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As a boy in Brooklyn’s Red Hook projects, James McBride 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 whether he was black or white. “You’re
a human being,” she snapped. “Educate yourself or you’ll
be a nobody!” And, when James asked what color God was, she said, “God
is the color of water.”… As an adult, McBride finally persuaded
his mother to tell her story - the story of a rabbi’s daughter,
born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a
black man, founded a Baptist church, and put twelve children through
college. The Color of Water is James McBride’s tribute to his
remarkable, eccentric, determined mother - and an eloquent exploration
of what family
really means.
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" Complex and moving...suffused with issues of race, religion and
identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories,
are not central. The triumph of the book - and of their lives - is
that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family,
love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakable insistence
that only two things really matter: school and church...It is her voice
- unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic - that is dominant
in
this paired history, and its richest contribution... The two stories,
son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note
at a time of racial polarization." -The New York Times Book Review
"
This moving and unforgettable memoir need to be read by people of all
colors and faiths." -Publishers Weekly
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