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A Book Review: The Color of Water by James McBride
This memoir was published in the year 1995 as a tribute of a black son to his white mother. The eloquent narrative is splendidly narrated in two voices, one of his own (McBride) describing his early life and another of his mother, Ruth, where she meditates and recalls every encounters of her life in first-person accounts. McBride explains the hardships he endured in a bid to self-realization in a race and ethic divided country while his mother narrates the hardships she underwent after she, a Jewish white, decided to marry a black man.
When he was a child he realized that his mother was different from others around him as she kept many secrets and would not reveal her ethnicity and originality. When asked where she came from she would answer that God made her and on her ethnicity she would interject with ‘I am light skinned’ and change the subject. But according to her son’s prodding into her to reveal her past, he came to the knowledge that his mother’s family was immigrant in America when she was two years old. She travelled with her father, Tateh, in search of a job as a rabbi but to no avail. He would settle in Suffolk, Virginia where he opened a grocery store but he exploited his customers by overcharging them due to his religion based lined mindset. He …show more content…
She would convert to Christianity and indulge into a lot of church activities and later they opened a ‘New Brown Memorial church’ in remembrance of Reverend Brown, their favorite preacher. Dennis would later succumb to lung cancer and die, amidst her pregnancy with James, a painful moment for Ruth where she mourned deeply. She sought help from her relatives but no one would relate with her. She then met her second husband, Hunter and bore four