2007 Summer Reading Book:
The Color of Water by James McBride
As a boy in Brooklyn’s Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she’d simply say, “I’m light-skinned.” Later he wondered if he was different, too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. “You’re a human being,” she snapped. “Educate yourself or you’ll be a nobody!” And when James asked what color God was, she said, “God is the color of water.” …As an adult, McBride finally persuaded his mother to tell her story – the story of a rabbi’s daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through college. The Color of Water is James McBride’s tribute to his remarkable, eccentric, determined mother – and an eloquent exploration of what family really means.
“Complex and moving…suffused with issues of race, religion, and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book – and of their lives – is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother’s will, and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church…It is her voice – unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic – that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution…The two stories, son’s and mother’s, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time of racial polarization.”
- The New York Times Book Review