The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride--Memoir

Engaging Readers through High Stakes, Structure that Mirrors Themes, and Compelling Narrative and Character Arcs

Engaging the Reader with a High Stakes Conflict
In the memoir, The Color of Water, McBride brings readers into his family, his neighborhood, the Civil Rights Movement, and the core conflict that drives his story--his mounting confusion about his mother, his identity, and where he belongs:​

As a kindergartner at the bus stop: He knows that his father, who died before he was born, was black. At the bus stop, he notices that his mother doesn’t look like the mothers of the other black children at the bus stop. She doesn’t look like him. In fact, she looks white like his kindergarten teacher, but she insists she is light-skinned.
 
Every Sunday at church: Looking across rows of black faces sitting in the church pews, it is clear to McBride that his mother is the only light-skinned face? white face????
 
In the neighborhood: Seeing his mother in these different contexts and watching her ride her bike through the neighborhood with black kids zipping past her on Sting-Ray bikes and skateboards, McBride eventually became clear that his mother was a white woman living in a black world.
 
Blacks talking about whites: With Malcom X labeling white people as the “white devil” and the rise of Black Power, McBride feared black people might kill his white mother. Yet, his mother didn’t feel threatened, nor did she think “white devil” applied to her.
 
His mother on black and white: McBride details the many contradictions in his mother’s decisions and her advice about black people and white people: White folks were evil toward blacks, but, McBride, having decided his mother was white, didn’t see her acting evil toward blacks. Additionally, even though she said whites were evil toward blacks, she placed him and his siblings in white schools to get the best education; Blacks were more trustworthy, but anything involving blacks was substandard. She may have been the only white person in a black church, but this meant that he was often the only black kid in a white classroom.
 
McBride’s confusion about who his mother was and where she belonged was compounded by the fact that she never talked about her parents, where she grew up, or anything else related to her past. He felt that if he could only understand who his mother was, he could understand who he was. He decided that his life would be easier if she were clearly black or clearly white. 

Engaging the Reader with a Structure that Mirrors the Main Themes 

The structure of McBride’s memoir mirrors his increasing confusion and then his increasing understanding of his mother and himself.  It is a memoir that illustrates how the structure of a book can echo the main themes in an individual's life and the author’s main point.  Chapters focused on McBride alternate with chapters in which his mother reveals her past. Readers walk beside McBride and his mother as her story and his trips to her hometown, Suffolk, Virginia, culminate in his understanding of who his mother is and, by extension, who he is.  

 The chapters progress thematically rather than through a strict linear chronology. For example, McBride’s chapters focus on McBride’s siblings (Brothers and Sisters), his family’s relationship with the church (The New Testament),  School, and the Civil Rights Movement (Black Power). His mother’s chapters focus on her Jewish heritage (Kosher and the Old Testament), her brother (Sam), and school (Schul). Through the juxtaposition of thematic chapters, the author and the reader discover that his mother was white and also Jewish. As a young girl, she was teased and bullied. In the family, she was used. Her father, Fishel Shilskey, used her; her brother, Sam, and her sister, Dee-Dee, as free labor for his grocery store. He sexually abused her.

People in Suffolk, Virginia, who knew Ruth's mother, Hudis, described her as a sweet woman. She was a Polish immigrant whose left side had been paralyzed by polio. Fearful of the husband who married her for her family’s money and sponsorship to New York where her oldest sister lived, she did what she could for her daughter.

 At school, McBride’s mother was teased because she was Jewish. Worse, the Jewish community ostracized her family because her father’s store sold to the black community.  She found acceptance and love with Dennis, a black man. When she married him, her family performed the Jewish ritual of sitting shiva for the dead.  Dead to her parents and siblings, she closed the door to her younger self, changing her name from Rachel to Ruth and leaving her Jewish culture and heritage behind.

Engaging the Reader with Compelling Narrative and Character Arcs

Even though the story progresses through thematic chapters, there is a clear narrative arc and an arc of transformation for the author and his mother. Through her decisions to marry Dennis,  a black man, and live in a black neighborhood, McBride’s mother moves from abuse and alienation to love and belonging. She becomes a wife and the mother of twelve mixed-race children, develops lifelong friends who are black, and is embraced by Christians in the New Brown Church founded by her husband.

McBride’s chapters also demonstrate a clear narrative arc and an arc of transformation. There are two components to these arcs: McBride’s identity crisis and his grief after the death of his stepfather. The identity crisis resolves as his mother shares her life story and McBride takes trips to Suffolk, Virginia, where his mother lived as a girl and a young woman. Through her story and his interactions with people who knew his mother and her family in Suffolk, Virginia, McBride experiences the loneliness of his mother and grandmother, loneliness created by the cruelty of his grandfather and the discrimination against Jewish individuals and blacks.

McBride had searched school records, court records. and other documents. He had explored his mother’s hometown, ordering lunch in a McDonald’s restaurant on the very spot where his grandfather’s grocery store had stood. And he had spent time with people who knew his mother and her family. The moment came when he had read, explored, and gleaned enough information about his mother’s family from the town’s older residents that the isolation and suffering of his grandmother, his mother, and her siblings overwhelmed him with a loneliness that began to suffocate him. He had seen and heard and experienced enough that finally a moment of clarity came, resolving his question about who he was and where he belonged:

"It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times and the loneliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in this lonely southern town—far from her mothers and sisters in New York, unable to speak English, a disabled Polish immigrant whose husband had no love for her and whose dreams of seeing her children grow up in America vanished as her life drained out of her at the age of forty-six—suddenly rose up in my blood and washed in waves, a penetrating loneliness covered me and lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face. I had no tears to shed. They were done long ago, but a new pain and a new awareness were born inside me. The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate; the ache that the little boy who stared in the mirror felt was gone."
 
 
The second element of McBride’s arc tracks his transition from a confused, but good kid, to a confused, acting-out kid, to the man who went to college and became a writer. McBride didn’t really know Dennis, his biological father, who died before he was born. However, he had a warm relationship with his stepfather and called him Daddy. After his stepfather’s death when he was fourteen, a confused and grieving McBride skipped school, shoplifted, stole purses, smoked marijuana, and abused alcohol. Unable to impact McBride’s bad decisions, his mother sent him to live with relatives in Kentucky in the summers. Over three summers, he hung out on a street corner with unemployed men who were alcoholics. These men looked out for him. One told him what he needed to know. Chicken Man could see that McBride thought he was special because he was smart. He let McBride know that the men on the corner were also smart. If he didn’t change, he would end up dead, in jail, or wasting his potential on the street corner just like the men around him. When Chicken Man died senselessly after an argument with a girlfriend, McBride reconsidered his decisions. Eventually recognizing the truth of Chicken Man’s prophecy, he returned to school with the renewed goal of attending college.

Engaging the Reader by Finding the Story's North Star

Developing a structure for a memoir that resonates with its main themes, engages the reader through a compelling narrative arc, and unfolds to reveal a significant transformation in your perspective, decisions, or something else, begins with committing time to reflect on questions  such as the following:

What do you want to say through the events in the story and your response to those events?
 
What themes and issues related to the human condition do you want your story to explore?
 
What do you want the reader to think and feel after reading the last word on the last page of the book?
 
Your themes and what you want to say, and what you want the reader to take away from your story, are the North Star that will guide you to a structure that serves your story. They are the North Star that guides selection of the specific events that define what is at stake and create a compelling narrative arc that reveals how and why, you, the main character transform over the course of the story. Whether you sit down and dive into writing your story or carefully plan it out, take some time to reflect on the questions above to find and develop your story’s North Star.
 

---