1: Dead
I'm dead.
You want to talk about my family and here I been dead to them for fifty years
2: The Bicycle
Gradually, as the week passed and the terror of going to school subsided, I began to notice something about my mother, that she looked nothing like the other kids' mothers. In fact, she looked more like my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Alexander, who was white
4: Black Power
I knew of no other white woman who would board the subway in Manhattan at one o'clock every morning and fall asleep till she got to her stop in Queens forty-five minutes later. Often I could no sleep until I heard her key hit the door. Her lack of fear for her safety—particularly among blacks, where she often stuck out like a sore thumb and seemed an easy target for muggers—had me stumped. As a grown man, I understand now, understand how her Christian principles and trust in God kept her going through all her life's battles, but as a boy, my faith was not that strong
Mommy held on to her purse, spinning around in a crazy circle with the mugger, neither saying a word as they both desperately wrested for the purse, whirling from the sidewalk into the dark empty street like two ballerinas locked in a death dance. I stood frozen in shock, watching. Finally the mugger got the purse and ran off as his buddy laughed at him, and Mommy fell to the ground.
She got up, calmly took my hand, and began to walk home without a word.
"You okay?" she asked me after a few moments.
I nodded. I was so frightened I couldn't speak. All that food that Jack had cooked for us lay on the ground behind us, ruined. "Why didn't you scream?" I asked, when I finally got my tongue back.
"It's just a purse," she said. "Don't worry about it"
5: The Old Testament
Sometimes when Tateh wasn't home, I'd tear out of the door of the store and just run. Just run anyplace. I would run down the back roads where the black folks lived, across the tracks to where the white folks were. I loved to spring, just to feel the wind blowing on my face and see things and not be at home. I was always a running-type of person.
Of course I had something to run from. My father did things to me when I was a young girl that I couldn't tell anyone about. Such as getting in bed with me at night and doing things to me sexually that I could not tell anyone about. When we'd go to the beach in Portsmouth, he'd get into the water with me, supposedly to teach me how to swim, and hold me real close to his body near his sexual parts and he'd have an erection. When we'd get back to the beach, Mameh would ask, "Are you getting better at swimming?" and I'd say, "Yes, Mameh," and he'd be standing there, glaring at me. God, I was scared of him.
Anytime he had a chance, he'd try to get close to me or crawl into bed with me and molest me. I was afraid of Tateh and had no love for him at all. I dreaded him and as relieved anytime he left the house. But it affected me in a lot of way, what he did to me. I had very low self-esteem as a child, which I kept with me for many, many years; and even now I don't want to be around anyone who is domineering or pushign me around because it makes me nervous. I'm only telling you this because you're my son and I want you to know the truth and nothing less. I did have low self-esteem as a child. I felt low.
Folks will run with that, won't they? They'll say, "Oh, she felt low, so she went on and married a nigger." Well I don't care. Your father changed my life. He taught me about a God who lifted me up and forgave me and made me new. I was lucky to meet him or I would've been a prostitute or dead. Who knows what would've happened to me. I was reborn in Christ
6: The New Testament
she would occasionally do something in church that I never saw her do at home or anywhere else: at some point in that eservice, usually when the congregation was singing on of her favorite songs, like "We've Come This far by Faith" or "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," she would bow down her head and weep. It was the only time I ever saw her cry. "Why do you cry in church?" I asked her one afternoon after service.
"Because God makes me happy."
"Then why cry?"
"I'm crying 'cause I'm happy. Anything wrong with that?"
"No," I said, but there was, because happy people did not seem to cry like she did. Mommy's tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a place far away, a place inside her that she never let any of us children visit, and even as a boy I felt there was pain behind them
A few more embarrassing seconds passed. Finally Deacon McNair said, "Well, you don't have to tell us a Bible story, Billy. Just recite a verse from the Bible."
"Any verse?" Billy asked.
"Any verse you want," the deacon said.
"Okay." Billy faced the church again. Every face was silent, watching him.
"Jesus wept," He said. He took his seat.
Dead silence.
"Amen," said Deacon McNair.
After church, we followed Mommy as she stalked out, and my godfather met her at the door. "It's all right, Ruth," he said, chuckling.
"No it's not," Ma said.
When we got home, Mommy beat Billy's butt
9: Shul
You know I'm spooked about 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 first to make sure no ghosts were trying to catch me
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 […]
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
By age ten, I was coming into my own feelings about myself and my own impending manhood, and going out with Mommy, which had been a privilege and an honor at five, had become a dreaded event. I had reached a point where I was ashamed of her and didn't want the world to see my white mother
I thought it would e easier if we were just one color, black or white. I didn't want to be white. My siblings had already instilled the notion of black pride in me. I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul
14: Chicken Man
I was numb. I felt like I was getting back at the world for injustices I had suffered, but if you sat me down and asked me which injustices I was talking about, I wouldn't have been able to name them if my life depended on it
15: Graduation
"Tell me the truth," I said. He confessed it. "They're making me marry her," he said. "My folks are making me."
"Did you get her pregnant?"
"Yeah."
Oh, that messed me up. I told him I didn't want to see him anymore and walked back through the black neighborhood, into the store, and went upstairs and cried my heart out, because I still loved him. I went through this entire ordeal and here he was busy with somebody else. The fact that he was black and the girl he was marrying was black—well, that hurt me even more. If the world were fair, I suppose I would have married him, but there was no way that could happen in Virginia. Not in 1937
17: Lost in Harlem
just trying to bury my past and get away from my father, but when I started to tell Dennis what I was doing, I felt so ashamed, because the look on his face said it all.
He said, "Ruth, your parents have done nothing to you that was so bad to make you run around with that man. That man's a pimp. He's a pimp and he's leading you around by the nose." And he sat there and he kind of fumed. He wasn't angry. He just seemed disappointed.
I felt so ashamed
18: Lost in Delaware
As I sat down on the bus and looked for her through the window, it occurred to me that since I was a little boy, she had always wanted me to go. She was always sending me off on a bus someplace, to elementary school, to camp, to relatives in Kentucky, to college. She pushed me away form her just as she'd pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them to the front door when they left for college. She would not hear of it when they applied for school that were near home. "If you stay here, you'll fool around," she'd say. "Go away and learn to live on your own." Yet she'd wipe her eyes with the back of her hand and watch silently through the living room as they smiled and waved goodbye from the sidewalk, straining under the weight of the same cheap duffel bag that now lay in the belly of the Greyhound bus, holding my things. She always cried when they left, through never in front of us. She'd retreat to her room for that. I was actually worried she would cry when I boarded the bus, but when I looked at her through the window I was relieved to see she wasn't crying at all
As the bus engine rumbled to life, she didn't wave but rather gave a quick flip of her hand that said, "Go! Go on!" and hurried away. The bus pulled off and she was out of sight for a moment, but after we turned the corner I saw her from the window across the aisle and she had broken down. She was leaning on the wall beneath the train trestle, head bowed, one hand squeezing her eyes, as if the tears that flowed out of them could be squeezed into oblivion
19: The Promise
She was a good Jewish wife who kept true to her religious faith, and she let a lot roll off her back 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
most interracial marriages did not last. That's what Dennis would say when we argued. I'd say, "I'm leaving," and he'd say, "Go ahead. Go ahead. That's what people want us to do. That's what they expect." And he was right.
See a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different
23: Dennis
When I told your stepfather about how my sister and Aunt Betts treated me, he spoke about them without bitterness or hate. "You don't need them to help you," he said. "I'll help you for the rest of my life if you'll marry me," which I did, and God bless him, he was as good as his word
24: New Brown
The old-timers as New Brown used to say God honored Rev. McBridge. The man died without a penny, yet his children grew up to graduate from college, to become doctors, professors, teachers, and professionals all. It was the work, they said, of none other than Jesus Christ Himself
25: Finding Ruthie
black male counterparts, some of whom marched around the newsrooms as if they were the second coming of Martin Luther King, wielded their race like baseball bats. They were no closer to the black man in the ghetto than their white counterparts. They spoke of their days of "growing up in Mississippi" or whatever it was, as proof of their poverty and blackness, but in fact the closest most of them had come to an urban ghetto in twenty years was from behind the wheel of a locked Honda. Their claims of growing up poor were without merit in my mind. They grew up privileged, not deprived, because they had mothers, fathers, grandparents, neighbors, church, family, a system that protected, sheltered, and raised them. They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their "I was raised with nuthin' and went to Harvard anyway" experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream
She's always been slightly out of control, my mother, always had the unnerving habit of taking the ship into the air to do loops and spins, then fleeing the cockpit screaming, "Someone do something, we're gonna crash!" then at the last dying second slipping into the pilot's seat and coolly landing the thing herself, only to forget the entire incident instantly. She wouldn't recall it for you if you showed her pictures of herself doing it. She wipes her memory instantly and with purpose; it's a way of preserving herself. That's how she moves. Her survival instinct are incredible, her dances with fire always fun to watch
THE COLOR OF WATER: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29209.The_Color_of_Water?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=YZOBDwyPip&rank=1
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