8/1/2000
By James McBride
The best-selling author of "The Color of Water" talks about how he captured his memories of growing up as a black man with a white mother.
As a boy, I never knew where my mother was from, where she was born, or 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 12 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 14 years to unearth her remarkable story.
She is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi's daughter who married a black man in 1942. And she revealed her past more as a favor to me than out of any desire to revisit it. The Color of Water (Riverhead Books) is her life as she told it to me and betwixt and between the pages of her life, you find my life as well.