The Color of Water

by James McBride

  I was almost grown before I could eat meat. The sight of my father plunging his knife into that cow was enough to make me avoid it for years. I was terrified of my father. He put the fear of God in me.

  The Jewish school didn’t really count with the white folks, so I went to the white school, Thomas Jefferson Elementary. If it was up to Tateh he would have kept me out of school altogether. “That gentile school won’t teach you anything you can use,” he scoffed. He paid for us to take private lessons in sewing and knitting and record keeping from other people. He was tight with his money, but when it came to that kind of thing, he wasn’t cheap, I’ll say that for him. He would rather pay for us to study privately than to go to school with gentiles, but the law was the law, so I had to go to school with the white folks. It was a problem from the moment I started, because the white kids hated Jews in my school. “Hey, Ruth, when did you start being a dirty Jew?” they’d ask. I couldn’t stand being ridiculed. I even changed my name to try to fit in more. My real name was Rachel, which in Yiddish is Ruckla, which is what my parents called me—but I used the name Ruth around white folk, because it didn’t sound so Jewish, though it never stopped the other kids from teasing me.

  Nobody liked me. That’s how I felt as a child. I know what it feels like when people laugh at you walking down the street, or snicker when they hear you speaking Yiddish, or just look at you with hate in their eyes. You know a Jew living in Suffolk when I was coming up could be lonely even if there were fifteen of them standing in the room, I don’t know why; it’s that feeling that nobody likes you; that’s how I felt, living in the South. You were different from everyone and liked by very few. There were white sections of Suffolk, like the Riverview section, where Jews weren’t allowed to own property. It said that on the deeds and you can look them up. They’d say “for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants only.” That was the law there and they meant it. The Jews in Suffolk did stick together, but even among Jews my family was low because we dealt with shvartses. So I didn’t have a lot of Jewish friends either.

  When I was in the fourth grade, a girl came up to me in the schoolyard during recess and said, “You have the prettiest hair. Let’s be friends.” I said, “Okay.” Heck, I was glad someone wanted to be my friend. Her name was Frances. I’ll never forget Frances for as long as I live. She was thin, with light brown hair and blue eyes. She was a quiet gentle person. I was actually forbidden to play with her because she was a gentile, but I’d sneak over to her house anyway and sneak her over to mine. Actually I didn’t have to sneak into Frances’s house because I was always welcome there. She lived past the cemetery on the other side of town in a frame house that we entered from the back door. It seemed that dinner was always being served at Frances’s house. Her mother would serve it on plates she took out of a wooden china closet: ham, chicken, potatoes, corn, string beans, sliced tomatoes, lima beans, white bread, and hot biscuits with lots of butter—and I couldn’t eat any of it. It was treyf, not kosher for a Jew to eat. The first time her mother served me dinner I said, “I can’t eat this,” and I was embarrassed until Frances piped out, “I don’t like this food either. My favorite food is mayonnaise on white bread.” That’s how she was. She’d do little things to let you know she was on your side. It didn’t bother her one bit that I was Jewish, and if she was around, no one in school would tease me.

  I would take pennies from the store cash register so Frances and I could go to the Chadwick Movie Theater—it cost only ten cents. Or we would cut through the town cemetery on the way home from school so Tateh wouldn’t see us; we’d spend a lot of afternoons sitting on the headstones talking. You know I’m spooked around dead folks. To this day you can’t get me near a graveyard. But when I was with Frances, it didn’t bother me a bit. It seemed like the easiest, most natural thing in the world, to sit on somebody’s headstone under the cool shade of a tree and chat. We always lingered till the last minute and when it was time to go, we’d have to run in separate directions to get home, so I’d watch her go first to make sure no ghosts were trying to catch her. She’d back away, facing me, asking, “Any ghosts behind me, Ruth? Is it clear?” I’d say, “Yeah. It’s clear.”

  Then she’d turn around and scamper off, dodging the headstones and yelling over her shoulder, “You still watching, Ruth? Watch out for me!”

  “I’m watching! No ghosts!” I’d shout. Then after a few seconds I’d yell, “I’m counting now!” I’d count to ten like this: “One two three four five…ten!”—and fly home! Fly through that cemetery!

  Frances’s family wasn’t rich. They were like a lot of white folks back then. Farming-type folks, poor. Not poor like you see today. Back then it was a different kind of poor. A better kind of poor, but poor just the same. What I mean by that is you didn’t need money as much, but you didn’t have any neither. Just about everyone I knew was poor. A lot of our customers were so poor it wasn’t funny. Black and white were poor. They got their food from the Nansemond River down the hill from our store. The men would go fishing and crabbing at the wharf and catch huge turtles and take them home and make soup and stew out of them. There was a man who all he did was haul in turtles. He’d walk home carrying a huge turtle under his arm the way you carry a schoolbook, and me and Dee-Dee would gawk. Sometimes he’d stop at the store and buy various ingredients for his turtle soup, various spices and garnishes. That turtle would still be alive, kicking and trying to get away while the man was standing in the store, poring over the vegetables, buying garlics and peppers to cook it up with. I used to feel sorry for the turtles. I wanted him to throw them back in the water, but I wouldn’t say that. You crazy? Shoot! He wouldn’t throw them back in the water for nobody. They were his dinner.

  Folks were poor, and starving. And I have to admit I never starved like a lot of people did. I never had to eat turtles and crabs out of the wharf like a lot of folks did. I never starved for food till I got married. But I was starving in another way. I was starving for love and affection. I didn’t get none of that.

  10.

  School

  Back in the 1960s, when she had money, which was hardly ever, Mommy would take us down to Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to shop for school clothes. “You have to go where the deals are,” she said. “They won’t come to you.”

  “Where are the deals?” we asked.

  “The Jews have the deals.”

  I thought Jews were something that was in the Bible. I’d heard about them in Sunday school, through Jesus and such. I told Ma I didn’t know they were still around.

  “Oh, they’re around,” she said. She had a funny look on her face.

  The Hasidic Jewish merchants in their black yarmulkes would stare in shock as Mommy walked in, trailed by five or six of us. When they recovered enough to make money, she would drive them to the wall, haggling them to death, lapsing into Yiddish when the going got tough. “I know what’s happening here! I know what’s happening!” she snapped when the merchants lapsed into Yiddish amongst themselves during negotiations over a pair of shoes. She angrily whipped off some gibberish and the merchants gawked even more. We were awed.

  The first time it happened, we asked, “Ma, how’d you learn to talk like that?”

  “Mind your own business,” she said. “Never ask questions or your mind will end up like a rock. Some of these Jews can’t stand you.”

  Looking back, I realize that I never felt any kinetic relationship to Jews. We were insulated from their world and any other world but our own. Yet there was a part of me that recognized Jews as slightly different from other white folks, partly through information gleaned from Mommy, who consciously and unconsciously sought many things Jewish, and partly through my elder siblings. My sister Rosetta’s college education at the all-black Howard University was completely paid for—tuition, books, even school clothes—by the Joseph L. Fisher Foundation, which was run out of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue of Manhattan. In addition, my oldest brother, Dennis, guru of wisdom and so
urce of much of our worldly news in the 1960s, came home from college with respect for Jewish friends he’d met. “They support the civil rights movement,” he reported. Mommy was for anything involving the improvement of our education and condition, and while she would be quick to point out that “some Jews can’t stand you,” she also, in her crazy contradictory way, communicated the sense to us that if we were lucky enough to come across the right Jew in our travels—a teacher, a cop, a merchant—he would be kinder than other white folks. She never spoke about Jewish people as white. She spoke about them as Jews, which made them somehow different. It was a feeling every single one of us took into adulthood, that Jews were different from white people somehow. Later as an adult when I heard folks talk of the love/hate relationship between blacks and Jews I understood it to the bone not because of any outside sociological study, but because of my own experience with Jewish teachers and classmates—some who were truly kind, genuine, and sensitive, others who could not hide their distaste for my black face—people I’d met during my own contacts with the Jewish world, which Mommy tacitly arranged by forcing every one of us to go to predominantly Jewish public schools.

  It was in her sense of education, more than any other, that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us. She admired the way Jewish parents raised their children to be scholastic standouts, insulating them from a potentially harmful and dangerous public school system by clustering together within certain communities, to attend certain schools, to be taught by certain teachers who enforced discipline and encouraged learning, and she followed their lead. During the school year she gave us careful instructions to bring home every single paper that the teachers handed out at school, especially in January, and failure to follow these instructions resulted in severe beatings. When we dutifully arrived with the papers, she would pore over them carefully, searching—“Okay…okay…here it is!”—grabbing the little form and filling it out. 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 nigger!” 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 nigger. 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.

  Music arrived in my life around that time, and books. I would disappear inside whole worlds comprised of Gulliver’s Travels, Shane, and books by Beverly Cleary. I took piano and clarinet lessons in school, often squirreling myself away in some corner with my clarinet to practice, wandering away in Tchaikovsky or John Philip Sousa, trying to improvise like jazz saxophonist James Moody, only to blink back to reality an hour or two later. To further escape from painful reality, I created an imaginary world for myself. I believed my true self was a boy who lived in the mirror. I’d lock myself in the bathroom and spend long hours playing with him. He looked just like me. I’d stare at him. Kiss him. Make faces at him and order him around. Unlike my siblings, he had no opinions. He would listen to me. “If I’m here and you’re me, how can you be there at the same time?” I’d ask. He’d shrug and smile. I’d shout at him, abuse him verbally. “Give me an answer!” I’d snarl. I would turn to leave, but when I wheeled around he was always there, waiting for me. I had an ache inside, a longing, but I didn’t know where it came from or why I had it. The boy in the mirror, he didn’t seem to have an ache. He was free. He was never hungry, he had his own bed probably, and his mother wasn’t white. I hated him. “Go away!” I’d shout. “Hurry up! Get on out!” but he’d never leave. My siblings would hold their ears to the bathroom door and laugh as I talked to myself. “What a doofus you are,” my brother Richie snickered.

  Even though my siblings called me “Big Head” because I had a big head and a skinny body, to the outer world I was probably on the “most likely to succeed” list. I was a smart kid. I read a lot. I played music well. I went to church. I had what black folks called “good” hair, because it was curly as opposed to nappy. I was light-skinned or brown-skinned, and girls thought I was cute despite my shyness. Yet I myself had no idea who I was. I loved my mother yet looked nothing like her. Neither did I look like the role models in my life—my stepfather, my godparents, other relatives—all of whom were black. And they looked nothing like the other heroes I saw, the guys in the movies, white men like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman who beat the bad guys and in the end got the pretty girl—who, incidentally, was always white.

  One afternoon I came home from school and cornered Mommy while she was cooking dinner. “Ma, what’s a tragic mulatto?” I asked.

  Anger flashed across her face like lightning and her nose, which tends to redden and swell in anger, blew up like a balloon. “Where’d you hear that?” she asked.

  “I read it in a book.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re no tragic mul—What book is this?”

  “Just a book I read.”

  “Don’t read that book anymore.” She sucked her teeth. “Tragic mulatto. What a stupid thing to call somebody! Somebody called you that?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t ever ever use that term.”

  “Am I black or white?”

  “You’re a human being,” she snapped. “Educate yourself or you’ll be a nobody!”

  “Will I be a black nobody or just a nobody?”

  “If you’re a nobody,” she said dryly, “it doesn’t matter what color you are.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  She sighed and sat down. “I bet you never heard the joke about the teacher and the beans,” she said. I shook my head. “The teacher says to the class, ‘Tell us about different kinds of beans.’

  “The first
little boy says, ‘There’s pinto beans.’

  “‘Correct,’ says the teacher.

  “Another boy raises his hand. ‘There’s lima beans.’

  “‘Very good,’ says the teacher.

  “Then a little girl in the back raises her hand and says, ‘We’re all human beans!”’

  She laughed. “That’s what you are, a human bean! And a fartbuster to boot!” She got up and went back to cooking, while I wandered away, bewildered.

  Perplexed to the point of bursting, I took the question to my elder siblings. Although each had drawn from the same bowl of crazy logic Mommy served up, none seemed to share my own confusion. “Are we black or white?” I asked my brother David one day.

  “I’m black,” said David, sporting his freshly grown Afro the size of Milwaukee. “But you may be a Negro. You better check with Billy upstairs.”

  I approached Billy, but before I could open my mouth, he asked, “Want to see something?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He led me through our house, past Mommy, who was absorbed in changing diapers, past a pile of upended chairs, books, music stands, and musical instruments that constituted the living room, up the stairs into the boys’ bedroom, and over to a closet which was filled, literally, from floor to ceiling, with junk. He stuck his head inside, pointed to the back, and said, “Look at this.” When I stuck my head in, he shoved me in from behind and slammed the door, holding it shut. “Hey, man! It’s dark in here!” I shouted, banging at the door and trying to keep the fear out of my voice. Suddenly, in the darkness, I felt hands grabbing me and heard a monster roar. My panic zoomed into high-level terror and I frantically pounded on the door with all my might, screaming in a high-pitched, fervent squawk, “BILLLLYYYYYYYY!” He released the door and I tore out of the closet, my brother David tumbling out behind me. My two brothers fell to the floor laughing, while I ran around the house crying for Ma, zooming from room to room, my circuits blown.