The Spirit Behind the Story

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother by James McBride.  Riverhead Books.  295 pp.  *****

I was so overwhelmed by The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store that I decided to reread James McBride’s memoir of life with his mother, The Color of Water.  I knew his own situation influenced the novel, but wasn’t sure how.  In an interview that he posted on his website, he said he wrote his novel because his grandmother had had a very hard life where she wasn’t respected or appreciated, and he wanted to give her a different life, one where she was loved and happy.  He most certainly did that in The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.  But it isn’t some sappy kind of happiness.  She has any number of difficulties, stands up to all kinds of difficult people, and dies after a sexual assault.  But she was loved and adored as she should have been.

The real life story is much grimmer, and, if anything, weirder.  James’ grandfather on his mother’s side was an Orthodox Rabbi who kept traveling from place to place trying to find a congregation, but after he spent a few months in a new place they decided they wanted no parts of him.  He wasn’t an especially good rabbi, and wasn’t a kind and loving person.  His wife—like the woman in the novel—had had polio as a child, walked with a severe limp, and was weak on her left side in general, often sickly.

He finally settled in, of all places, Suffolk, Virginia, where the Jewish population was small and couldn’t be too picky, and he opened a grocery store in the black section of town, not out of altruism, as happens in the novel, but because he knew he could overcharge his poor population and cheat them, since they had no other choice.  It was this situation that his sensitive and intelligent daughter Rachel (she later changed her name to Ruth) lived in, and she, as it turned out, was the truly rebellious soul, not her mother.  I would say she is one of the most memorable characters in all of literature except that she isn’t a character; she’s a real person.  And in this novel McBride not only tells us about his mother, he lets her speak for herself, in alternate chapters.  She was doing so after a lifetime of reticence, not wanting to speak up.  But the woman was a natural and unbridled storyteller.

She didn’t have a happy life in Suffolk.  She was picked on and laughed at because she was Jewish, and had only one friend when she was a child.   But she got along with the black customers of her father’s store, and at one point did something that was so transgressive in her day that it was almost unthinkable; she began spending time with a black boyfriend and actually got pregnant with him.  Her father would have gone berserk if he’d known, but her mother, a shadowy figure in this book, understood the pain of her life and also the way she had tried to escape it.  Rachel often visited her mother’s family in New York in the summer, and her mother knew that one of her sisters would take care of the situation, and one did.  Rachel had an illegal abortion, and when she got back to Suffolk she found out that her boyfriend, though he wanted to take up with her again, was engaged to another woman, whom he had also impregnated.  He was a loving, caring person.  He was a little too loving.

But Rachel had tasted another kind of life, and she never looked back.  She moved to New York, lived and worked in Harlem, got tangled up with a charming pimp and almost became a prostitute, but just in the nick of time met a man who truly loved her and wanted to marry her.  With him she had eight children (James was the last of the eight, born when his father was fatally ill) and also started a Christian church, in her living room, in which he was the preacher, and which has continued in Harlem until this day.  This daughter of an Orthodox rabbi had converted to Christianity because it was Christians, black Christians, who had loved and accepted her.  It was their love that convinced her, more than any theological reason.  She had found her spiritual home.

After her first husband died she married a second one, a different kind of person, but who was just as good a father.  With him she had four children, for a grand total of twelve.  She did all this despite the fact that she faced fierce prejudice in Harlem and in the rest of Manhattan; there were plenty of black people, as well as whites, who didn’t like what she was doing.  But she knew what she wanted, married men whom she loved and who were good fathers to her children, was fierce in getting good educations for them.  All twelve went to college and had distinguished careers.  McBride lists their resumes at the end.

This astonishing mother almost overshadows the story of her remarkable son, who had plenty of difficulties of his own.  He was low man on the totem pole in his family for a long time, picked on and mocked by his older siblings, who would nevertheless have stood up for him if he’d needed them.  He had an extremely rebellious adolescence, including shoplifting, extensive drinking and drug use, despite his mother’s fury and repeated beatings with a belt.  He finally got himself straightened out and got a scholarship to Oberlin College, where he studied both music and journalism, and has maintained a career in both things to this day, sometimes giving himself to writing, other times to performing and composing music.  He is now, at the age of 65, a bestselling and hugely acclaimed novelist, also still a composer and performer.  In many ways he’s as unique a person as his mother.

There’s no simple way that the material of these lives made their way into The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.  McBride seems to be an instinctive artist, and a lot of his story seems to have come to him as he wrote it.  But his mother’s life and his own clearly set the stage for the backdrop of his remarkable novel.  The way he transformed them is a tribute to the magic of the literary imagination.