karenika - books - the color of water

The Color of Water

As a boy, I often found Mommy's ease among black people surprising. Most white folks I knew seemed to have a great fear of blacks. Even as a young child, I was aware of that. I'd read it in the paper , between the lines of my favorite sport columnists in the New York Post and the old Long Island Press, in their refusal to call Cassius Clay Muhammad Ali, in their portrayal of Floyd Patterson as a ‘good Negro Catholic,’ and in their burning criticism of black athletes like Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals, whom I idolized. In fact, I didn't even have to open the paper to see it. I could see it in the faces of the white people who stared at me and Mommy and my siblings when we rode the subway, sometimes laughing at us, pointing, muttering things like, ‘Look at her with those little niggers.’ I remember when a white man shoved her angrily as she led a group of us onto an escalator, but Mommy simply ignored him. I remember two black women pointing at us, saying, ‘Look at that white bitch,’ and a white man screaming at Mommy somewhere in Manhattan, calling her a ‘nigger lover.’ Mommy ignored them all, unless the insults threatened her children, at which time she would turn and fight back like an alley cat, hissing, angry, and fearless. She had a casual way of ignoring affronts, slipping past insults to her whiteness like a seasoned boxer slips punches. When Malcolm X, the supposed demon of the white man, was killed, I asked her who he was and she said, ‘He was a man ahead of his time.’ She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him nearly in the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys -- any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about the ‘white devil’ Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her. She viewed the civil rights achievements of black Americans with pride, as if they were her own. And she herself occasionally talked about ‘the white man’ in the third person, as if she had nothing to do with him, and in fact she didn't, since most of her friends and social circle were black women from church. ‘What's the matter with there white folks?’ she'd must after reading some craziness in the New York Daily News. ‘They're fighting over this man's money now that he's dead. None of them wanted him when he was alive, and now look at them. Forget it, honey’ -- this is Mommy talking to the newspaper -- ‘your husband's dead, okay? He's dead -- poop! You had your chance. Is money gonna bring him back? No!’ Then she'd turn to us and deliver the invariable lecture: ‘You don't need money. What's money if your mind is empty! Educate your mind! Is this world crazy or am I the crazy one? It's probably me.’

A truly remarkable story told in an exquisite style. This book will not only make you laugh and cry, but it will also make you realize that love is above everything.

Today's kinda longish passage comes from a beautiful book called The Color of Water by James McBride. The novel is a true story about a boy who grew up with a Polish Jewish mother and a black father in the Bronx. It's told from the point of view of the mother and the son, switching chapter to chapter. The excerpt below is taken from a section where the little boy talks about his mother and her unique personality.