The Color of Water

“Mommy was, by her own definition, “light-skinned,” a statement which I had initially accepted as fact but at some point later decided was not true. My best friend Billy Smith’s mother was as light as Mommy was and had red hair to boot, but there was no question in my mind that Billy’s mother was black and my mother was not.”

Colorism is an incredibly powerful force in The Color of Water, but it also has its limits. Despite the hierarchy of skin color within Black and diverse racial communities, James sees race in binary, exclusionary terms: Black and white. No matter where she lives, whom she marries, or what her children look like, Ruth’s Polish Jewish ancestry makes it impossible for her to cross from whiteness into Blackness.

“But there was a part of me that feared black power very deeply for the obvious reason. I thought black power would be the end of my mother. I had swallowed the white man’s fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole.”

As a young impressionable boy sitting in front of the television screen, James internalizes 1960s media representations of Black Power as an existential threat to white America. To James, it follows logically that his white mother Ruth is a prime target for the ascendant Black nationalist movements spreading through major cities at the time. Tragically, this forces James to view expressions of Black pride as direct threats to his mother, scrambling his ability to embrace his Black identity.

“On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.”

For all of Ruth’s efforts to bury her Jewish immigrant past, these experiences shape her life and the way she raises her children in profound ways. James cannot simply pretend that his European Jewish heritage is irrelevant, despite the fact that it feels so distant to him. The need to uncover that heritage animates James throughout the book, as he investigates the Shilsky side of his extended family.

“[W]hite folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard.”

When speaking to James and the rest of her children, Ruth professes an obliviousness toward race that could be characterized as colorblindness. Whenever James asks if she is Black or white, she dodges the question, arguing that she is simply the way God made her. This attitude comes out in the quotation that lends the book its title: that God is the “color of water” (51). Yet as James suggests here, Ruth is keenly aware of race, particularly in her decisions over where to send her children to school. In America, where race factors into so much about the country’s economic, cultural, and historical identity, true obliviousness to race is impossible, factoring into The Layered Nature of Privilege.

“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.”

As the son of a white mother and a Black father, James is particularly sensitive to media messaging that white and Black people are adversaries. Aside from the nightly news reports that very clearly stoke white America’s fear of Black nationalism, this messaging is evident even in ostensibly non-political media, like sports journalism. St. Louis pitcher Bob Gibson is a fascinating example. Because of his skin color and imposing stature, Gibson drew criticism for “intimidating” white batters. In response, Gibson often pointed out that an average Black man simply living his life faced far more intimidation than a white batter facing off against Bob Gibson.

“The biggest event Suffolk had seen in years was a traveling sideshow that came through town on the railroad tracks, with a stuffed whale in a boxcar. The folks loved that. They loved anything different, or new, or from out of town, except for Jews. In school the kids called me ‘Christ killer’ and ‘Jew baby.’ That name stuck with me for a long time. “Jew baby.” You know it’s so easy to hurt a child.”

Ruth’s upbringing as a Jew in the South reflects the layered nature of privilege and discrimination in America. As a white girl, Ruth is permitted to attend the white-only public school, unlike the children of her Black neighbors who attend the underfunded Black-only school. Yet she is still an outsider, forced to endure antisemitic hatred. Ruth learns that in the US, Jews do not belong to the same category of privilege that other white people do, highlighting the theme of The Layered Nature of Privilege.

“I used to see that empty chair we left for Elijah at the table and wish I could be gone to wherever Elijah was, eating over somebody else’s house where your father didn’t crawl into bed with you at night, interrupting your dreams so you don’t know if it’s really him or just the same nightmare happening over and over again.”

This quote reflects how Ruth’s sexual abuse at the hands of her rabbi father conflates with her view of Judaism. Hebrew tradition looks forward to the day Elijah will appear to herald the arrival of the Messiah. For that reason, an empty chair is left for Elijah at the Passover Seder. Yet when Ruth looks at that chair, all she can think is, wherever Elijah is, it must be better than her home, which is ruled by an abusive and unloving tyrant.

“God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

Adding to James’s confusion Growing Up With a Diverse Racial Background is the fact that while all of the iconography of Jesus Christ depicts him as a white man, Ruth insists that God is neither Black nor white. This reflects the colorblind attitude she seeks to instill in her children. These efforts, however, do not consider the social and economic divisions along racial lines that are impossible for James to ignore. Furthermore, the explanation that God has no color is difficult for James to accept, given his need for a decisive answer explaining his own racial identity.

“‘Look at them laughing,’ he’d say in Yiddish. ‘They don’t have a dime in their pocket and they’re always laughing.’ But he had plenty money and we were all miserable.”

This is a formative moment for Ruth, who will aggressively reject her father’s materialism as an adult, particularly with respect to how she raises her children. One of the overarching themes of her childhood is that while her family never went hungry and always had a roof over their heads, they were emotionally impoverished when it came to love. Ruth vows never to prioritize money over love, God, or education, and the fruits of this approach are difficult to argue with: All 12 of her children earn bachelor’s degrees, and most of them build exemplary professional careers in medicine, business, and journalism.

“‘She’ll come back,’ Daddy said. ‘It’ll work out.’ He had no idea what to do about Helen. They spoke a completely different language. He was an old-timer who called school ‘schoolin’’ and called me ‘boy.’ He had run off from Jim Crow in the South and felt that education, any education, was a privilege. Helen was far beyond that.”

The Color of Water traces divisions between white and Black, light skin and dark skin, urban and rural, North and South, and Christian and Jewish. Here, James adds yet another division: the Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era generations. Hunter, who grew up amid the twin scourges of segregation and routine anti-Black terrorism, sees the fact that Helen goes to one of the city’s top magnet schools for Music and Arts as extraordinary privilege. Yet Helen comes of age at a time when young Black Americans feel increasingly empowered to demand equal treatment within America’s social and legal frameworks, as opposed to mere survival as second-class citizens.

“She never spoke about Jewish people as white. She spoke about them as Jews.”

The question of where Jews exist on America’s racial spectrum—a categorization that smacks of Nazi overtones—continues to be a subject of some debate for those who want to turn America into a white ethno-state, excluding Jews. Though Jews are frequently subjected to antisemitic discrimination, a refusal to categorize non-Black Jews as white is problematic. James grapples with this question, but comes to no definitive answer.

“I felt the blood rush to my face and sank low in my chair, seething inside, yet I did nothing. I imagined what my siblings would have done. They would have gone wild. They would have found that punk and bum-rushed him. They never would’ve allowed anyone to call them a n*****. But I was not them. I was shy and passive and quiet, and only later did the anger come bursting out of me, roaring out of me with such blast-furnace force that I would wonder who that person was and where it all came from.”

One of the book’s chief preoccupations is the effect of racism on children. James is “shy and passive,” and therefore he lacks the emotional constitution to respond to so vile a racist attack in the moment. At the same time, such an attack is impossible to shrug off, and therefore he internalizes his anger, only to see it take shape later on in unhealthy behaviors like drug and alcohol use. Of course, the real problem is that any child, regardless of temperament, be exposed to vicious bigotry in the first place—the idea that James should have responded appropriately or otherwise is completely beside the point.

“The boy in the mirror, he didn’t seem to have an ache. He was free. He was never hungry, he had his own bed probably, and his mother wasn’t white.”

James focuses his imagination and escapist tendencies on the image of himself in the mirror. He fantasizes that the mirror version has easy access to basic amenities and is free of confusion regarding his racial identity. Although James loves his mother, her whiteness makes him feel like an outsider in both white spaces and Black spaces.

“The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable.”

In this simile, James likens race to the moon. The moon gives off the illusion of silence and stillness, but in reality, its imperceptible rotation is a form of supreme influence on earthly phenomena. Likewise, James’s race affects how he navigates the world in countless ways. Ruth’s refusal to acknowledge her racial identity and the racial identities of her children may do them a disservice—ignoring race only adds to James’s crisis of identity.

“As I walked home, holding Mommy’s hand while she fumed, I thought it would be easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don’t consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust photographs of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, There but for the grace of God goes my own mother—and by extension, myself.”

Given that James grows up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, surrounded by older siblings who embrace the Black Power movement, it is understandable that he gravitates toward the Black side of his heritage more than the Jewish side. Only in adulthood does James appreciate the richness that comes with belonging to two different cultural traditions—richness he calls spiritual privilege.

“Rachel Deborah Shilsky could drive a car and pull a trailer behind it, but Ruth McBride Jordan had never touched a steering wheel before that day in 1973, and you can make book on it.”

The fact that a middle-aged Ruth cannot drive is evidence of how deeply she buried her past as Rachel Shilsky. This is largely due to the pain she associates with her youth, including the trauma of sexual abuse and the trauma of losing her mother and sister forever in her efforts to escape her tyrannical father. Yet the Shilsky legacy lives on subconsciously and spiritually in both Ruth and her children.

“The way Tateh treated her, they’d call her an ‘abused woman’ today. Back then they just called you ‘wife.’”

Growing up as a European immigrant in the Depression Era South, Ruth lacks the vocabulary to describe her father’s abuse. James later learns that Tateh’s abuse of Mameh was an open secret in the community, yet in those days—as often still the case today—what a man did in his own home was his business. Given the strength of these insidious cultural norms, it is all the more impressive that Ruth escaped this nightmarish household, albeit at great personal cost.

“It helped me to hear the Christian way, because I needed help, I needed to let Mameh go, and that’s when I started to become a Christian and the Jew in me began to die. The Jew in me was dying anyway, but it truly died when my mother died.”

Mameh is Ruth’s only positive thread to Judaism. While Ruth tends to be reductive when discussing Christianity and Judaism—she characterizes the former as full of love and the latter as rigid and culturally cloistered—this attitude makes sense given her experiences with each religion.

“That chicken is just showing God we’re thankful for living. It’s just a chicken. It’s not a bird who flies. A bird who flies is special. You would never trap a bird who flies.”

Mameh memorably tells Ruth that there is nothing wrong or grotesque about slaughtering a chicken because it cannot fly—it is not a “special” bird. In examining the subtext of this quote, Mameh’s intention may be to give Ruth tacit permission to escape. Unlike a chicken, Ruth is capable of thriving on her own, and therefore it would be unjust to keep her trapped in Tateh’s household. The dark side of this interpretation is that Mameh sees herself as a flightless bird, unable to escape and destined to experience Tateh’s cruel and controlling behavior.

“Like most of the Jews in Suffolk they treated me very kindly, truly warm and welcoming, as if I were one of them which in an odd way I suppose I was. I found it odd and amazing when white people treated me that way, as if there were no barriers between us. It said a lot about this religion—Judaism—that some of its followers, old southern crackers who talked with southern twangs and wore straw hats, seemed to believe that its covenants went beyond the color of one’s skin.”

The capacity of religion to overcome the barriers of race is a theme that emerges throughout the book. It is true of Ruth, who finds a spiritual home in the predominantly Black churches of Harlem and Red Hook, despite usually being the only white person in the congregation. It is also true for James, who finds the Jews of Suffolk unique among white people—particularly Southern white people—in their treatment of him. Much of this is due to their shared Jewish heritage, but another factor may be their shared status as outsiders.

“My life won’t be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children’s. I left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing.”

On James’s last night in Suffolk, he comes closest to achieving a moment of closure in his quest to reconcile his racial and cultural identity. Amid evidence of the same racial, social, and economic divides that afflicted America when Ruth was a child, James finds a kernel of meaning. In Mameh, he sees a woman who lived, suffered, and died so that Ruth might escape and raise children in her own loving way. This progress is the legacy James chooses to carry on from the Jewish side of his family.

“For years, Mommy rarely talked about my father. It was as if his death was so long ago that she couldn’t remember; but deep inside she saw her marriage to him as the beginning of her life, and thus his death as part of its end, and to reach any further beyond that into her past was to go into hell, an area that she didn’t want to touch. In order to steer clear of the most verboten area, the Jewish side, she steered clear of him as well. Her memory was like a minefield, each recollection a potential booby trap, a Bouncing Betty—the old land mines the Viet Cong used in the Vietnam War that never went off when you stepped on them but blew you to hell the moment you pulled your foot away.”

Ruth’s refusal to discuss her past is a source of enormous frustration for James—first in his youth, as he struggles to reconcile the duality of his identity, and later as an adult, as he attempts to write a book about his mother. Here, he understands why Ruth is as reluctant to discuss Dennis as she is to discuss Tateh and her traumatic upbringing in Suffolk. It is as if Dennis represents less a permanent escape from her upbringing and more a temporary reprieve, and thus his absence only serves to remind her of the abusive times before they met.

“Given my black face and upbringing it was easy for me to flee into the anonymity of blackness, yet I felt frustrated to live in a world that considers the color of your face an immediate political statement whether you like it or not. It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous ‘white man’s world’ wasn’t as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals’ problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too. Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle. In order to clear it, my solution was to stay away from it and fly solo.”

James’s personal journey does not result in a unified theory of racial identity. The best he can achieve is a personal reconciliation with his own cultural and racial identity, which exists in its own unique space. For a man with Orthodox Jewish grandparents, a white Christian mother, and a Black father, James has a singular view on race and religion in America, which resists universalizing philosophical or political statements.