The Color of Water

A few months ago, I mentioned the best-selling book The Color of Water. As I prepare to teach and preach this weekend, I've been drawn back to this amazing story and the way in which it connects with Mary, the mother of Jesus.

About ten years ago, James McBride wrote a book about his mother that captured the hearts of many Americans. The book, The Color of Water, is his tribute to his mother who raised twelve children on her own in the Red Hook Housing Projects in Harlem, New York City. “As a boy . . . James knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she’d simply say, ‘I’m light skinned.’ Later he wondered if he was different, too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. ‘You’re a human being,’ she snapped.”

On another occasion, after a rousing experience in church, James asked his mother if God was white or black. “God is a spirit . . . neither. God is the color of water.”
When James was 14, his stepfather died. His biological father, a devout Christian who stared the Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem which still stands today, died while his mother carried him in her womb. The death of two husbands sent his mother into a state of chaos. She coped by riding her bike all over Harlem. While most drove cars, took the bus, hopped on the subway, she decided to ride her red bike through the busy streets of America’s biggest city. “The image of her riding that bike bicycle typified her whole existence to me. Her oddness, her complete nonawareness of what the world thought of her, nonchalance in the face of what I perceived to be imminent danger from blacks and whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world. She saw none of it.”

The Color of Water is the story of his mother’s life—a story of a rabbi’s daughter (she was Jewish ethnically but later became a bible believing Christian because of the acceptance she experienced in the black Christian community), born in Poland, raised a southerner, abused by the men in her life, only to escape to New York City to make a new life for herself and her children. In the end, all twelve of her children attended college: they became doctors, lawyers, teachers, and psychologists. From the projects to Harvard, their mother’s eccentric ways and unrelenting love pushed them to seize all that life offered. In retrospect, all of her children realized that their mother’s love was like the power of the moon. “It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, and thus completely ignorable.”