Analysis: The Color Of Water By James Mcbride

Readers are enlightened by a true story about the relationship between a black boy and his white mother and how it all unfolds. In the novel, “The Color of Water,” by James McBride, he tells his story about growing up in an interracial household. Although they had a rocky relationship McBride looks up to his mother in some ways. Of the many things that occur, James’s mother Ruth never tells him the truth about her back round, Ruth holds a lot inside herself from him, and James becomes very rebellious toward his mother after his step-father dies. James mother never tells him the truth about her background as a child. McBride states in the novel, “When I asked her where she was from, she would say, “God made me,” and change the subject. When I asked her if she was white, she’d say, “No. I’m light-skinned,” and change the subject again. When his mother and his friends’ mothers were, around each other he tries to compare her to them. McBride says, “Gradually, as the weeks 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. Then one day he hears his mother speak another language. She could speak in Yiddish.
She does not tell him she comes from a Jewish family. Ruth says, “I was born an Orthodox Jew on April 1, 1921, April Fool’s Day, in Poland, her Jewish name is Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, and they ate kosher every day. However, she does not tell him that as a child her father use to molest her. She says, it affects her in a lot of ways;she has low self-esteem and even now she does not want to be around anyone who has a domineering pesonality. She also never tells about how her family does not want anything to do with her because of her love for blacks. When they hear she is married to a black man, no one in the family would accept her