I once encountered a novel in the African literature section of a London library. It was about an out-of-luck black Nigerian man, Furo Wariboko, who went to bed and woke up transformed into a white man. Nothing else about Furo changes (held the same undergraduate degree, spoke in Pidgin English and even retained a Black ass), yet his social interactions in the vibrant city of Lagos improved overnight: from offers of high remunerating jobs to excessive deference towards him from his fellow Nigerians; all because of his newly-acquired skin colour. I remember sliding that novel back into the library’s bookshelf, thinking the synopsis around Furo’s life was outlandish even for a work of fiction.
Not until I immersed myself into James McBride’s demure memoir, The Color of Water, in which the author unfurled the life-world of his mother, Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, did I realise that I’d been limited in my imagination to think back then that Furo’s story was outlandish, and that reality can, indeed, be stranger than fiction.
Born in 1921 Poland, Ruchel and her Orthodox Jewish family emigrated to America. The family lived a nomadic lifestyle in their early years in America with Ruchel’s father being a rabbi, before they would finally settle in a racially-segregated Suffolk, Virginia. As a 15-year-old, Ruchel, whose name had changed to Ruth (her name changed from Ruchel to Rachel and “the more American-sounding” Ruth), fell in love with the object of her father’s hate (“If there was one thing Tateh didn’t like more than gentiles, it was black folks”) and was to have a black baby (schvartze being Yiddish for the n-word) in an era when interracial relationship was criminalised. Ruth would terminate that pregnancy and graduate High School 4 years later. And not exorcised of her spirit of rebellion, just like her elder brother, Sam, who upped sticks to Chicago (he would later die in WWII), Ruth left Virginia for New York, leaving behind her sister, Dee-Dee, a polio-stricken mother, Hudis, and a tyrannical father, Fishel. It was in Harlem, New York that Ruth would make the acquaintance of another black man, Andrew McBride, marry him, start a family and even a black church in 1953: New Brown Memorial Baptist Church.
Over 223 pages we get the sense that Ruth, a bowlegged Jewish-European girl with little prospects in life (“I would’ve been a prostitute or dead”), metamorphosed first into a non-practicing Jew (goye) who was considered dead by her family (“they said kaddish and sat shiva”), and then into a Malcolm-X-supporting, Holy-Spirit-filled single mother of twelve black children in Brooklyn’s Red Hook Housing Projects. Ruth raised her children in a manner indistinguishable from how the average working-class poor American woman would, while held in contempt by society for her life choices. Except that Ruth was unwavering in her belief that “education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America”. All 12 siblings graduated from college (some even from graduate school) to lead comfortable lives as adults in a world miles away from the lack that permeated their childhood in the Projects, proving Ruth’s belief right.
Whilst Furo Wariboko’s transformation was physically from a black man to a white man named Frank Whyte, Ruth’s transformation from white to black took place in her psyche and worldview (“And she herself occasionally talked about the “white man” in the third person, as if she had nothing to do with him, and in fact she didn’t, since most of her friends and social circle were black women from church”). James recollects when as a boy he’d ask his mother if she was white, and Ruth would reply, “No. I’m light-skinned,” renouncing her whiteness.
And whilst it may be said that Furo’s lifelong desire to be white stemmed, seemingly, from internalised racism, the root of Ruth’s black affinity requires careful examination. We may cursorily put it down to the warmth Ruth feels in black company (“That’s how black folks thought back then. That’s why I never veered from the black side”) or a first act of rebellion against her abusive father or, perhaps, being the mother of 12 mixed-race children from two forthright black men: following Rev. McBride’s death in 1957 – with whom Ruth had 8 children – she married Mr. Hunter Jordan and had 4 more children.
However, reading the memoir through a lens of “intersectionality”, we recognise that the fellow-feeling with black folks may have been imbibed in Ruth from all the foregoing, overlapped by the haphazard start to her own life in America: family instability, poverty (“We attracted a lot of attention when we travelled because we were poor and Jewish and my mother was handicapped”), prevalent anti-Jewish racism (“In school the kids called me “Christ killer”, and “Jew baby.” That name stuck with me for a long time. “Jew baby.” You know it’s so easy to hurt a child”) and her conversion to Christianity in a black church (“It helped me to hear the Christian way, because I needed help, I needed to let Mameh go, and that’s when I started to become a Christian and the Jew in me began to die”). Indeed, James identified a common theme in the worldviews of his Jewish-European mother and his two African-American fathers, which he summarised as the “immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education.”
It’s ultimately in a literal reading of this memoir that we appreciate core of the author’s thesis. That although his mother’s story revolves around race and identity, her life transcended both. The first clue of this is Ruth’s seeming unconcern for both forms of prejudice, “Matters involving race and identity she ignored.” And the other is when a young James asks his mother, “What color is God’s spirit?” and Ruth replies, “It doesn’t have a color. God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.” After reading this memoir, I found myself reflecting that our life experiences aren’t unique to the colour of our skins (black, yellow, brown or white), and it’s by building up our character that we overcome life’s challenges.
When mixed-race British poet, activist and author, Akala, asked on “X” (formerly Twitter): “You lot read anything good lately?” I promptly recommended The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother; adding that “If the job of a writer is to complicate an issue in a way that provokes the reader to move beyond binary thinking, this book hits a home run! I recommend to you too that you should find this book wherever you get your literature and let its simplicity transform you, not like Furo but Ruth.
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