The Color of Water

James McBride grew up with a question he couldn't answer. His mother looked different from every other mother in their Brooklyn neighborhood. She had pale skin, straight hair, and a way of speaking that marked her as an outsider. When James asked if she was white, she would simply say, "No. I'm light-skinned."

But James knew this wasn't true. His best friend Billy Smith had a mother just as light-skinned as his own, with red hair to boot. Yet there was no question in James's mind that Billy's mother was Black and his mother was not. The difference hung in the air between them, unspoken and unresolved.

The book you're about to hear is The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, published in 1996. It's a dual memoir that alternates between James's own childhood memories and the transcribed interviews he conducted with his mother Ruth over nearly a decade. The book traces two parallel journeys: James's struggle to understand his racial identity as the son of a white Jewish woman and a Black man, and Ruth's painful past as a young Orthodox Jewish girl who escaped an abusive home in the Jim Crow South to build a new life in Harlem.

The title comes from a conversation James had with his mother when he was a child. Sitting in church one Sunday, watching Ruth weep during the hymns, James wondered if she cried because God loved Black people better than white people—and she wished she were Black. He asked her point-blank: "Is God black or white?"

Ruth didn't hesitate. "God is the color of water," she said. "Water doesn't have a color."

This answer satisfied James in the moment. Water was clear, transparent, without race or division. It seemed like the perfect explanation for a mother who refused to acknowledge the very concept of race. But as James grew older, he came to see that his mother's race-neutral philosophy was more complicated than it appeared. Water might have no color, but people do. And the world treated people differently based on the color of their skin, whether Ruth wanted to admit it or not.

James McBride was born in 1957, the eighth of twelve children. His biological father, Andrew "Dennis" McBride, died of lung cancer just months before James was born, leaving Ruth pregnant and alone with seven other children to raise. She soon married Hunter Jordan, a kind man who worked for the New York City Housing Authority and became the only father James ever knew.

Ruth McBride Jordan—born Ruchel Dwajra Zylska in Poland in 1921—had immigrated to America as a toddler with her Orthodox Jewish family. By the time James came along, she had buried her Jewish heritage so deeply that she claimed to remember almost nothing from her childhood. She never spoke about her parents, her sister, or the town of Suffolk, Virginia, where she grew up. When James asked about his grandparents, she changed the subject. When he pressed her about her family's origins, she said she couldn't remember.

It took nearly a decade of patient interviewing before Ruth finally opened up. The story she told was one of unspeakable trauma: a father who was an Orthodox Jewish rabbi by day and a sexual predator by night, a mother too sick and isolated to protect her children, a town where antisemitism ran alongside the more visible racism against Black residents, and a family that disowned her completely when she chose to marry a Black man.

The book's structure reflects this dual perspective. In James's chapters, we see the confusion of a boy trying to figure out where he belongs. In the 1960s, as the Black Power movement swept through his neighborhood, James found himself torn. His older siblings embraced the movement, wearing red, black, and green liberation colors and singing songs by Black nationalist poets. James wanted to be cool like them. But he also watched the evening news, where white newscasters spoke in panicked tones about the threat Black Panthers posed to white America. James internalized that fear completely. He believed that Black Power would mean the end of his mother.

Ruth, meanwhile, seemed oblivious to the racial tensions swirling around her. She was too busy working second-shift typing jobs at Chase Manhattan Bank, too focused on getting her children to school and church, too determined to keep moving forward to worry about what anyone thought of her. She distrusted everyone—cops, social workers, Black Panthers, white neighbors—and she had no patience for discussions about race. When her children asked if she was Black or white, she would say simply, "God made me."

But James saw the contradictions in his mother's approach. She insisted that race didn't matter, yet she forced her children to attend predominantly white private schools for the best education. She said white people were implicitly evil toward Black people, yet she worked for white employers and trusted white doctors. She told her children they could be anything they wanted, yet she never prepared them for the reality that the world would see them as Black, regardless of what she said at home.

The central question of The Color of Water is whether it's possible to escape one's heritage. Ruth tried. She changed her name from Rachel to Ruth because it didn't "sound so Jewish." She converted to Christianity and threw herself into the warm embrace of the Black church. She raised her children in a household where race was never discussed. But her Jewish upbringing shaped her parenting in ways she couldn't control. She had no model for raising children other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family—the hard work, the relentless pursuit of excellence, the deep belief in education and God, the distrust of outsiders. Even as she ran from her past, she carried it with her.

James's journey to understand his mother becomes a journey to understand himself. He travels to Suffolk, Virginia, to uncover the truth about his grandfather Fishel Shilsky, known as Tateh. He meets elderly Black residents who remember Tateh's cruelty and racism, and Jewish community members who treat James warmly as one of their own. He learns about his grandmother Mameh, a gentle woman who died young, unloved and trapped in a terrible marriage. He discovers that his uncle Sam died in World War II, that his aunt Dee-Dee vanished from public records, that Tateh himself disappeared sometime in the 1960s.

What James doesn't find is a neat resolution. There is no moment of dramatic catharsis, no single answer that makes sense of everything. Instead, he comes to understand that his mother's life—and his own—cannot be reduced to simple categories. Race, religion, class, luck—they all factor in, often in ways that defy easy explanation.

Ruth's statement that "God is the color of water" was meant to end the conversation about race. But for James, it started one. Water may have no color, but it shapes everything it touches. It carves canyons, it nourishes life, it reflects the sky above. It is both invisible and essential. Perhaps that's what Ruth was really saying: that what matters most is not the surface we present to the world, but the depths beneath.

As James embarks on this investigation into his mother's past, he carries with him a question that will haunt him for years: If water has no color, then why does the world insist on dividing people by the color of their skin? And if his mother could escape her heritage entirely, why does he feel so bound by his own?