The Color of Water

by James McBride

  This was around 1940 and black and white didn’t do what me and Dennis were doing, walking around and such. Some folks did it, but it was all secret, or they were good-time, partying folks like Rocky’s friends at Small’s Paradise. But Dennis was a Christian man and a serious man and so were his friends. This was no joking matter to them.

  Well, once they managed to pull their jaws from off the floor, they said, “Our house is your house. Sit down and eat.” And I didn’t have any problem with them, or with any of Dennis’s family. They took me in with open hearts and made me one of their own; the only thing was it sometimes took a minute for them to get over the shock of seeing a black and white together—like Aunt Candis, Dennis’s aunt. Aunt Candis was Dennis’s favorite. She was the grandchild of slaves. When I first came to North Carolina and walked into her house, she said, “I just hope you excuse me for looking at you so hard, because I’ve never had a white person in my house before, and I’ve never been this close to a white person before.” And I said, “All right,” and she was my friend till she died. I’ll never forget her as long as I live. She lived to be nearly a hundred. We wouldn’t have made it without Aunt Candis. She came up from North Carolina and cared for y’all after Dennis died, because I was grieving and lost and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move. She took the train all the way up to New York from North Carolina and took care of all eight of you, including you, James, and you weren’t but a tiny child. She had never been to the city before. She’d never seen so much cement and so many tall buildings in her life. Your stepfather, he bought her a big gold watch after he married me and she left to go home to North Carolina. He said, “That’s some woman,” and he was right. She was some woman.

  Well, Dennis was a solid, clean Christian man. He seemed to understand me and see right through me. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with him and after a few months we started thinking of getting married. Well, I was thinking of getting married. Dennis hemmed and hawed on it and finally he said, “Let’s live together as husband and wife. We don’t need the world to know we’re married. The world isn’t ready for us yet.” That excuse was okay for me—for the time being—so we rented a room in the Port Royal on 129th Street. We had a room in a three-bedroom apartment run by a lady named Mrs. Ellis. She and her husband had one bedroom and they rented the other two out and we shared the kitchen and bathroom.

  Just like that I left home. I left Bubeh’s apartment one day and never came back. See, Bubeh was old and she had diabetes and couldn’t control me, and it wasn’t like my aunts were calling to check on me or anything like that. They had their own lives and they didn’t care about me. I was grown, child. I wasn’t no baby then. “Get out there and do your own thing,” that was their attitude. So I did my own thing. I moved in with Dennis and I didn’t regret it. He continued to work for my Aunt Mary while I was living with him, and she never knew it.

  It was a scandal, don’t you think? But I did miss my mother. I missed her terribly and would think of her and my sister Dee-Dee often. One day I had a feeling, I just wanted to talk to Mameh, even though I knew she didn’t agree with how I was living, so I got a pile of coins together and I went outside our little room on 129th Street to a pay phone and called Suffolk. Since Dennis and I lived in a room in somebody’s apartment, to use the phone you had to sit in the woman’s living room. I couldn’t call my mother and talk Yiddish on the lady’s phone. It seemed too odd to do. I was too embarrassed. So I went outside. It was a big deal to call long-distance in those days. When I called, Tateh picked up the line and he told me, “I don’t know what you’re doing up there, but your mother’s sick and I need help with the store.” So I came back to Suffolk. I didn’t want to, but since Mameh was sick, I needed to go back. I told Dennis I was going home for a few weeks and he said he would write and send me money, which he did.

  When I got to Virginia I told Tateh, “I’ll help out for a while, but I’m not staying.” He ignored that. One of the first things he did was take me out to Portsmouth to one of his Jewish merchant friends, supposedly to “do business,” and introduce me to this man’s son. He was pressing me to marry this fat guy whom I didn’t even know. But I had no plans on that. I’d come home for Mameh. She was getting more ill. [She had become nearly blind in her left eye and would black out.] She wasn’t a total cripple, not even when she was ill was she truly crippled. She would cook all day and also darn socks. She could chop fish, meat, and vegetables on a butcher-block cutting board—all with one hand. She was a good Jewish wife who kept true to her religious faith, and she let a lot roll off her back over the years because her husband wasn’t worth a dime and she had no choice. The way Tateh treated her, they’d call her an “abused woman” today. Back then they just called you “wife.” And a man could do anything he wanted to his wife in the South. Especially if she’s a Jew who’s crippled and he’s a so-called rabbi. He can yell at her, make fun of her, curse her, slap her. He can even go out with another woman right in front of her face.

  She tried to ignore that, too, as long as she could, and I don’t think she knew for a while because Tateh was always a little strange anyway, you know, and secretive. He never told us anything, like where he was born, or if he had any family or relatives. Every summer he’d disappear for a few weeks to Europe. He’d say, “I’m going to see my landsman,” and off he’d go on a steamer to France someplace. “Landsman” in Jewish is somebody from your hometown. We’d run the store in his absence, me, Dee-Dee, and Mameh. To this day I don’t know exactly where he went, but a few weeks later he’d strut into the store, put down his bags, and say, “Where’s my money?” We’d give it to him and he’d sit down and count it. Even before he took off his jacket, he’d count his money. He knew just how much he was supposed to earn a week, more or less. He was serious about his money.

  This big fat white lady started showing up at the store around 1939 or 1940. She had a behind as big as this living room. She lived not far from us up the road. Her husband was serving time in the county jail across the street for being drunk or some petty crime like that. She wasn’t Jewish and she had four or five kids. Tateh would talk to her in the store and try to act like it was casual; then on Friday nights, the Sabbath, Mr. Rabbi would go out. Me, Dee-Dee, and Mameh would light the candles and say our prayers to begin the Sabbath, and Tateh would pack a bag of groceries and throw them in his car while Mameh watched him. He’d say to her in Yiddish, “I’m going out.” Then he’d say to me in English, “I won’t be back till Monday. Open up the store Sunday morning.”

  Then Mameh would ask me, “What did he say?”

  “Nothing,” I’d say.

  Their marriage was falling apart and I was in the middle. I’d translate, or not translate, between them. Tateh’s affair became full-blown very quickly, the way I remember it. Before I knew it he’d moved her and her kids across the North Carolina line someplace about an hour’s drive from Suffolk, and he once even dragged me down there and made me wait outside the woman’s house while he ran inside. He started bothering me to get Mameh to give him a divorce, trying to talk to her through me. She refused, and I could understand her dilemma. She was in her early forties then, and there was nobody to look out for her. She was handicapped. She was sick. She had no other home. She was not giving him a divorce. Never. I don’t think she had one friend down in Suffolk at that time either, not that I remember. Except for her mother she had nobody to turn to, because her sisters never cared for her that much. She was just a crippled thing to them, and they rarely wrote to her and never gave her any credit for the good things she had done. Their way of being kind to her was to take me in during the summers and by then they were done with me because I wasn’t a child anymore. And here Tateh wanted to divorce her so he could marry his fat girlfriend, this woman who was bigger and taller than him and who wasn’t even Jewish. A goye. It was all so disgusting I could hardly stand it.

  In order for my parents to get a divorce properly in the Jewish faith they would’ve ha
d to go to a rov, a kind of high Jewish rabbi, but Tateh didn’t care for no rov. He was done with being religious. He went out to a lawyer one day and came back with some papers and laid them on the table and told me, “Tell your mother to sign these.” They were divorce papers. Mameh refused. Then he went to Reno, Nevada, and got himself a quickie divorce. He came back to Virginia and said, “Tell your mother we’re divorced,” and that was it. But nothing changed in my house. We all still lived together, and we were all miserable, and by this time I was home a few weeks, a lot longer than I had planned, and I wanted to leave. It was a miserable time, especially for my poor sister Dee-Dee. Dee-Dee was four years younger than me, only about fifteen then. What a life she’d had. Of all of us children, Dee-Dee had the worst of it, because she was the youngest.

  Dee-Dee didn’t seem to have problems. I always thought she was prettier than me. She wasn’t rebellious like I was. We were like night and day. She was short and had curly brown hair while I was tall and dark and thin and had a mustache. When she was little she refused to wear hand-me-downs and wore nice skirts and socks and always looked neat, whereas I would wear hand-me-downs and looked like a sack of potatoes no matter what I wore. Dee-Dee was very smart. She got good grades in school while me and my brother Sam barely passed. She was Tateh’s favorite and I was always a little jealous of her because Tateh paid for her piano lessons while he wouldn’t allow me to take them and that sort of thing. See, she was the first American in my family, while Sam and I were immigrants, and we kind of had that immigrant thing on us. The kids would make fun of us for being Jewish in school, but they wouldn’t make fun of Dee-Dee. You just didn’t do that to Dee-Dee. She had confidence. She was a nice Jewish girl who did what she was told. I mean, she was in high school going through the things high school girls go through, playing tennis and learning piano, and when Tateh was divorcing Mameh she got lost in all that. No one ever talked to her or shared feelings with her, including me. We were close—not close enough for me to tell her the mess I had made of my life, but close enough—and one evening she came up to our bedroom and said, “I know you’re going to leave, Rachel. Don’t leave. Don’t go back to New York.” Dee-Dee was so proud, and for her to ask me to stay…well, she meant it. We didn’t talk to each other that way, and for her to come out and say what she was feeling was hard for her. It hurt me so much to hear it because I couldn’t stay. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “I know you’re going back. Please don’t go back. Promise me you’ll stay.” She sat on the bed and buried her face in her hands and cried, my little sister. “Promise me,” she sobbed. “Promise me you’ll stay.”

  “Okay, I promise,” I said. “I’ll stay.” But I broke my promise to Dee-Dee and she never forgot it. And she would remind me of it many years later.

  20.

  Old Man Shilsky

  It was November 1982, and I was tooling down Virginia State Route 460 in my green 1972 Volkswagen at four a.m. A few hours before, I had dropped off my ex-girlfriend, Karen, a black model who renamed herself Karone (“My agent told me to do it”) at her grandmother’s house in Petersburg. Also in tow with her was her two-year-old son, Paul, a gentle, kind boy who seemed slightly confused as to who I was. Mommy hated Karone. “You got a ready-made family now,” she quipped. “Your whole life was in front of you. Now look at you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Bye-bye dreams!” she sniffed.

  I ignored her. Karone and I had no plans to get married. We were not close. We were both living in Boston and decided it was time to leave town as well as each other. She was leaving her ex-husband behind. I wanted to leave myself behind. I had been working as a feature writer at the Boston Globe, a great job for a twenty-four-year-old reporter. My best friend was a white guy about sixty years old named Ernie Santosuosso who was the Globe jazz critic then. We would walk around the features department singing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and “It’s You or No One” by saxophonist Dexter Gordon. I could’ve stayed there with Ernie forever, dogging it and cracking jokes in the features department, but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to be a writer or a musician, not knowing that it was possible to do both. In some ways I was caught between the worlds of black and white as well, because I’d discovered after college and graduate school that the earnest change-the-world rap sessions me and my schoolmates had that lasted till four A.M. didn’t change the world one iota. I can clearly remember saying to my black college roommate in my freshman year, “Racism is a problem that should end just about the time we graduate.” Instead it smashed me across the face like a bottle when I walked into the real world. Boston was not an easy place to have a racial identity crisis either. Its racial problems are complicated, spilling over into matters of class, history, politics, even education. It was more than I wanted to face, and I had to run.

  On the seat next to me was a small map of Virginia with the town of Suffolk circled on it, and a hand-drawn map Mommy had given me. It had taken years to solicit this information about where she grew up. Every time I’d ask about it, she’d say, “Oh yeah, well, there’s nobody there that remembers me,” and off she went, looking for a house, or chasing down some errand that lasted hours, days, or weeks. It had gotten to the point where I didn’t see why she made such a secret of it, and the part of me that wanted to understand who I was began to irk and itch at me, like a pesky mosquito bite that cries out to be scratched. When I finally nailed her down on it, she sat at the kitchen table, pulled out an old envelope, ripped it open, and unfolded it to give her more space. She then drew me a map of where she had lived in Suffolk. She talked as she drew: “The highway goes here. Here’s the bridge. The courthouse is down the road, and the Jaffe slaughterhouse is over here. …” That map was the only clue I had to lead me to Mommy’s family. She knew no names of people in Suffolk, despite having lived there for nearly thirteen years. “You can’t remember anybody?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Nobody?”

  “Well, I knew a girl named Frances.”

  “Who was she?”

  “She was my best friend.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “God knows.”

  “What about her family.”

  “Don’t remember them. But her mother could cook like the dickens.”

  So I went to Suffolk looking for Frances and her mother who could cook like the dickens. Mommy didn’t remember their last name.

  It was seven A.M. when I arrived in town, exhausted and hungry after the drive from Petersburg. The town looked like its sugar days were over. Quiet, empty, a mix of grand old buildings and new, more of an industrial site than a town really, with development sprawling into its surrounding areas rather than inside the town itself. I saw a McDonald’s at a corner intersection. I parked there, went inside, and ordered some food. I sat down at a table and opened Mommy’s little hand map. I checked the map, looked out the window, checked it again, looked out the window again. I knew I was on Main Street. There was an old courthouse building catty-corner to where I sat. Behind the courthouse was a graveyard. To my left was a bridge and a slaughterhouse. I was sitting right where her family’s store used to be, 601 North Main Street. I left the food untouched and went outside and looked around. There was an old house behind the McDonald’s. I knocked on the door and an elderly, bespectacled black man answered. I told him my business: Mother used to live here. Name was Shilsky. Jews. A little store. He fingered his glasses and stared at me a long time. Then he said, “C’mon in here.”

  He sat me down and brought me a soda. Then he asked me to tell my story one more time. So I did.

  He nodded and listened closely. Then his face broke into a smile. “That means you ol’ Rabbi Shilsky’s grandson?”

  “Yep.”

  First he chuckled. Then he laughed. Then he laughed some more. He tried to control his laughing but he couldn’t, so he stopped, took off his glasses, and wiped his e
yes. I started to get angry, and he apologized. His name was Eddie Thompson. He was sixty-six. He had lived in that house all his life. It took him a minute to get himself together.

  “I knew your mother,” he said. “We used to call her Rachel.”

  I had never heard that name before. Even in recounting what little she had told me of her life, Mommy had never referred to herself as Rachel. She had always called herself Ruth. I discovered later that her true name was Ruchel, a Yiddish name which her family Americanized to Rachel, which she in turn further changed to the even more American-sounding Ruth.

  “I knew that whole family,” Thompson said. “Rachel, Gladys, Sam, and the parents. Rachel was the kindhearted one. Gladys, the young one, we called her Dee-Dee. She was a li’l bitty thing. She looked more like the father. Sam, the brother, we used to call him Sparky. They say he got killed in World War Two in a plane crash. Rachel, why she used to walk right up and down the road here, her and the mother. The mother was crippled. She used to limp. Her whole left side was messed up, Mrs. Shilsky. What a nice lady. She’d slip you a piece of fruit or candy inside the store when the old man wasn’t looking. Old Man Shilsky though …” He shrugged. “Personally, I never had no problem with him.”

  “What was he like?” I asked, my heart pounding. Why is my heart pounding? I asked myself. I wasn’t sure.

  “Like?” he asked.

  “Old Man Shil—My grandfa—” I didn’t know what to call him. Neither one sounded right. “What was Shilsky like?” I asked.

  “Well…you being his grandson and all …” He shrugged again. “He…The old man was all right. I got along with him okay.”

  I could see in his face that he didn’t believe it, so I said, “You don’t have to spare me. I never knew him. I’d just like to know what he was like.”