The Color of Water

This is a truly beautiful book.  My friend Jayme recommended it.  She's got me on a hot reading streak.  This is the best thing I've read in awhile.  It's written by the son of a white, Jewish mother who bore a dozen children with two African American men.  She married both men (one after the other, not simultaneously) in an era when biracial marriages were essentially unheard of.  On the heels of her first marriage, her family disowned her.  She and her husband caused riots just walking down the street together.  But they found a home in Harlem in its heyday and were eventually accepted by the African American community.

The author's mother was all too happy to forget her difficult childhood and strained family relations.  She found solace in her new family and ultimately dropped her Jewish faith and adopted Christianity.  She and her first husband founded a church in their living room that still exists in Red Hook, Brooklyn today.  Through her faith and her conviction to raise well-educated, reform-minded children, she was able to thrive in an environment utterly different from the one she was raised in.  She was poor, and had twelve mouths to feed, but still managed to put every single one of her kids through college.  Most of them went to grad school as well.  She raised doctors, nurses, teachers, writers and activists.

Mrs. McBride was an agent of change in a narrow-minded era and she kept her family together despite the odds stacked against her.  She was deeply moved by the non-judgmental and loving treatment she experienced in New York's African American community.  Though her kids had a good deal of confusion about the fact that they didn't look much like their mother, they were taught to look beyond color and appearances and embrace the goodness of people in general.  The title of the book comes from a conversation the author had with his mother at a young age.  He wanted to know the color of God.  His mother told him that God was every color and no color at all.  He was the color of water.  Isn't that a perfect response?