the color of water sparknotes literature guide james mcbride

Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion-and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain. 'Mommy,' a fiercely protective woman with 'dark eyes full of pep and fire,' herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades and commanded respect. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in 'orchestrated chaos' with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. James McBride, journalist, musician and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared 'light-skinned' woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. He complies, and despite a performance that would have inspired jeers and ridicule from his Black peers, the White students believe he is the best dancer they’ve ever seen.Touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son. In middle school and high school, White students literally ask James to dance for them, assuming he can move like James Brown simply because he is a person of color. James’s precarious tightrope walk between White and Black America continues. This panic culminates in an incident in which he punches the adolescent son of a Black Panther because he believes the boy’s father is going to try to kill Ruth.

As he watches White newscasters incite panic over the supposed threat the Panthers pose to White America, James concludes that the Black Power movement must logically be a threat to his White mother. James is attracted to the fashion and iconography associated with the movement, but he is also susceptible to the media narrative about Black Power and its most visible and controversial auxiliary group, the Black Panthers. In the 1960s, the emergence of the Black Power movement highlights James’s inability to know where and how he fits. As a child, James questions why he looks different from his mother.

The color of water sparknotes literature guide james mcbride