Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 453

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother," by James McBride.

My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat shiva. 

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. 

Yet conflict was a part of our lives, written into our very faces, hands, and arms, and to see how contradiction lived and survived in its essence, we had to look no farther than our own mother. Mommy’s contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island. White 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. She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of it. 

Every year the mighty bureaucratic dinosaur known as the New York City Public School System would belch forth a tiny diamond: they slipped a little notice to parents giving them the opportunity to have their kids bused to different school districts if they wanted; but there was a limited time to enroll, a short window of opportunity that lasted only a few days. Mommy stood poised over that option like a hawk. She invariably chose predominantly Jewish public schools: P.S. 138 in Rosedale, J.H.S. 231 in Springfield Gardens, Benjamin Cardozo, Francis Lewis, Forest Hills, Music and Art. Every morning we hit the door at six-thirty, fanning out across the city like soldiers, armed with books, T squares, musical instruments, an “S” bus pass that allowed you to ride the bus and subway for a nickel, and a free-school-lunch coupon in our pocket. Even the tiniest of us knew the subway and local city bus schedules and routes by heart. The number 3 bus lets you off at the corner, but the 3A turns, so you have to get off…By age twelve, I was traveling an hour and a half one way to junior high school by myself, taking two buses each direction every day. My homeroom teacher, Miss Allison, a young white woman with glasses who generally ignored me, would shrug as I walked in ten minutes late, apologizing about a delayed bus. The white kids stared at me in the cafeteria as I gobbled down the horrible school lunch. Who cared. It was all I had to eat.

In this pre-busing era, my siblings and I were unlike most other kids in our neighborhood, traveling miles and miles to largely white, Jewish communities to attend school while our friends walked to the neighborhood school. We grew accustomed to being the only black, or “Negro,” in school and were standout students, neat and well-mannered, despite the racist attitudes of many of our teachers, who were happy to knock our 95 test scores down to 85’s and 80’s over the most trivial mistakes. Being the token Negro was something I was never entirely comfortable with. I was the only black kid in my fifth-grade class at P.S. 138 in the then all-white enclave of Rosedale, Queens, and one afternoon as the teacher dutifully read aloud from our history book’s one page on “Negro history,” someone in the back of the class whispered, “James is a ni**er!” followed by a ripple of tittering and giggling across the room. The teacher shushed him and glared, but the damage had been done. 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 ni**er. 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.

Deep inside I knew that my old friend Chicken Man back in Louisville was right. I wasn’t any smarter, or any wiser, or any bolder than the cats on the Corner, and if I chose that life I would end up on the Corner no matter what my brains or potential. I knew I wasn’t raised to drink every day, to work at a gas station, and to get killed fooling around with people like Herman and his gas station knuckleheads. That life wasn’t as wild and as carefree as it looked from the outside anyway. It was ragged and cruel and I didn’t want to end up that way, stabbed to death after an argument over a bottle of wine, or shot dead by some horny dude who was trying to take my manhood. “You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself,” my sister Jack told me several times. “Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong.” I knew Jack was right, and when I got back to New York in the fall of 1973 for my junior year in high school I resolved to jump back into my studies and rebuild myself. Like my own mother did in times of stress, I turned to God. I lay in bed at night praying to Him to make me strong, to rid me of anger, to make me a man, and He listened, and I began to change.

Ma was called in to reenter the debate. “Let me think about it again,” she said. She sat down on the couch and immediately dropped off to sleep, snoring away while the rest of us argued. My mother is the only individual I know who can fall asleep instantly for two minutes—deep REM sleep, complete with snoring—only to be awakened instantly by certain select noises. A hurricane won’t move her, but the sound of a crying baby or a falling pot will send her to her feet like a soldier at reveille. When she awoke, she wandered off saying nothing. Days passed. Finally she announced: “We’re staying.” Cheers from the girls. We slowly began to unpack. The very next day she barked: “We’re moving!” Cheers from the boys. We packed again. Ma went back and forth on this for weeks while the realtor pulled out his hair trying to decide if his commission was going to come through or not. The debate lasted literally up to the August morning when we rented a U-Haul truck, loaded it up with all our worldly possessions—some of us riding with the furniture in the back—and pointed it down I-95 toward Wilmington, Delaware, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.

We thought we’d function in Wilmington as we had in New York, catching subways and buses and living off public transportation and the groove of the city. But Wilmington had no subway and only the very poor took the bus, which stopped running at about nine P.M. Unlike New York, where Ma could stretch a dollar for a mile and lead her troops to the promised land of Macy’s, Gimbels, and Ohrbach’s, entertaining them for free at museums, parades, block parties, and public concerts, Wilmington was a land of suburban shopping malls, high school marching bands, blond prom queens, small-town gossip, and an inner city from which whites were fleeing as fast as their Ford Pintos could take them. We were shocked by the racial division of the city and surrounding county, where most of the black kids attended understaffed and underfunded city schools while whites attended sparkling clean suburban schools with fantastic facilities. The segregated schools came as a complete surprise to Mommy, who had not even considered that problem, and the southern vibe of the city—anything south of Canal Street in Manhattan was the South to us—brought back unpleasant memories for Mommy. She hates the South. 

A few months after we arrived, a group of Delaware state troopers stopped a group of us on a dark highway one night after my older brother David, who was driving, made an illegal U-turn. The troopers were tall, arrogant, and unsympathetic. They surrounded the car full of black kids and white mother, shone flashlights everywhere, and made David, then a doctoral student at Columbia University, stand outside in the cold without his coat while they questioned him pointedly. They then hauled him into night court while the rest of us followed, frightened and angry. Mommy was furious that her shy, intellectual son—she was always so proud of David and would literally have carried his books to school for him if he had asked her to—was placed before a judge, who asked him to announce whether he was “guilty” of the traffic infraction or not. She immediately jumped into F. Lee Bailey mode. “Don’t say guilty!” she cried. “They’ll lock you up!”

At the Dawson affairs, I quietly served chuckling white folks—the president of Du Pont and the governor of Delaware, among others. These people were nothing like me or my mother or anyone else in my family, but I had no anger toward them. My anger at the world had been replaced by burning ambition. I didn’t want to be like them, standing around sipping wine and showing proper manners and acting happy when they weren’t—I’m similar to my mother in that way—but these people had done nothing to me. I could see they were willing to help the band and indirectly me, because I was dying to go to Europe, so I was grateful to them. My expectations of them went no farther than that.

I’ve been welcomed with open arms by about a dozen relatives since this book was published, many of them white and Jewish. I’m a better person, a fuller person, for knowing them. And I hope they feel the same way about me. Naturally there are some among them who have no interest in meeting their black relatives—just as there are a few on my side who have no interest in their white, Jewish relatives. This isn’t the movies; this is the real world. Nothing is perfect. Everyone has a right to his feelings. As for me, I’m proud of my extended family—all of them. They are me and I am them.