end, telling my white editors after a year or two that I had to leave to “find myself, write a book, play my sax,” whatever the excuse was. Most black folks considered “finding myself” a luxury. White people seemed to think of it as a necessity—most white people that is, except for that all-important one.

  Each time I quit a job, Mommy would do a war dance, complete with chants and dancing, usually beginning with, “Now what are you gonna do!? You had a second chance and you threw it out the window! You need a job!” Like most mothers, she wielded tremendous power and my staunch resolve would crumble like a sandcastle before her frontal assaults, which were like tidal waves. I’d stave her off and back out of her house, saying, “Don’t worry, Ma. Don’t worry,” disappearing into the underworld labyrinth of the New York music scene for months, playing sax with this or that band, selling a piece of music here and there. I was always moderately successful, and later in life much more so, winning the Stephen Sondheim Award for musical theater composition, working with Anita Baker, Grover Washington, Jr., Jimmy Scott, Rachelle Ferrell, and many others, but the eighties were hard times for me as a composer, and each time I hit a dry spell I’d scurry back into journalism—until February 1988, when I was working for the Washington Post Style section and thinking of quitting to go back to music in New York. The Post Style section is the top of the line, the elite, the haute cuisine, the green, green grass of heaven for newspaper feature writers, and quitting there is not something you do lightly, not even for a seasoned quitter like me. As I pondered it, Ma called me out of the blue, smelling trouble. “I know you!” she snapped. “You’re getting steady money now. And a lot of it. Don’t quit that job!”

  But I did quit, partly because I got tired of running, and partly because the little ache I had known as a boy was no longer a little ache when I reached thirty. It was a giant, roaring, musical riff, screaming through my soul like a distorted rock guitar with the sound turned all the way up, telling me, Get on with your life: Play sax, write books, compose music, do something, express yourself, who the hell are you anyway? There were two worlds bursting inside me trying to get out. I had to find out more about who I was, and in order to find out who I was, I had to find out who my mother was.

  It was a devastating realization, coming to grips with the fact that all your life you had never really known the person you loved the most. Even as a young boy I was used to Mommy hiding her past, and I grew to accept it, and the details of her past got lost as my own life moved forward, which is probably how she wanted it anyway. I never even seriously broached the subject with her until 1977, when I was in college and had to fill out a form that for some reason or other required Ma’s maiden name. I called her long-distance, in Philadelphia, to find out, and she was suddenly evasive. “What do you need that for?” she asked. “How come?” She hemmed and hawed awhile longer before finally coming out with it. “Shilsky,” she said.

  “Can you spell that, Ma?”

  “Who’s paying for this call? Am I paying for it? Did you call me collect?”

  “No.”

  “You’re in college,” she snapped. “You can spell. Figure it out yourself.” Click.

  The subject was not broached again until I met Al Larkin, then Sunday Magazine editor at the Boston Globe in early 1982. Al talked me into writing a Mother’s Day piece, which the Philadelphia Inquirer was kind enough to run simultaneously, since Ma was living in Philly at the time. The public response to the piece was so overwhelming I decided to delve further, partly to get out of working for a living and partly to expel some of my own demons regarding my brown skin, curly hair, and divided soul. I asked Mommy if she would be interested in doing a book and she said no. I told her it could make me a million bucks. She said, “Okay. If you’re rich, I’m rich. Just don’t quit your job.” So I took a leave of absence from the Boston Globe in 1982 and then quit. “That was one of the stupidest things you’ve ever done,” she snorted, when I announced I had quit.

  I expected to sit down with her and conduct long, rambling interviews, listening intently as the painful, fascinating details of her life came tumbling out. I envisioned her as the wise sage, sitting in a rocking chair, impassively pouring the moving details of her life into my waiting tape recorder over six weeks, maybe two months, me prodding her along, her cooperating, cringing, inching along, mother and son, hand in hand, fighting forward, emotionally wrought, until—behold! We’d be done six months later, and the world would be graced with our mighty tome.

  Eight years later, I was still getting this: “Mind your own business. If you think too hard, your mind dries up like a prune. I don’t want a TV special named after me. Leave me alone. You’re a nosy-body! I’m moving out of Philly. Let’s pack up the house.”

  My mother is the only individual I have ever known who has been in the process of moving for ten years straight. After living in Delaware for only a year, she bought a small rowhouse in Germantown, Philadelphia, in 1975, settled in, and promptly began the process of looking for another place to move that literally became a lifestyle. She seemed to know every realtor in Germantown on a first-name basis. She would rise in the morning, scoot out the door, and ride around with a realtor all day, looking at houses which she had neither the money for nor the desire to buy, telling the poor realtor after the day was done to “call me in a week.” She’d then clear out of town completely, “moving” to Atlanta for three weeks to stay with my siblings, or just disappear from sight, never to be seen by the realtor again. The poor guy would call and call, and one of us would finally break the news to him that Mommy wasn’t interested. Sometimes Mommy would be standing by the phone whispering to us in one ear while we were running interference for her with the other. “Tell him I’m not here!” she’d hiss. “Why does he keep bothering me?”

  It was typical Mommy neurotic behavior, and I didn’t fully understand it till I learned how far she had truly come. For her, her Jewish side is gone. She opened the door for me but closed it for herself long ago, and for her to crack it open and peek inside was like eating fire. She’d look in and stagger back, blinded, as the facts of her own history poured over her like lava. As she revealed the facts of her life I felt helpless, like I was watching her die and be reborn again (yet there was a cleansing element, too), because after years of hiding, she opened up and began to talk about the past, and as she did so, I was the one who wanted to run for cover. I can’t describe what a shock it was to hear words like “Tateh” and “rov” and “shiva” and “Bubeh” coming from Mommy’s mouth as she sat at the kitchen table in her Ewing home. Imagine, if you will, five thousand years of Jewish history landing in your lap in the space of months. It sent me tumbling through my own abyss of sorts, trying to salvage what I could of my feelings and emotions, which would be scattered to the winds as she talked. It was a fascinating lesson in life history—a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction marvel, to say the least. I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

  Mommy has changed, changed from the time she adopted Christianity back in the 1940s. What’s different is that she can face the past now. 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 in Florida,” which in her mind is the same as being dead. “I’ll never retire to Florida,” she vowed. Riding past a graveyard one day, she looked over and
remarked, “That’s Florida Forever.”

  Ma settled in to get her college degree in social work from Temple University at age sixty-five. She enjoyed the intellectual back-and-forth, the study, reading different authors—I’d forgotten how bright she was. The constant learning and yearning for knowledge was what helped her finally move away from the bustle of Philadelphia to settle into the quieter, safer suburb of Ewing with my sister Kathy. For a few years, she used her degree to work as a volunteer in a Philadelphia social service agency that helped pregnant, unwed mothers; then she moved on to run a weekly reading group for literate and illiterate senior citizens at the local Ewing library, which she still does today. But that’s not enough to keep her busy. Every day she rises, spirits her two grandchildren off to school, and drives around central New Jersey, haggling with merchants at flea markets, taking yoga classes in sweats and Nikes, tooling along in a 1995 Toyota at twenty-seven miles an hour in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone, holding up traffic on Route 1 listening to Bernard Meltzer on WOR-AM or the Howard Stern show. (“Grandma laughs when Howard Stern talks dirty,” my niece Maya whispers.) Sometimes she’ll get up in the morning and disappear for days at a time, slipping away to her old stomping grounds, the Red Hook Housing Projects, to go to church and see her old friends there. She loves Red Hook. Despite the fact that my siblings often urge her to stay out of the projects, she won’t. “Don’t tell me how to live,” she says. She’s always been slightly out of control, my mother, always had the unnerving habit of taking the ship into the air to do loops and spins, then fleeing the cockpit screaming, “Someone do something, we’re gonna crash!” then at the last dying second slipping into the pilot’s seat and coolly landing the thing herself, only to forget the entire incident instantly. She wouldn’t recall it for you if you showed her pictures of herself doing it. She wipes her memory instantly and with purpose; it’s a way of preserving herself. That’s how she moves. Her survival instincts are incredible, her dances with fire always fun to watch. “Ruthie,” my sisters affectionately called her. “Ruthie’s crazy.”

  In August 1993, after more than fifty years, Ruthie, aka Ruth McBride Jordan, aka Rachel Deborah Shilsky, finally faced the ghosts of her pasts. She went home to Suffolk, Virginia, with me; my sister Judy, a New York schoolteacher; and my brother Billy, an Atlanta physician, in tow. We drove through the entire town, down Main Street, past the one building in town that had an elevator back in the thirties, past the spot where her old home had been, past the old synagogue and old high school, which were still there. “Nothing’s changed,” she breathed as we sat in front of the old synagogue, still white, aged, but slightly noble with its four tall columns. Ma stared at the old temple, but refused to get out of the car; she merely looked out the window. “They sure do take care of it,” she murmured, then ordered Billy, who was driving, to pull away. She seemed immobile—attentive, reflective, but unmoved—until we pulled into the Portsmouth driveway of one Frances Moody, now Frances Falcone, whom I found after a long search. It took twelve years and a ton of good luck for me to find the mysterious Frances. It was, after all, fifty years since Mommy had been there, and most of the old-timers had gone. Those that remained did not remember or know anyone named Frances. Finally I came across a woman named Frances Holland who told me about two girls who befriended her when she was a new student in the seventh grade at Thomas Jefferson Junior High: Ruth Shilsky and Frances Moody. “Frances Moody’s alive, living in Portsmouth somewhere,” she said. A search through the directory turned up nothing, and I was empty-handed until I visited the town library in Suffolk and a librarian handed me a slip of paper with a phone number on it. “This is the woman you’re looking for,” she said. “She’s Frances Falcone now.” I thanked her and asked her how she knew. She shrugged. She didn’t seem to be friendly or unfriendly, just matter-of-fact. She picked up the phone, dialed a number, and handed me the phone. Frances Moody, now Frances Falcone, was on the other line. “I’ve been looking for you for years,” I said. She laughed. “Come see me, but I might not be able to see you,” she said. “I had an operation on my eyes yesterday for cataracts.” Right away I drove to Portsmouth and met my mother’s childhood friend, a slim, brown-haired, soft-spoken woman of Mommy’s age whose eyes, it turned out, were working just fine. It seems fitting that Frances Moody, who crossed the line and made a Jewish friend in the 1940s when Jews were unpopular in Suffolk, had married an Italian, Nick Falcone, a wood artisan. “The last time I saw your mother, she gave me a shower for my wedding,” Frances said. “That was in 1941.”

  “I bet you thought you’d never see her again,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I knew I’d see her again somehow.”

  As we neared Frances’s house in Portsmouth, Mommy began to get nervous and to talk excessively. “Look at these roads,” she said. “Not a bump. Not a notch. They fix them down here in Virginia, but you shouldn’t speed on them, because the cops here don’t play. They don’t play, you hear me! Billy, slow down! Oh, my knees hurt. The air-conditioning really bothers my knees. And these seats are too small.” Even after we pulled into the driveway of Frances’s house and her friend approached, she was babbling away, complaining now. “Oh, I can’t get up now. My legs hurt. Help me get up, what the heck are y’all trying to do anyway! Driving so fast like that! You can’t drive like that in Virginia, I tell you. Now my knees hurt, and—Frances! Look at how thin you are. Oh, you’re so pretty. Oh, I’m crying now. Oh boy, what are y’all trying to do …” And she wept as she hugged her friend.

  After the trip, she and Frances picked up where their high school friendship left off and remain close today. But Frances is as far back as Ruthie can go. Her reunion with her old friend is one of the small, beautiful side benefits of a book experience that Mommy was truly never interested in, exploring a past for her that in many ways is gone forever and is better left buried and untouched.

  There are probably a hundred reasons why Ruthie should have stayed on the Jewish side, instead of taking New Jersey Transit and the F train to go to a Christian church in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with her shvartse children and friends, and I’m sure the Old Testament lists them all, but I’m glad she came over to the African-American side. She married two extraordinary men and raised twelve very creative and talented children, and I ought to list their names now. After all, that was part of the deal on my end, and her children’s achievements are her life’s work anyway. So, from eldest to youngest:

  ANDREW DENNIS MCBRIDE, B.A., Lincoln University; M.D., University of Pennsylvania Medical School; M.A., Public Health, Yale University; Director of Health Department, City of Stamford, Connecticut.

  ROSETTA MCBRIDE, B.A., Howard University; M.S.W., Social Work, Hunter College; Staff Psychologist, New York City Board of Education.

  WILLIAM MCBRIDE, B.A., Lincoln University; M.D., Yale University School of Medicine; M.B.A., Emory University School of Business; Medical Director Southeast Region, Medical and Scientific Affairs, Merck and Co., Inc.

  DAVID MCBRIDE, B.A., Denison University; M.A., History, Columbia University; Ph.D., History, Columbia University; Chairman of Afro-American History Department, Pennsylvania State University.

  HELEN MCBRIDE-RICHTER, R.N., Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; G.O.N.P., Emory University School of Medicine, Graduate Student in Nurse Midwifery, Emory University School of Nursing.

  RICHARD MCBRIDE, U.S. Army veteran, B.A., Cheney University, Chemistry; M.S., Drexel University; Associate Professor of Chemistry, Cheney State; Chemistry Research Associate, AT&T.

  DOROTHY MCBRIDE-WESLEY, A.A., Pierce Junior College; B.A., La Salle University; medical practice office manager, Atlanta, Georgia.

  JAMES MCBRIDE, B.A., Oberlin College; M.S.J., Journalism, Columbia University; writer, composer, saxophonist.

  KATHY JORDAN, B.A., Syracuse University; M.S., Education, Long Island University; special-education teacher, Ewing High School, Ewing, New Jersey.

  JUDY JORDAN, B.A., Adelphi University; M.A.,
Columbia University Teachers College; teacher, JHS 168, Manhattan.

  HUNTER JORDAN, B.S., Computer Engineering, Syracuse University; computer consultant, U.S. Trust Corporation, Ann Taylor.

  HENRY JORDAN, junior at North Carolina A&T University; customer service and purchasing, Neal Manufacturing, Inc., Greensboro, North Carolina.

  RUTH JORDAN, B.A., Temple University, 1986.

  Mommy’s children are extraordinary people, most of them leaders in their own right. All of them have toted more mental baggage and dealt with more hardship than they care to remember, yet they carry themselves with a giant measure of dignity, humility, and humor. Like any family we have problems, but we have always been close. Through marriage, adoptions, love-ins, live-ins, and shack-ups, the original dozen has expanded into dozens and dozens more—wives, husbands, children, grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews—ranging from dark-skinned to light-skinned; from black kinky hair to blond hair and blue eyes. In running from her past, Mommy has created her own nation, a rainbow coalition that descends on her house every Christmas and Thanksgiving and sleeps everywhere—on the floor, on rugs, in shifts; sleeping double, triple to a bed, “two up, three down,” just like old times.