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“As lively as a novel, a well-written, thoughtful contribution to the literature on race.” —The Washington Post Book World

“It’s a story about keeping on and about not being a victim. It’s a love story…Much hilarity is mixed in with much sadness. As McBride describes the chaotic life in a family of fourteen, you can almost feel the teasing, the yelling, and the love.…The book is a delight, a goading, and an inspiration, worth your time and a few tears.”

—Sunday Denver Post

“A standout among the current surfeit of memoirs about growing up black in the United States…Mr. McBride’s portrait of his mother is not of a saint, which makes her all the more compelling.”

—The Washington Times

“Told with humor and clear-eyed grace…a terrific story…The sheer strength of spirit, pain, and humor of McBride and his mother as they wrestled with different aspects of race and identity is vividly told.…I laughed and thrilled to her brood of twelve kids…I wish I’d known them. I’m glad James McBride wrote it all down so I can.”

—The Nation

“A refreshing portrait of family self-discovery…brilliantly inter twine[s] passages of the family’s lives…Mr. McBride’s search is less about racial turmoil than about how he realizes how blessed he is to have had a support system in the face of what could have been insurmountable obstacles.”

—The Dallas Morning News

“James McBride has combined the techniques of the memoirist and the oral historian to illuminate a hidden corner of race relations. The author and his mother are two American originals.”

—Susan Brownmiller

“A lyrical, deeply moving tribute.…The Color of Water is about the love that a mother has for her children.”

—The Detroit News

“What makes this story inspiring is that she succeeded against strong odds…how she did this is what makes this memoir read like a very well-plotted novel. This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The author, his mother, and his siblings come across as utterly unique, heroic, fascinating people. I couldn’t stop reading the book once I began. McBride is a wonderful writer.”

—Jonathan Kozol

“Eloquent…vivid, affecting…McBride’s mother should take much pleasure in this loving, if sometimes uncomfortable, memoir, which embodies family values of the best kind. Other readers will take pleasure in it as well.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Tells us a great deal about our nations racial sickness—and about the possibilities of triumphing over it.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Eye- and mind-opening about the eternal convolutions and paradoxes of race in America.” —Chicago Tribune (Tempo)

“Poignant…a uniquely American coming of age…Ruth McBride Jordan’s anecdotes are richly detailed, her voice clear and engaging. And she has a story worth telling.”

—The Miami Herald

“Fascinating…superbly written.” —The Boston Globe

“Remarkable…a page-turner, full of compassion, tremendous hardship and triumph…McBride’s story is ultimately a celebration delivered with humor and pride.”

—Emerge

“A wonderful story that goes beyond race…richly detailed…earthy, honest.” —The Baltimore Sun

“[A] remarkable saga.” —New York Newsday

Praise for James McBride’s

Miracle at St. Anna

“McBride creates an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Searingly, soaringly beautiful…The book’s central theme, its essence, is a celebration of the human capacity for love.”

—The Baltimore Sun

“McBride is adept at describing the wartime state of mind: land and people lying ravaged in the wake of a wild brutality.…His narrative, which is based on a true story, plunges straight to the heart.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“McBride makes an impressive foray into fiction with a multi-shaded WWII tale…a haunting meditation on faith that is also a crack military thriller…strikingly cinematic…With nods to Ralph Ellison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, McBride creates a mesmerizing concoction…a miracle in itself.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“So descriptive that I feel as though I’m an eyewitness to everything that happens emotionally on the frontline.”

—The Dallas Morning News

“James McBride…brings formidable storytelling skills and lyrical imagination to his novel…[He] deftly broadens the landscape of his drama by entering the minds of a range of supporting characters: Italian freedom fighters, white army officers, starving villagers, a clairvoyant, and even a sixteenth- century sculptor.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Great-hearted, hopeful, and deeply imaginative.” —Elle

“McBride has taken a bold leap into fiction. [He] goes deep into each character and takes you with him. His rich description of the landscape…transports you into this world. It’s a great piece of storytelling. I cried. I laughed. I hated finishing this book.”

—Albuquerque Tribune

“Full of miracles of friendship, of salvation and survival.” —Los Angeles Times

“Riveting.” —Newsday

“A sweetly compelling novel. McBride combines elements of history, mythology, and magical realism to make this a story about the little things like life and forgiveness and shared experience.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Miracle at St. Anna powerfully examines the horrors of history and finds an unexpected wealth of goodness and compassion in the human soul.”

—Newark Star-Ledger

“The miracles of survival, of love born in extremity, and of inexplicable ‘luck’ are the subjects of this first novel. [Miracle at St. Anna] is true to the stark realities of racial politics yet has an eye to justice and hope.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Roars ahead kicking and screaming to the finish, lightning-lit with rage and tenderness.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“A powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind.…Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A tale of hardship and horror as well as nobility and—yes—miracles, during the Italian campaign in World War II.”

—Philadelphia Daily News

“World War II provides a dazzling backdrop for James McBride’s first novel.” —Savoy

“A brutal and moving first novel…McBride’s heart is on his sleeve, but these days it looks just right.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Also by James McBride

MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA

SONG YET SUNG

The Color of Water

A BLACK MAN’S TRIBUTE TO HIS WHITE MOTHER

James McBride

Riverhead Books, New York

RIVERHEAD BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 1996, 2006 by James McBride Readers Group Guide copyright © 2006 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Cover design copyright © 1996 by Honi Werner

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First Riverhead hardcover edition: January 1996 First Riverhead trade paperback edition: February 1997 First Riverhead trade paperback 10th Anniversary Edition: February 2006

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Riverhead hardcover edition as follows;

McBride, James. The color of water: a Black man’s tribute to his white mother / James McBride.

p. cm. ISBN: 978-1-4406-3610-3 1. McBride-Jordan, Ruth, 1921– 2. McBride, James, date. 3. Mulattoes—New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 4. Mothers—New

York (N.Y.)—Biography. 5. Whites—New York (N.Y.)—Biography. 6. Mulattoes—New York (N.Y.)—Race Identity. I. Title.

F130.N4M38 1996 974.’100496073’0092—dc20 95-37243 CIP

[B]

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

I wrote this book for my mother,

and her mother, and mothers everywhere.

In memory of Hudis Shilsky, Rev. Andrew D. McBride, and Hunter L. Jordan, Sr.

Contents

1. Dead

2. The Bicycle

3. Kosher

4. Black Power

5. The Old Testament

6. The New Testament

7. Sam

8. Brothers and Sisters

9. Shul

10. School

11. Boys

12. Daddy

13. New York

14. Chicken Man

15. Graduation

16. Driving

17. Lost in Harlem

18. Lost in Delaware

19. The Promise

20. Old Man Shilsky

21. A Bird Who Flies

22. A Jew Discovered

23. Dennis

24. New Brown

25. Finding Ruthie

Epilogue

Afterword

Thanks and Acknowledgments

As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from—where she was born, who her parents were. When I asked she’d say, “God made me.” When I asked if she was white, she’d say, “I’m light-skinned,” and change the subject. She raised twelve black children and sent us all to college and in most cases graduate school. Her children became doctors, professors, chemists, teachers—yet none of us even knew her maiden name until we were grown. It took me fourteen years to unearth her remarkable story —the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, she married a black man in 1942—and she revealed it more as a favor to me than out of any desire to revisit her past. Here is her life as she told it to me, and betwixt and between the pages of her life you will find mine as well.

The Color of Water

1.

Dead

I’m dead. You want to talk about my family and here I been dead to them for fifty years. Leave me alone. Don’t

bother me. They want no parts of me and me I don’t want no parts of them. Hurry up and get this interview over with. I want to watch Dallas. See, my family, if you had a been part of them, you wouldn’t have time for this foolishness, your roots, so to speak. You’d be better off watching the Three Stooges than to interview them, like to go interview my father, forget it. He’d have a heart attack if he saw you. He’s dead now anyway, or if not he’s 150 years old.

I was born an Orthodox Jew on April 1, 1921, April Fool’s Day, in Poland. I don’t remember the name of the town where I was born, but I do remember my Jewish name: Ruchel Dwajra Zylska. My parents got rid of that name when we came to America and changed it to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and I got rid of that name when I was nineteen and never used it again after I left Virginia for good in 1941. Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live.

My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat shiva. That’s how Orthodox Jews mourn their dead. They say prayers, turn their mirrors down, sit on boxes for seven days, and cover their heads. It’s a real workout, which is maybe why I’m not a Jew now. There were too many rules to follow, too many forbiddens and “you can’ts” and “you mustn’ts,” but does anybody say they love you? Not in my family we didn’t. We didn’t talk that way. We said things like, “There’s a box in there for the nails,” or my father would say, “Be quiet while I sleep.”

My father’s name was Fishel Shilsky and he was an Orthodox rabbi. He escaped from the Russian army and snuck over the Polish border and married my mother in an arranged marriage. He used to say he was under fire when he ran off from the army, and his ability to slick himself out of anything that wasn’t good for him stayed with him for as long as I knew him. Tateh, we called him. That means father in Yiddish. He was a fox, especially when it came to money. He was short, dark, hairy, and gruff. He wore a white shirt, black pants, and a tallis on his shirtsleeve, and that was like his uniform. He’d wear those black pants till they glazed and shined and were ripe enough to stand in the corner by themselves, but God help you if those pants were coming your way in a hurry, because he was nobody to fool with, my father. He was hard as a rock.

My mother was named Hudis and she was the exact opposite of him, gentle and meek. She was born in 1896 in the town of Dobryzn, Poland, but if you checked there today, nobody would remember her family because any Jews who didn’t leave before Hitler got through with Poland were wiped out in the Holocaust. She was pretty about the face. Dark hair, high cheekbones, but she had polio. It paralyzed her left side and left her in overall poor health. Her left hand was useless. It was bent at the wrist and held close to her chest. She was nearly blind in her left eye and walked with a severe limp, dragging her left foot behind her. She was a quiet woman, my sweet Mameh. That’s what we called her, Mameh. She’s one person in this world I didn’t do right by….

2.

The Bicycle

When I was fourteen, my mother took up two new hobbies: riding a bicycle and playing piano. The piano I didn’t mind, but the bicycle drove me crazy. It was a huge old clunker, blue with white trim, with big fat tires, huge fenders, and a battery-powered horn built into the middle of the frame with a button you pushed to make it blow. The contraption would be a collector’s item now, probably worth about five thousand dollars, but back then it was something my stepfather found on the street in Brooklyn and hauled home a few months before he died.

I don’t know whether it was his decision to pull out or not, but I think not. He was seventy-two when he died, trim, strong, easygoing, seemingly infallible, and though he was my stepfather, I always thought of him as Daddy. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man who wore old-timey clothes, fedoras, button-down wool coats, suspenders, and dressed neatly at all times, regardless of how dirty his work made him. He did everything slowly and carefully, but beneath his tractor-like slowness and outward gentleness was a crossbreed of quiet Indian and country black man, surefooted, hard, bold, and quick. He took no guff and gave none. He married my mother, a white Jewish woman, when she had eight mixed-race black children, me being the youngest at less than a year old. They added four more children to make it an even twelve and he cared for all of us as if we were his own. “I got enough for a baseball team,” he joked. One day he was there, the next—a stroke, and he was gone.

I virtually dropped out of high school after he died, failing every class. I spent the year going to movies on Forty-second Street in Times Square with my friends. “James is going through his revolution,” my siblings snickered. Still, my sisters were concerned, my older brothers angry. I ignored them. Me and my hanging-out boys were into the movies. Superfly, Shaft, and reefer, which we smoked in as much quantity as possible. I snatched purses. I shoplifted. I even robbed a petty drug dealer once. And then in the afternoons, coming home after a day of cutting school, smoking reefer, waving razors, and riding the subway, I would see my mother pedaling her blue bicycle.

She would ride in slow motion across our street, Murdock Avenue in the St. Albans section of Queens, the only white person in sight, as cars swerved around her and black motorists gawked at the strange, middle-aged white lady riding her ancient bicycle. It was her way of grieving, though I didn’t know it then. Hunter Jordan, my stepfather, was dead. Andrew McBride, my biological father, had died while she was pregnant with me fourteen years earlier. It was clear that Mommy was no longer interested in getting married again, despite the efforts of a couple of local preachers who were all Cadillacs and smiles and knew that she, and thus we, were broke. At fifty-one she was still slender and pretty, with curly black hair, dark eyes, a large nose, a sparkling smile, and a bowlegged walk you could see a mile off. We used to call that “Mommy’s madwalk,” and if she was doing it in your direction, all hell was gonna break loose. I’d seen her go up to some pretty tough dudes and shake her fist in their faces when she was angry—but that was before Daddy died. Now she seemed intent on playing the piano, dodging bill collectors, forcing us into college through sheer willpower, and riding her bicycle all over Queens. She refused to learn how to drive. Daddy’s old car sat out front for weeks, parked at the curb. Silent. Clean. Polished. Every day she rode her bike right past it, ignoring it.

The image of her riding that bicycle typified her whole existence to me. Her oddness, her complete nonawareness of what the world thought of her, a 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. She rode so slowly that if you looked at her from a distance it seemed as if she

weren’t moving, the image frozen, painted against the spring sky, a middle-aged white woman on an antique bicycle with black kids zipping past her on Sting-Ray bikes and skateboards, popping wheelies and throwing baseballs that whizzed past her head, tossing firecrackers that burst all around her. She ignored it all. She wore a flower-print dress and black loafers, her head swiveling back and forth as she rode shakily past the triangle curve where I played stickball with my friends, up Lewiston Avenue, down the hill on Mayville Street where a lovely kid named Roger got killed in a car accident, back up the hill on Murdock, over the driveway curb, and to the front of our house. She would stop, teetering shakily, catching herself just before the bike collapsed onto the sidewalk. “Whew!” she’d say, while my siblings, camped on the stoop of our house to keep an eye on her, shook their heads. My sister Dotty would say, “I sure wish you wouldn’t ride that bike, Ma,” and I silently agreed, because I didn’t want my friends seeing my white mother out there riding a bicycle. She was already white, that was bad enough, but to go out and ride an old bike that went out of style a hundred years ago? And a grown-up no less? I couldn’t handle it.

As a boy, I always thought my mother was strange. She never cared to socialize with our neighbors. Her past was a mystery she refused to discuss. She drank tea out of a glass. She could speak Yiddish. She had an absolute distrust of authority and an insistence on complete privacy which seemed to make her, and my family, even odder. My family was huge, twelve kids, unlike any other family I’d ever seen, so many of us that at times Mommy would call us by saying, “Hey James—Judy-Henry-Hunter- Kath—whatever your name is, come here a minute.” It wasn’t that she forgot who we were, but there were so many of us, she had no time for silly details like names. She was the commander in chief of my house, because my stepfather did not live with us. He lived in Brooklyn until near the end of his life, staying away from the thronging masses to come home on weekends, bearing food and tricycles and the resolve to fix whatever physical thing we had broken during the week. The nuts and bolts of raising us was left to Mommy, who acted as chief surgeon for bruises (“Put iodine on it”), war secretary (“If somebody hits you, take your fist and crack ‘em”), religious consultant (“Put God first”), chief psychologist (“Don’t think about it”), and financial adviser (“What’s money if your mind is empty?”). Matters involving race and identity she ignored.

As a kid, I remember wishing I were in the TV show Father Knows Best, where the father comes home from work every day wearing a suit and tie and there are only enoughkids to fit on his lap, instead of in my house, where we walked around with huge holes in our pants, cheap Bo-Bo sneakers that cost $1.99 at John’s Bargains store, with parents who were busy and distracted, my stepfather appearing only on weekends in sleeveless T-shirt, tools in hand, and Mommy bearing diapers, pins, washcloths, Q-tips, and a child in each arm with another pulling at her dress. She barely had time to wipe the behind of one child before another began screaming at the top of her lungs. Back in the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn, where we lived before moving to the relative bliss of St. Albans, Queens, Mommy put us to bed each night like slabs of meat, laying us out three and four to a bed, one with his head to the headboard, the next with his feet to the headboard, and so on. “Head up, toes down,” she called it as she kissed us good night and laid us out in the proper position. The moment she left the room we’d fight over who got to sleep next to the wall. “I got the inside!” I’d shout, and Richard, the brother above me and thus my superior, would shake his head and say, “No, no, no. David sleeps on the inside. I have the middle. You, knucklehead, have the outside,” so all night I’d inhale David’s breath and eat Richie’s toes, and when I couldn’t stand the combination of toes and breath any longer I’d turn over and land on the cold cement floor with a clunk.

It was kill or be killed in my house, and Mommy understood that, in fact created the system. You were left to your own devices or so you thought until you were at your very wits’ end, at which time she would step in and rescue you. I was terrified when it came my turn to go to school. Although P.S. 118 was only eight blocks away, I wasn’t allowed to walk there with my siblings because kindergarten

students were required to ride the bus. On the ill-fated morning, Mommy chased me all around the kitchen trying to dress me as my siblings laughed at my terror. “The bus isn’t bad,” one quipped, “except for the snakes.” Another added, “Sometimes the bus never brings you home.” Guffaws all around.

“Be quiet,” Mommy said, inspecting my first-day-of-school attire. My clothes were clean, but not new. The pants had been Billy’s, the shirt was David’s, the coat had been passed down from Dennis to Billy to David to Richie to me. It was a gray coat with a fur collar that had literally been chewed up by somebody. Mommy dusted it off with a whisk broom, set out eight or nine bowls, poured oatmeal in each one, left instructions for the eldest to feed the rest, then ran a comb through my hair. The sensation was like a tractor pulling my curls off. “C’mon,” she said, “I’ll walk you to the bus stop.” Surprise reward. Me and Mommy alone. It was the first time I remember ever being alone with my mother.

It became the high point of my day, a memory so sweet it is burned into my mind like a tattoo, Mommy walking me to the bus stop and every afternoon picking me up, standing on the corner of New Mexico and 114th Road, clad in a brown coat, her black hair tied in a colorful scarf, watching with the rest of the parents as the yellow school bus swung around the corner and came to a stop with a hiss of air brakes.

Gradually, as the weeks passed and the terror of going to school subsided, I began to notice something about my mother, that she looked nothing like the other kids’ mothers. In fact, she looked more like my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Alexander, who was white. Peering out the window as the bus rounded the corner and the front doors flew open, I noticed that Mommy stood apart from the other mothers, rarely speaking to them. She stood behind them, waiting calmly, hands in her coat pockets, watching intently through the bus windows to see where I was, then smiling and waving as I yelled my greeting to her through the window. She’d quickly grasp my hand as I stepped off the bus, ignoring the stares of the black women as she whisked me away.

One afternoon as we walked home from the bus stop, I asked Mommy why she didn’t look like the other mothers.

“Because I’m not them,” she said. “Who are you?” I asked. “I’m your mother.” “Then why don’t you look like Rodney’s mother, or Pete’s mother? How come you don’t look like

me?” She sighed and shrugged. She’d obviously been down this road many times. “I do look like you. I’m

your mother. You ask too many questions. Educate your mind. School is important. Forget Rodney and Pete. Forget their mothers. You remember school. Forget everything else. Who cares about Rodney and Pete! When they go one way, you go the other way. Understand? When they go one way, you go the other way. You hear me?”

“Yes.” “I know what I’m talking about. Don’t follow none of them around. You stick to your brothers and

sisters, that’s it. Don’t tell nobody your business neither!” End of discussion. A couple of weeks later the bus dropped me off and Mommy was not there. I panicked. Somewhere

in the back of my mind was the memory of her warning me, “You’re going to have to learn to walk home by yourself,” but that memory blinked like a distant fog light in a stormy sea and it drowned in my panic. I was lost. My house was two blocks away, but it might as well have been ten miles because I had no idea where it was. I stood on the corner and bit back my tears. The other parents regarded me sympathetically and asked me my address, but I was afraid to tell them. In my mind was Mommy’s warning, drilled into all twelve of us children from the time we could walk: “Never, ever, ever tell

your business to nobody,” and I shook my head no, I don’t know my address. They departed one by one, until a sole figure remained, a black father, who stood in front of me with his son, saying, “Don’t worry, your mother is coming soon.” I ignored him. He was blocking my view, the tears clouding my vision as I tried to peer behind him, looking down the block to see if that familiar brown coat and white face would appear in the distance. It didn’t. In fact there wasn’t anyone coming at all, except a bunch of kids and they certainly didn’t look like Mommy. They were a motley crew of girls and boys, ragged, with wild hairdos and unkempt jackets, hooting and making noise, and only when they were almost upon me did I recognize the faces of my elder siblings and my little sister Kathy who trailed behind them. I ran into their arms and collapsed in tears as they gathered around me, laughing.

3.

Kosher

My parents’ marriage was put together by a rov, a rabbi of a high order who goes to each of the parents and sees about the dowry and arranges the marriage contract properly according to Jewish law, which meant love had nothing to do with it. See, my mother’s family had all the class and money. Tateh, I don’t know where his family was from. Mameh was his meal ticket to America, and once he got here, he was done with her. He came here under the sponsorship of my mother’s eldest sister, Laurie, and her husband, Paul Schiffman. You couldn’t just walk into America. You had to have a sponsor, someone who would say, “I’ll vouch for this person.” He came first and after a few months sent for his family—me, Mameh, and my older brother, Sam. I was two years old and Sam was four when we arrived, so I don’t remember anything about our long, perilous journey to America other than what I’ve seen in the movies. I have a legal paper in the shoebox under my bed that says I arrived here on August 23, 1923, on a steamer called the Austergeist. I kept that paper on my person wherever I went for over twenty years. That was my protection. I didn’t want them to throw me out. Who? Anybody…the government, my father, anybody. I thought they could throw you out of America like they throw you out of a baseball game. My father would say, “I’m a citizen and you’re not. I can send you back to Europe anytime I want.” He used to threaten us with that, to send us back to Europe, especially my mother, because she was the last of her family to get here and she had spent a good deal of her life running from Russian soldiers in Poland. She used to talk about the Czar or the Kaiser and how the Russian soldiers would come into the village and line up the Jews and shoot them in cold blood. “I had to run for my life,” she used to say. “I held you and your brother in my arms as I ran.” She was terrified of Europe and happy to be in America.

When we first got off the boat we lived with my grandparents Zaydeh and Bubeh on 115th and St. Nicholas in Manhattan. Although I was a tiny child, I remember Zaydeh well. He had a long beard and was jolly and always seemed to be drinking hot tea out of a glass. All the men in my family had long beards. Zaydeh kept a picture of himself and my grandmother on his bureau. It was taken while they were in Europe. They were standing side by side, Zaydeh wearing a black suit, with a hat and beard, and Bubeh wearing a wig, or shaytl, as was the religious custom. Bubeh was bald underneath that wig, I believe. That’s why women were supposed to keep their heads covered. They were bald.

I enjoyed my grandparents. They were warm and I loved them the way any grandchild loves a grandparent. They kept a clean, comfortable apartment, furnished with heavy dark mahogany pieces. Their dining room table was covered with a sparkling white lace tablecloth at all times. They were strictly Orthodox and ate kosher every day. You don’t know anything about kosher. You think it’s a halvah candy bar. You need to read up on it because I ain’t no expert. They got folks who write whole books about it, go find them and ask them! Or read the Bible! Shoot! Who am I? I ain’t nobody! I can’t be telling the world this! I don’t know! The way we did it, you had different table settings for every meal, different tablecloths, different dishes, forks, spoons, knives, everything. And you couldn’t mix your meals. Like you had your dairy meals and your meat meals. So you eat all dairy one meal and all meat the next. No mixing it up. No pork, either—no pork chops with potato salad, no bacon and eggs, forget all that. You sit your butt down and eat what you were supposed to, and do what you were supposed to. We used a special-type tablecloth for dairy meals because you could clean it with a simple dishrag as opposed to washing it. Then every Friday evening at sundown you had to light your candles and pray and the Sabbath began. That lasted till sundown Saturday. No light switches could

be turned on or off, no tearing of paper, no riding in cars or going to the movies, not even a simple thing like lighting a stove. You had to sit tight and read by candlelight. Or just sit tight. For me that was the hardest thing, sitting tight. Even as a girl, I was a runner. I liked to get out of the house and go. Run. The only thing I was allowed to do on the Sabbath was read romance magazines. I did that for years.

I remember when Zaydeh died in the apartment. I don’t know how he died, he just died. In those days people didn’t linger and fool around like people do now, with tubes hanging out their mouths and making doctors rich and all this. They just died. Dead. Bye. Well, he was dead, honey. They laid him out on his bed and brought us children into his bedroom to look at him. They had to lift me and my brother Sam off the floor to see him. His beard lay flat on his chest and his hands were folded. He had a little black tie on. He seemed asleep. I remember saying to myself that he couldn’t possibly be dead, because it seemed not too long before that he’d been alive and joking and being silly and now here he was dead as a rock. They buried him before sundown that day and we sat shiva for him. All the mirrors in the house were covered. The adults covered their heads. Everyone sat on boxes. My grandmother wore black for a long time afterwards. But you know, I felt they were burying him too quick. I wanted to ask someone, “Suppose Zaydeh isn’t dead? Suppose he’s joking and wakes up to find out he’s buried?” But a child in my family didn’t ask questions. You did what you were told. You obeyed, period.

I always remembered that, and I think that’s why I’m claustrophobic today, because I didn’t know what death was. You know my family didn’t talk of death. You weren’t allowed to say the word. The old-time Jews, they’d spit on the floor when they said the word “death” in Yiddish. I don’t know if it was superstition or what, but if my father said “death” you can bet two seconds later spit would be flying out his mouth. Why? Why not! He could throw up on the floor in his house and no one was allowed to say a word to him. Why he’d spit I do not know, but when my grandfather passed away I kept asking myself, “Suppose Zaydeh isn’t dead, then what? And he’s surrounded by all those dead people too, and he’s still alive?” Lord…anything that’s too closed in makes me feel like I can’t breathe and I’m going to die. That’s why I tell y’all to make sure I’m dead when I die. Kick me and pinch me and make sure I’m gone, because the thought of being buried alive, lying there all smushed up and smothered and surrounded by dead people and I’m still alive, Lord, that scares me to death.

4.

Black Power

When I was a boy, I used to wonder where my mother came from, how she got on this earth. When I asked her where she was from, she would say, “God made me,” and change the subject. When I asked her if she was white, she’d say, “No. I’m light-skinned,” and change the subject again. Answering questions about her personal history did not jibe with Mommy’s view of parenting twelve curious, wild, brown-skinned children. She issued orders and her rule was law. Since she refused to divulge details about herself or her past, and because my stepfather was largely unavailable to deal with questions about himself or Ma, what I learned of Mommy’s past I learned from my siblings. We traded information on Mommy the way people trade baseball cards at trade shows, offering bits and pieces fraught with gossip, nonsense, wisdom, and sometimes just plain foolishness. “What does it matter to you?” my older brother Richie scoffed when I asked him if we had any grandparents. “You’re adopted anyway.”

My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control. I told Richie I didn’t believe him.

“I don’t care if you believe me or not,” he sniffed. “Mommy’s not your real mother. Your real mother’s in jail.”

“You’re lying!” “You’ll see when Mommy takes you back to your real mother next week. Why do you think she’s

been so nice to you all week?” Suddenly it occurred to me that Mommy had been nice to me all week. But wasn’t she nice to me

all the time? I couldn’t remember, partly because within my confused eight-year-old reasoning was a growing fear that maybe Richie was right. Mommy, after all, did not really look like me. In fact, she didn’t look like Richie, or David—or any of her children for that matter. We were all clearly black, of various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly hair. 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. There was something inside me, an ache I had, like a constant itch that got bigger and bigger as I grew, that told me. It was in my blood, you might say, and however the notion got there, it bothered me greatly. Yet Mommy refused to acknowledge her whiteness. Why she did so was not clear, but even my teachers seemed to know she was white and I wasn’t. On open school nights, the question most often asked by my schoolteachers was: “Is James adopted?” which always prompted an outraged response from Mommy.

I told Richie: “If I’m adopted, you’re adopted too.” “Nope,” Richie replied. “Just you, and you’re going back to your real mother in jail.” “I’ll run away first.” “You can’t do that. Mommy will get in trouble if you do that. You don’t want to see Ma get in

trouble, do you? It’s not her fault that you’re adopted, is it?” He had me then. Panic set in. “But I don’t want to go to my real mother. I want to stay here with

Ma…” “You gotta go. I’m sorry, man.” This went on until I was in tears. I remember pacing about nervously all day while Richie, knowing

he had ruined my life, cackled himself to sleep. That night I lay wide awake in bed waiting for Mommy to get home from work at two a.m., whereupon she laid the ruse out as I sat at the kitchen table in my tattered Fruit of the Loom underwear. “You’re not adopted,” she laughed.

“So you’re my real mother?” “Of course I am.” Big kiss. “Then who’s my grandparents?” “Your grandpa Nash died and so did your grandma Etta.” “Who were they?” “They were your father’s parents.” “Where were they from?” “From down south. You remember them?” I had a faint recollection of my grandmother Etta, an ancient black woman with a beautiful face

who seemed very confused, walking around with a blue dress and a fishing pole, the bait, tackle, and line dragging down around her ankles. She didn’t seem real to me.

“Did you know them, Ma?” “I knew them very, very well.” “Did they love you?” “Why do you ask so many questions?” “I just want to know. Did they love you? Because your own parents didn’t love you, did they?” “My own parents loved me.” “Then where are they?” A short silence. “My mother died many, many years ago,” she said. “My father, he was a fox. No

more questions tonight. You want some coffee cake?” Enough said. If getting Mommy’s undivided attention for more than five minutes was a great feat in a family of twelve kids, then getting a midnight snack in my house was a greater thrill. I cut the questions and ate the cake, though it never stopped me from wondering, partly because of my own growing sense of self, and partly because of fear for her safety, because even as a child I had a clear sense that black and white folks did not get along, which put her, and us, in a pretty tight space.

In 1966, when I was nine, black power had permeated every element of my neighborhood in St. Albans, Queens. Malcolm X had been killed the year before and had grown larger in death than in life. Afros were in style. The Black Panthers were a force. Public buildings, statues, monuments, even trees, met the evening in their original bland colors and reemerged the next morning painted in the sparkling “liberation colors” of red, black, and green. Congas played at night on the streets while teenyboppers gathered to talk of revolution. My siblings marched around the house reciting poetry from the Last Poets, a sort of rap group who recited in-your-face poetry with conga and fascinating vocal lines serving as a musical backdrop, with songs titled “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution” and “On the Subway.” Every Saturday morning my friends and I would pedal our bicycles to the corner of Dunkirk Street and Ilion Avenue to watch the local drag racers near the Sun Dew soft drink factory, trying to see who could drive the fastest over a dip in the road that sent even the slowest-moving car airborne. My stepfather hit that dip at fifteen miles an hour in his ‘64 Pontiac and I bounced high in my seat. These guys hit it at ninety and their cars flew like birds, barreling through the air and landing fifteen feet away, often skidding out of control, sometimes smacking against the wall of the Sun Dew factory before wobbling away in a pile of bent metal, grilles, and fenders. Their cars had names like “Smokin’ Joe” and “Miko” and “Dream Machine” scrawled on the hoods, but our favorite was a gleaming black, souped-up GTO with the words “Black Power” written in smooth white script across the hood and top. It was the fastest and its driver was, of course, the coolest. He drove like a madman, and after leaving some poor Corvette in the dust, he’d power his mighty car in a circle, wheel it

around, and do a victory lap for us, driving by at low speed, one muscled arm angling out the window, his car rumbling powerfully, while we whistled and cheered, raising our fists and yelling, “Black power!” He’d laugh and burn rubber for us, tires screeching, roaring away in a burst of gleaming metal and hot exhaust, his taillights flashing as he disappeared into the back alleyways before the cops had a chance to bust him. We thought he was God.

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. It began with a sober white newsman on our black-and-white television set introducing a news clip showing a Black Panther rally, led by Bobby Seale or Huey Newton or one of those young black militant leaders, screaming to hundreds and hundreds of angry African-American students, “Black power! Black power! Black power!” while the crowd roared. It frightened the shit out of me. I thought to myself, These people will kill Mommy. Mommy, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned. Her motto was, “If it doesn’t involve your going to school or church, I could care less about it and my answer is no whatever it is.”

She insisted on absolute privacy, excellent school grades, and trusted no outsiders of either race. We were instructed never to reveal details of our home life to any figures of authority: teachers, social workers, cops, storekeepers, or even friends. If anyone asked us about our home life, we were taught to respond with, “I don’t know,” and for years I did just that. Mommy’s house was an entire world that she created. She appointed the eldest child at home to be “king” or “queen” to run the house in her absence and we took it from there, creating court jesters, slaves, musicians, poets, pets, and clowns. Playing in the street was discouraged and often forbidden and if you did manage to slip out, “Get your butt in this house before dark,” she would warn, a rule she enforced to the bone. I often played that rule out to its very edge, stealing into the house at dusk, just as the last glimmer of sunlight was peeking over the western horizon, closing the door softly, hoping Mommy had gone to work, only to turn around and find her standing before me, hands on hips, whipping belt in hand, eyes flicking angrily back and forth to the window, then to me, lips pursed, trying to decide whether it was light or dark outside. “It’s still light,” I’d suggest, my voice wavering, as my siblings gathered behind her to watch the impending slaughter.

“That looks like light to you?” she’d snap, motioning to the window. “Looks pretty dark,” my siblings would chirp from behind her. “It’s definitely dark, Ma!” they’d

shout, stifling their giggles. If I was lucky a baby would wail in another room and she’d be off, hanging the belt on the doorknob as she went. “Don’t do it again,” she’d warn over her shoulder, and I was a free man.