Ruth begins her story by telling James that she is "dead". The girl who was born Ruchel Dwajra Zylsky on April 1, 1921 in Poland, and who immigrated to America, settling in a small town in Virginia, is gone. In America, her name was changed to Rachel Deborah Shilsky. Her father, Fishel Shilsky, was a traveling Orthodox Jewish rabbi who married his wife, Hudis, according to the Jewish laws of contract: theirs was never a marriage of love. Ruth describes Tateh (Yiddish for "father") as a "fox" and Mameh (Yiddish for "mother") as "gentle and meek." Mameh was crippled on her left side because she had suffered polio as a child, and was nearly blind in her left eye. Rachel began going by "Ruth" in high school, and when she left for New York at age 19 and married a black man, her family mourned her as if she were dead. Ruth reflects: "[Rachel]had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live."

Ruth and her first husband, Andrew McBride, had eight children, but before Ruth could bear him a ninth, Andrew died of lung cancer. She later married Hunter Jordan, and together they added four more children to the family. James, having never known his biological father, thought of Hunter Jordan as his real father, and when he died of a stroke at 72, 14-year-old James almost dropped out of high school, and began hanging out with friends and drinking. His mother, he recalls, would ride her odd-looking bicycle around town as though she was completely oblivious to the rest of the world. She was "commander in chief" of the family, and James asserts that his childhood growing up in the Red Hook housing projects in Brooklyn was chaos. His mother implemented a system of dividing "the big kids" from "the little kids", and instilled in them basic tenets to live by, such as: "Educate your mind. School is important" and "Don't tell nobody your business."

As the book unfolds, it alternates between the mother's voice and the son's. Ruth explains that her mother came from a wealthy family with a lot of class. Tateh only married her to get a ticket to America, because much of her family had already moved to the States and could offer the sponsorship necessary to be admitted. Ruth, her mother, and her older brother Sam arrived in America on August 23, 1923. Tateh had gone over first, and they initially lived with Mameh's parents, Zaydeh and Bubeh (Yiddish for "grandfather" and "grandmother"). When Zaydeh died, Ruth remembers thinking he was asleep, and was frightened that the family had buried him alive.

In 1966, when James was nine, "black power" struck fear into his heart: "I thought black power would be the end of my mother. I swallowed the white man's fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole." His mother worked as a typist at Chase Manhattan Bank from 3pm to 2am, and didn't have time, James remembers, for "identity crises." His mother considered the achievements of the civil rights movement to be her own, but, at the same time, her "contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island. White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard." She drummed into her children's heads: "What's money if your mind is empty! Educate your mind!" One night, after visiting Jacqueline, or "Jack", James remembers two black men snatching his mother's purse. His mother let the incident slide right off of her back. For James, however, this only emphasized the danger his mother was in, so when he left for summer camp and boarded a bus, realizing that the man standing next to his mother outside was a Black Panther, he felt fearful; he tried to warn her, and when the son of the Black Panther sat down in the seat in front of him, James punched him in the face.

Analysis

Ruth's statement that she is "dead" raises the question of personal identity on the most fundamental level. Ruth is clearly alive, not dead, but she later explains that the girl she had been had to die in order for the girl she truly was to live. She confronted the basic question of death when she was young and her grandfather Zaydeh passed away, and when she recalls how she had feared that her grandfather had been buried alive, the moment echoes her own figurative death. When her own family disowned her, she was considered dead. They were no longer responsible for her fate. Her struggles after the death of her first husband were not, she imagined, unlike the experience of being buried alive.

Ruth's emigration from Poland to the United States followed the basic trajectory of many new Americans who fled persecution abroad. In America, Ruth's name became Rachel Deborah Shilsky, an Americanized version of her original Polish name. The basic change in her name also marked the official change of her citizenship. Later, however, when she began going informally by "Ruth" because it sounded less Jewish, she expressed a personal choice that pointed in the direction of self-determination. She attempted to assimilate into a community that looked askance upon her Jewish heritage, increasingly viewing her parents' strict ways as "old-fashioned". She began to desire, more and more, to be "American". Her desire and rebellious character were, and continue to be, common among children who come of age in places different from the locales in which their parents were born.

Ruth's motherly governance over twelve children in the housing projects of Brooklyn, according to James, expressed her own strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing: "unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father's tyranny - [they] represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and deep belief in God and education." Though she consciously cast off her Jewish identity, it remained a distinct part of her largely because it was a part of her experience. Her upbringing was the only model she had to work with when she raised her children, so she could not dislodge herself from her identity (and history) completely. What was once a part of her history was forever a part of her future. James implies that the secret to the success of each of Ruth's twelve children, in other words, was something rooted in the mysterious alchemy of growing up under the influence of the immigrant mentality, along with the communal nature of the house and the black community in general.

With regards to questions of race, James experienced a great deal of confusion. As the reader becomes acclimated to the basic picture of the story, he or she begins to develop an image of an eccentric Jewish woman riding her bicycle around the Brooklyn projects. At the same time, she is a kind of "just tyrant", and James loves her fiercely, as evidenced by his fear that something harmful will happen to her. He presents the historical backdrop of the Black Power movement, and clearly felt that his mother was in danger in their presence; a feeling that was reinforced when he witnessed two black men robbing her of her purse. He knew the state of race relations, and his love for his white mother only contributed to his confusion: "partly because of my own growing sense of self, and partly because of fear for her safety, because even as a child I had a sense that black and white folks did not get along, which put her, and us, in a pretty tight space."

When James punched the son of a Black Panther because he feared for his mother's safety, the action expressed a clear alliance with his mother, and not with the Black Power movement. In other words, he allied himself with his sense of family and love, as opposed to what he would later refer to as the superficial blanket political statement the color of one's face often led one to assume. The action exhibited his personal confusion, but, at the same time, the way divisions that relied on race could be transcended. The idea of "love" was crucial.

Ruth explains that Tateh, her father, was a traveling rabbi who moved from contract to contract. He wasn't a very good rabbi, so the contracts were never renewed. When he accepted one in Suffolk, Virginia, Mameh didn't want to move South, because her mother and sisters were all in New York, but Tateh forced the family to settle in the small Southern town. The area was beset with serious racial problems in those days, and bodies were always being dragged out of the river. Tateh, knowing that his contract as a rabbi probably wouldn't be renewed, opened a grocery store and made himself rich off of his black customers. He showed no love towards the members of his family, often making fun of Mameh's disability. Even Ruth admits that she was ashamed of her mother: "see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian." Ruth describes the emotional desert of her childhood, and reveals that her father sexually abused her. As a result, "I had very low self-esteem as a child." When she met her first husband, however, everything changed.

James remembers his mother in church, singing off-key. She was a devout Christian, and particularly enthusiastic about ministers, since her first husband had been an excellent reverend. James states: "as a boy I knew God was all-powerful because of Mommy's utter deference to Him." The only time he ever saw her cry was in church. Her tears worried him, but she said that she was crying because God made her happy. When he asked her point-blank if God was black or white, she answered that he had no color - he's a spirit: "God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color." Reverend Owen was the minister of the church Ruth and her husband had founded while James was growing up, and he recalls Richie, his older brother, challenging the minister about the color of Jesus. When Reverend Owen failed to give him an adequate response, Richie insisted Jesus was gray, and stopped attending Sunday School after that. James also offers a humorous retelling of an Easter Sunday where his older brother Billy needed to recite a Bible story. He blanked in front of the congregation. When the Deacon said it was alright and to just recite any Bible verse, Billy paused and then said, "Jesus wept." Their mother was furious.

By contrast, Ruth's childhood was not so humorous. She saw the Ku Klux Klan riding in their white hoods through the middle of town: "It seemed to me death was always around Suffolk." The Protestant whites discriminated against the small community of Jews, and the Depression of the 1930s made life difficult for everyone. Mameh kept a close watch on Ruth and her younger sister Gladys, or Dee-Dee. Sailors landed in the wharf and came into the store, offering to show them the boats, but Mameh always held a tight rein over both of them. What struck Ruth during those years was how the black community every Sunday "dressed up so clean for church I wouldn't recognize them. I liked that. They seemed to have such a purpose come Sunday morning. Their families were together and although they were poor, they seemed happy." In Ruth's family, however, Tateh was unbearable, and Sam, a quiet, submissive shadow, worked like a slave in the store. He ran away in 1934 at the age of 15 to Chicago, and wrote a letter home saying he had a job working in a store there. He never came back. Ruth only later learned that he had joined the army and had been killed during World War II.

Ruth's household was, according to James, "orchestrated chaos." He and his siblings forever frolicked with food, books, music, and pets, and the environment was much like a circus. The eldest brother, Dennis, held sway over all of the children, since he had been admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, where he was also a civil rights activist. The second eldest of the sisters, Helen, a pretty, gentle, and talkative girl, who according to James, was the most artistic of the siblings, suddenly stopped going to church and quit school. She became a full-fledged hippie, and announced that "the white man's education is not for me." One night, as "the big kids" debated about revolution, Helen got in a fight with Rosetta, the eldest of the sisters, and the smartest of all of them. In the end, Helen left the house, saying she was sick of it. When their mother came home in the night, she worried intensely about her 15-year-old daughter. She soon learned that Helen had gone to Jacqueline's house, and sent Richie to go and talk to her. When he came back, he said Helen wasn't coming home, and, after a time, she disappeared from Jack's. Eventually, they traced her to a crazy woman's apartment, and their mother went to go talk to her directly, to no avail.

Analysis

In this section, James explores the theme of "community" in conjunction with the theme of "household governance", contrasting his mother's upbringing with his own. Ruth grew up under the thumb of a tyrant who not only disrespected his wife, but abused his daughter. He also abused his son by treating him like a slave. The only member of the family who seemed not to suffer any direct abuse was the youngest sibling, Dee-Dee, though as a first-hand observer, it is unlikely that she escaped her childhood unscathed. At the same time, because she was not directly subject to her father's tyranny, Dee-Dee was unable to understand why Ruth - as well as Sam - needed to go away. Tateh dominated his family by the force of his own decisions, and decided that they would live in Suffolk, despite his wife's displeasure with the idea. He isolated his wife from her family, and the family was isolated in general because the Jewish community was small, and because the South discriminated against Jews, as well as blacks.

It is logical that Ruth would internalize her upbringing while outwardly - albeit most likely unconsciously - expressing the values she learned in her youth in her child-rearing techniques. She ruled over her own household as a kind of tyrant, but because her rule was tempered with love and she truly had in mind the best interests of each of her children, her strictness became a standard that the family sought to live up to. Even though she punished her son Billy for blanking during the Easter Sunday service, the lesson prompted Billy to learn to deploy his memory, something which would eventually lead him into medical school. The house was a dynamic mixture of activity, learning, religion, and mutual support, and the eldest brother's success inspired admiration from the rest of the children.

Communities in general require some form of leadership, but an effective leader must help to create a synergy between all of the members of the community. While force alone can lead a community, and the members can survive and still flourish under a dictatorship, the ideal "beloved community" is one in which harmony exists and tensions are overcome. The group collectively aims for a common set of ideals, thus contributing to the happiness of each of its members. Ruth succeeded in creating such a community in her home, and observed that the black people she knew in Suffolk all placed great store in this kind of community.

The book then unravels the parallel strands of Ruth's older brother, Sam, and James's older sister, Helen. Sam, a "shadow" who suffered under Tateh, ran away from home at the young age of 15, and Helen ran away from home at the same age. Sam ran away to escape and breathe more freely, and Helen exhibited a similar need to get away from the chaos of the house. She rebelled against "the white man's education" as well as her sister Rosetta, and sought a space where she could grow into the person she wanted to become. The implication is that Ruth reacted to Helen's actions with grief, remembering the pain of her brother's absence. The parallel further shows that history often repeats itself, and that across generations, races, and religions, families often face the same kinds of crises. The difference, ultimately, becomes evident in the fates of both Sam and Helen. While Sam never returned home, and was later killed during World War II, Helen eventually returned home, reconciled with her mother, and brought new life to the family in the shape of a child and a degree in nursing. The break, in Helen's case, was eventually healed.

The memoir acquires momentum by alternating the story of Ruth's life with the story of James's childhood and later career. By highlighting the similarities and differences between the two stories, the memoir achieves complexity and nuance. The parallels and symmetries which occur (Sam and Helen are just one example) contribute to the power of the story's message. While the events that occur over the course of life often appear to be mere happenstance, the memoir achieves a forward momentum that mimics the developments, hardships, and revelations that characterize life itself; seemingly arbitrary events become the platforms for later developments.

In this section, Ruth's character achieves real depth, not only because of the resonance of her own voice, but because of how she is seen through the eyes of her son James. She is a figure who inspires love; when she told her children that God was "the color of water," she created an indelible image that lingered in all of their minds for years to come. Helen's decision to run away also prompted Ruth to go to her directly, and to tell her that all would be forgiven. That openness and show of concern no doubt helped pave the way for Helen's eventual return.

Suffolk, Ruth explains, was racially divided, with an all-white school and an all-black school. The discrimination against Jews was similarly pervasive: she changed her name from Rachel to Ruth because it seemed less "Jewish". She made only one friend, a girl named Frances, with whom she spent hours talking in the cemetery. The ghosts, she recalls, never bothered her then. Frances's family was poor, but "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." Some people in the town were so poor that they caught huge turtles to make soup. Ruth always had enough to eat in her house, but she was starving for love and affection, both of which were in short supply in the Shilsky household.

James remembers how his mother often sought out things that were Jewish, even though she outwardly rejected her past life as Rachel Shilsky. She exhibited contradictory feelings, and shocked James when she spoke fluent Yiddish with the merchants in Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they went to buy their school clothes. When choosing a public school for her children to attend, Ruth ensured that they attended predominantly Jewish public schools, even though getting to these schools were often very far away. The McBride children were nearly always the token blacks in their classes, and as James grew older he became increasingly confused about his own racial identity. Once, he even remembers asking if he was black or white, to which Ruth responded: "You're a human being...Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody...If you're a nobody... it doesn't matter what color you are." Ruth made sure that her children attended every free event New York City had to offer: "festivals, zoos, parades, block parties, libraries, concerts." In retrospect, James realizes that they never felt deprived or poor. In the house, the question of race was "ignorable".

Ruth was a rebellious girl who hated her father, and since her father hated blacks - and especially black men - it made sense for her to fall in love with a black man. In those days, she explains, interracial relationships were intensely dangerous, as black men were hanged in the South for even looking at a white woman. Ruth longed for romance, but no one ever asked her on a date until, one day, a young black man began visiting the store and asking her how she was doing. She had always liked the black people in the town because they never judged her. This young man, Peter, was tall and handsome, and he soon became her boyfriend. One day, he flat-out asked Ruth if she would go for a walk. She said yes: "I was naïve and young and before you know it I fell in love with him." After dating Peter for some time, Ruth realized that her period was late, and soon understood that it wasn't coming at all. The year was 1936, and she was scared Peter would be killed. Some of Peter's friends knew about the pregnancy and were scared too. She asked Peter to marry her, but he said it wasn't possible. They argued outside the house about what to do, and Ruth dropped her gold chain bracelet. When she went back to look for it, it was gone. A couple of days later, Mameh gave it back to her and quietly suggested that she go to New York in the summertime to visit her grandmother.

James's real father, Andrew McBride, died before James was born. When his mother remarried a furnace fireman for the New York City Housing Authority named Hunter Jordan, her new husband became like a real father to James. Ruth and Jordan met while Ruth was selling church dinners in the plaza in front of the building. After their marriage, no distinction was ever made between the McBride and the Jordan children. When James was six or seven, he remembers moving to a four-bedroom pink stucco house in St. Albans, Queens; Jordan had spent his life savings to buy it. He couldn't live with the madness of so many children, so he kept his own place in Brooklyn, and visited on the weekends. He was half Native-American, and half black. In 1969, the city of New York told Jordan to move out of his Brooklyn home because they were going to build a high-rise housing project at the site. They gave him $13,000 for the brownstone, in spite of all the time and love he put into the place. He was forced to leave, but when James recently visited the address, all he found was an empty lot.

Jordan moved into the house in Queens, and converted the basement into a semblance of his old place. At age 72, he complained of a headache and then suffered a stroke. He improved a little, and asked James to take him for a drive, during which he said to him: "y'all are special...And just so special to me..." He told James that since he was the eldest in the house now, he needed to watch his mother and the younger kids. Two days later, Jordan had a relapse and passed away.

Analysis

A point of contrast between the household in which Ruth grew up and the household she eventually ran is the idea of poverty and wealth. Ruth explains that, in spite of the difficult economic times, the store did well, and she never starved. However, she saw others who were starving, but were sustained by spirituality and affection. Ruth states that she always felt hungry for love and affection; though they existed in a sort of silent alliance with her mother, their relationship was never the open, safe kind in which one could luxuriate and grow. Tateh made their home life deeply unhappy. When Ruth ruled over her own children, James states that, in spite of the chaos, his mother was always there at the crucial times. She made sure that they took advantage of everything the city had to offer, and, through all the hardship, the house was lavished in love. Even though the family was always in financial trouble, James never felt "poor".

The emphasis on the recurring theme of education is directly connected to the idea of self-determination. When Ruth stated that education was the way to make something of oneself, she recognized its power to set one along the road to opportunity. In her fixation on education, Ruth exhibited the immigrant mentality of those who strongly believed they could remake themselves with the opportunities America afforded. Ruth provided her family with all of the things America - and New York City - had to offer. In doing so, she pushed her children to engage in the world and learn how to move upwards in society.

The idea of self-determination, in Ruth's view, transcended the idea of race. To her children, she insisted that it didn't matter what color they were if they were nobody, and urged them to concentrate on school grades and church. Ruth created a tiny microcosm of the world to keep her family safe, but as the children grew older, the household began to destabilize as the question of race began spreading through their lives. When James saw his mother retaliate against a storeowner who sold James spoiled milk and then insulted her, he began feeling increasingly ashamed of being seen with her in public. This echoes the shame Ruth experienced with Mameh, who could not speak English and was physically crippled. In the end, however, James states that his views changed: "[As a child] I would have preferred that Mommy were black. Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds." He recognizes that his hybrid identity and the uniqueness of his background invest him with the ability to express ideas that transcend race.

Ruth's abortion, which she describes in this section, was fraught with a sense of inevitability mixed with fear; there were no feelings of empowerment or self-determination. The action, however, was a brave one: she helped save Peter's life, and undoubtedly saved him from a serious, possibly violent retaliation from her father. The irony, however, arises in light of Ruth's fertility; despite her initial reluctance to give life to a child who was half black and half white, Ruth later gave birth to twelve children, all with similar racial identities. The trouble with her relationship with Peter, however, had less to do with race than with the actual relationship. Ruth loved him passionately: "[M]y whole life changed after I fell in love. It was like the sun started shining on me for the first time, and for the first time in my life I began to smile. I was loved, I was loved, and I didn't care what anyone thought." However, Peter did not return the sentiment. He didn't want to run away from his life in order to marry Ruth, and was seeing at least one other girl at the same time - a black girl who he did eventually marry.

The memoir then shifts to a more detailed description of Hunter Jordan, Ruth's second husband, and the man who James felt was his real father, even though they were not blood relations. When James tells the reader about how the brownstone his father loved was taken down by the city with only the most meager compensation, James expresses his anger about the injustices done to blacks, particularly with respect to property issues. Despite Jordan's good heart and the fact that he was an employee of the city, he was forced to give up something he cherished. The fact that the lot was never even built upon is a symbol of the pervasive waste found in the United States.

When Jordan passed away, James experienced death for the first time. His real father died before he was born, so he never had to deal with that source of grief. The grief he felt upon Jordan's death, however, caused him to actively rebel against his upbringing (an echo of his mother's rebellious nature). As death in The Color of Water often suggests a later rebirth, the natural momentum of the story causes the reader to wonder how James will rebel, how his mother will respond, and, in the end, how James, along with the rest of his siblings, will achieve the American Dream.

Mameh, aware that Ruth was pregnant, sent her to New York to stay with her well-to-do family: "my mother's family, they didn't say a lot to you. They would always take care of you in a basic way but they never said a lot to you. I didn't feel loved by them." Her Aunt Betsy, the youngest of the sisters, was living with Bubeh at that time, working as the bookkeeper of a lingerie store on the East Side. She was beautiful, like all of the sisters, and intuitive, immediately sensing that something was wrong with Ruth. Ruth told her about the pregnancy, and Aunt Betsy located a Jewish doctor who agreed to perform the abortion (without anesthesia). After the procedure Ruth felt very ashamed, and apologized profusely to her aunt. Years later, Aunt Betsy slammed the door in Ruth's face, but Ruth never faulted her: "They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind."

When Hunter Jordan died, it took Ruth a long time to recover from her grief. James remembers feeling that "the fire was gone." He was finally the "king" of the house - the eldest - but his grades dropped, and he began spending as much time away from home as possible, joining a band, getting drunk and high with his new friends, and narrowly escaping arrest. His mother tried to whip him into shape, but failed. In the end, as the house fell into disrepair, Ruth sent him to stay with Jacqueline in Kentucky for the summer.

In Louisville, James hung out on "the Corner" with the "cool" southern working men who gathered to sip whiskey and play crap games. He befriended Chicken Man, "one of the chief philosophers of the Corner." James was called "New York": no one knew of his past or his mother, and he finally felt free to be himself. It was in Louisville that James acquired his "street education". When Chicken Man finally sat him down and said: "Everybody on this corner is smart. You ain't no smarter than anybody here. If you so smart, why you got to come on this corner every summer? 'Cause you flunkin' school! You think if you drop out of school somebody's gonna beg you to go back? Hell no!...If you want to drop out of school and shoot people and hang on this corner all your life, go ahead! It's your life!" Later, Chicken Man was stabbed to death by a former lover.

While Ruth was in New York during the summer of her abortion, she enrolled in a girls' school. She didn't want to return home, but the school was too hard, and she went back to Suffolk only to learn that Peter had gotten another girl - the black girl - pregnant. Upon learning that Peter had decided to marry the black girl, Ruth became angry and refused to talk to him ever again. In the meantime, she began planning to leave for New York after graduation, although she felt guilty about abandoning Mameh: "I was her eyes and ears in America." Mameh was also suffering from fainting spells, and Tateh didn't care about her, though Mameh was always a good Jewish wife to him. Ruth states: "a wife wants love."

Tateh refused to allow Ruth to attend her graduation ceremony, which was held inside a Protestant church. She and Frances marched in the ceremony, and Ruth was determined to go into the church, but when the crucial moment came, she just couldn't do it: "In my heart I was still a Jew. I had done some wrong things in my life, but I was still my parents' child." The next day, she caught a Greyhound bus for New York.

In 1973, James was living at home while his mother tried to learn how to drive. That year, Jack said to him: "You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself." He didn't change overnight, but as he watched his mother go through hell, he realized that "she did not fall." Her best friend Irene, a black woman, passed away, and his mother refused to attend the memorial service. She was done with funerals, she said. She was determined to learn how to drive a car, something that scared the hell out of James. He notes the interesting fact that as eighteen-year-old Rachel Shilsky in Suffolk, his mother had known how to drive perfectly. That girl, however, was dead, and Ruth McBride Jordan couldn't drive.

Analysis

The memoir creates a parallel between Ruth's visits to New York and James's visits to Louisville, Kentucky. Mameh was fully aware of Ruth's pregnancy and her general unhappiness in Suffolk, so she sent her to New York to stay with her family. Ruth later sent James to see his "Aunt" Jacqueline because she knew that he loved her, and also knew that he was having difficulty coping with Hunter Jordan's death. Leaving the place in which one was born and raised in order to escape what one has become, Ruth understood, can inspire one to pursue the American Dream and undergo a rebirth. Ruth appears to have understood that being too close to home could prove detrimental to one's ability to imagine other lives and avenues for growth. When Ruth began going to New York for the summers, she was able to imagine a life for herself there. Though she couldn't keep up with the school in New York, she was nonetheless able to imagine physically moving there, finding work, and living a life outside of Suffolk. The new environment inspired her to imagine the possibilities of who she might become.

Ruth also understood that the instability of their home life after Hunter Jordan's death required James to gain a different perspective. Part of her motivation for sending him to Louisville was to ensure that another influence he respected - Jacqueline - would be accessible to him for a significant period of time. While in Louisville, James could be himself in another context; people didn't know his past. According to James, he received his real "street education" there. On "the Corner", Chicken Man advised him to go to school and to make something of himself, seeming to regret not having done so himself. Education, he emphasized, is valuable; it creates opportunities. He told James that everyone on the Corner was smart, but that smarts don't mean anything without education. Intelligence can't be deployed in the world without a formal education that teaches one how to use it to achieve concrete goals. James needed to hear this truth come from someone other than his mother and the people who had been telling him this all his life. To have a man he respected as "street-smart" and "cool" tell him that he was failing prompted his decision to seek a fresh start.

The reader learns that Ruth's Aunt Betsy successfully helped Ruth get an abortion, but also that Aunt Betsy later slammed the door in her face. This helps the memoir gain momentum by offering the reader a glimpse of the future, sparking a desire to know how this event actually came to be. Why did Ruth approach her aunt, and what did she request that caused the formerly open-minded woman to reject her so completely?

In the wake of Hunter Jordan's death, James coped with his grief by rebelling against his mother, getting drunk, letting his grades fall, shoplifting, and getting high. Deaths in this memoir, however, are often followed by rebirth. The reader thus intimates that James will change, and that the difficulty of this period will ultimately cause him to grow into a stronger young man than he might have otherwise been. The same can also be said about the strength that Ruth developed as a consequence of her difficult past.

Romantic relationships also come under the spotlight in this section. When Ruth returned to Suffolk after the abortion, it became clear to her that "love" was not at the center of her relationship with Peter, despite the fact that she had said that she loved him. The marriage between Mameh and Tateh was regrettably not one of love, which prompts Ruth to state that a wife desires "love". She witnessed the lovelessness of her parents' marriage, but refused to allow the same thing to happen to her. Her happiness upon marrying Dennis is understandable: their marriage was one based entirely on mutual love.

The theme of identity surfaces again during Ruth's graduation ceremony. Despite Ruth's desire to disobey her parents, she found that she simply couldn't step into the Protestant church. This reveals her psychic confinement in Suffolk; in her parents' town, she was unable to escape her inherited identity. In New York, by contrast, she was able to successfully cast off the undesirable parts of her heritage.

As James observed his mother trying to learn how to drive, the irony of the attempt highlights Ruth's figurative death and rebirth. As a girl in Suffolk, she had known how to drive perfectly, but as Ruth McBride Jordan, the mother of twelve, she no longer knew how to drive. Ruth's mother's identity underwent a kind of death when she left Suffolk, lost her mother, and married. James's motivation for writing the book is to recover a sense of his mother's former identity, in order for him to better understand who she was and is, thus giving him a fuller awareness of himself. While death signals a new beginning, it does not negate the fact of the life that has been lived.

After leaving home, Ruth moved to New York City to stay with Bubeh, and began working for Aunt Mary in her leather-goods factory. Aunt Mary was an obese, pretty-faced woman with a husband who made shoes for movie stars. Aunt Mary was, however, having an affair with her best friend's husband. In 1939, she hired a man from North Carolina named Andrew McBride, who went by his middle name, "Dennis". Dennis quickly became Aunt Mary's best artisan. At this time, Ruth was just beginning to discover Harlem; it was "like magic". She went to the movies and looked for a job there, too, but no one would hire a nineteen-year-old white girl. Eventually, she found a job as a beautician, but damaged a client's hair and was fired. Finally, she was hired to work in a nail salon. Rocky, the owner of the salon, was in his fifties and drove a nice car, and Ruth thought of him as "prosperous". Before long, he was driving her home, taking her out, and setting her up in a room of her own in Harlem. Ruth would stay away from home for days at a time, and Bubeh started getting suspicious. Ruth, however, wasn't as innocent as she seemed: she knew that Rocky wasn't only a nail salon owner. She had even begun inquiring how she could go out and make money like his other girls. When she ran into Dennis in Harlem, he shamed her, telling her that her family was worried about her and that Rocky was a pimp. Her parents, he said, didn't raise her to become one of Rocky's women. Dennis's disappointment prompted Ruth to move back to Bubeh's. Rocky tried to win her back, but eventually stopped coming around.

In 1974, James and his family moved to Wilmington, Delaware, because they couldn't afford to keep up the house in Queens. James was looking forward to a fresh start, but his younger sisters didn't want to move. After a great deal of debate, the family decided to leave Queens, but arrived in Delaware only to discover that the schools in Wilmington were segregated. When James's older brother David was pulled over for making an illegal U-turn (he was a doctoral student at Columbia at the time), Ruth decided that she hated Delaware. At 54 years of age, Ruth was living off of a small pension and social security, and still had five children to raise. James enrolled with his sisters in the all-black public high school, where he found a new crowd, focused on music, and won the opportunity to go to Europe. The trip wasn't free, but a rich couple, the Dawsons, had donated money so that inner-city kids would be able to take advantage of such opportunities. In exchange, James worked on their estate. When Mrs. Dawson discovered him sleeping in a strawberry patch she fired him, but still paid for his trip to Europe. The Dawsons kept in touch with James even after he left for Oberlin, which he attended for its strong liberal arts program and music conservatory: James vividly recalls receiving a letter from Mrs. Dawson telling him that her husband had died. In September of 1975, he got on a Greyhound bus and watched his mother wave good-bye to him, remembering how she had always rushed her children out the door, telling them to learn to live on their own.

After leaving Rocky, Ruth made a brand-new start. She found work as a waitress in a diner, and began dating Dennis. He was thoughtful and serious; a violinist who originally dreamed of playing with an orchestra. In those days, however, no orchestra would hire a black man. Undaunted, Dennis composed his own religious music, although he nearly starved to death. Finally, he decided to take a job working in the leather factory. Dennis's family welcomed Ruth with open arms, although Aunt Candis, Dennis's favorite, said: "I just hope you excuse me for looking at you so hard, because I've never had a white person in my house before, and I've never been this close to a white person before." Aunt Candis lived to be a hundred, and when Dennis died, she moved to New York to help with the children.

Although Dennis wasn't ready quite ready to wed, he and Ruth lived as husband and wife. One day, she simply left Bubeh's apartment, causing a scandal. Another day, in 1939, Ruth suddenly decided she wanted to talk to Mameh. She called home long-distance, and Tateh answered the phone. He said that Mameh was ill, and that he needed her to come down and to help with the store. When Ruth arrived home, she discovered that her father was having an affair with a fat, white gentile woman who lived up the road. Soon afterwards, Tateh went to Nevada and got a quickie divorce from Mameh. Dee-Dee, Ruth's younger sister, begged Ruth to stay home. According to Ruth, Dee-Dee was very smart and confident, and got good grades. No one ever made fun of her: "she was the first American in my family, while Sam and I were immigrants." Tateh was proud of Dee-Dee, too, which made Ruth a little jealous. The two sisters were not that close, so she knew that Dee-Dee's request carried great weight. Although Ruth promised that she would stay, in the end she broke her promise: something that Dee-Dee never forgave her for.

Analysis

When Ruth moved to New York, she sought a fresh start away from her family in Suffolk. Although she remained connected to her mother's side of the family by moving in with Bubeh and working for her Aunt Mary, the move was an overt expression of Ruth's desire to determine the direction of her own life.

Ruth's first independent move, however, was a false start. While she was genuinely attracted to life in Harlem, her involvement with Rocky revealed that she wasn't as innocent as she seemed; she was aware that he was a pimp, and understood where the relationship was heading. At the same time, her attraction to Rocky's lifestyle is not wholly surprising, since pimps often lure in new women by dangling the image of the "good life" before them. For the first time, Ruth felt free, and reveled in the excitement of Harlem. She also most likely believed in Rocky's image of "prosperity". The usage of this phrase adds even more depth to her character: in the reader's mind, at least, Ruth was very far from being an innocent "victim".

Dennis was a new and positive influence in Ruth's life: he shamed her out of her relationship with Rocky, and she made another fresh start. She found work as a waitress, moved back in with Bubeh, and began a serious relationship with Dennis. This relationship was something different: Dennis was serious, kind, and good. He was also religious, but his religion was expressed through his morality and warm-hearted nature, and was not expressed as the tyranny she had experienced living under Tateh. He did not expect the kind of confinement her mother had endured in her efforts to live up to the idea of the "good Jewish wife". Dennis was something different, and in the end he offered Ruth the love and affection that had been absent in her childhood.

For James, the "fresh start" happened when Ruth moved the family to Wilmington, Delaware. The move was clearly an echo of her youthful tendency to physically move away from a site of pain. Ruth had lost both of her husbands and found herself in dire financial straits, and the move expressed her need to start over. James understood this, and welcomed the opportunity to make new friends and escape his rebellious past. He began concentrating on his education, building on what he had learned from Chicken Man. He focused on his passion for music, and sought opportunities for development in the musical arena.

James's relationship with the Dawsons shows the complexities inherent in race-based divisions. While on the one hand the Dawsons employed James as a waiter and groundskeeper, traditional jobs that placed him in a "serving" capacity, they simultaneously worked to provide him with a valuable opportunity to further his education. While they eventually fired him for failing to perform his duties, they did not take away the crucial opportunity that they had given him to travel and play with the jazz band in Europe. James highlights his gratitude to this couple and relates to readers that it was difficult for him to categorize them - white, privileged, wealthy - as "the enemy" in the fight for civil rights. He knew them on a personal level; they were human beings to him, not just "white people". James's relationship with the Dawsons thus reinforces Ruth's statement to her children: it doesn't matter what color someone is if they're a nobody. A person's ultimate value, in other words, is not dependent upon the color of their skin.

The memoir also contrasts Aunt Candis and Jacqueline (James's "aunts") with Ruth's aunts (Mameh's sisters). Aunt Candis and Jacqueline offered James their help, love, and guidance, particularly after Dennis's death. They created the sense of a shared responsibility for one another's fates in a way that Ruth's aunts failed to do. While Ruth's aunts had always ensured that she had enough to eat, Ruth had never felt "loved" by them.

When Ruth returned to Suffolk, the family was on the verge of collapse. Sam had gone; Ruth had gone; Mameh was increasingly ill; Tateh was having an affair. Tateh's affair with a gentile woman is ironic, given the fact that he was a rabbi and was vociferously opposed to even stepping foot inside a Protestant church. The affair also echoes Ruth's own relationship with a black man. Both Ruth and Tateh transgressed the boundaries of their religious community in favor of love.

In November of 1982, James experienced an identity crisis that manifested in his career. He bounced from one reporting job to another, and became intensely frustrated with his mother: "It had gotten to the point where I didn't see why she made such a secret of it." He visited Suffolk in search of Tateh's store, only to find a McDonald's where it had once stood. In Suffolk, he met a 66-year-old black man named Eddie Thompson who still remembered the Shilskys. James's mother's name, Eddie told James, was called "Rachel" back then. This was the first time that James had ever heard his mother's former name. Eddie told him that he remembered Ruth's mother, who was crippled: a nice lady who always slipped them fruit and candy when her husband wasn't looking. As for the Rabbi, he had run off with an enormous woman with whom he was having an affair; this was particularly humorous because Shilsky was such a diminutive man. Rachel, Eddie recalled, just disappeared one day. Eddie decided that he wanted to talk to her and called her long-distance. When she heard his voice and the memories it brought back, Ruth began crying.

In the summer of 1941, before Ruth returned to New York, a letter arrived from Mameh's sisters stating that they had three rooms worth of extra furniture. It was their way of saying that Bubeh had died. Mameh couldn't read the letter because it had been intended for Tateh and was thus written in English, but late that night Ruth read it aloud to her. Mameh never said a word at the time; later, though, Ruth heard her mother weeping: a sound that she would never forget.

As Ruth readied herself to return to New York, Dee-Dee became angry with her for having broken her promise. Mameh tried to convince her to stay, as well, but in the end Ruth stood firm. Mameh packed her a bag lunch. As she waited for the bus, Tateh pulled up in his car and said that she should stay, because he needed her help with the store. Her mother, he said, needed her as well. Ruth refused, and they began to argue. In the end, Tateh told her that if she married a black man, she would never be welcome home again. Ruth never learned how her father had found out about Peter. On the bus, when she opened her bag lunch, she found her mother's Polish passport. The passport photo is the only image Ruth has of her mother.

Back in New York, Ruth found a job at a glass factory in Chelsea. One day in 1942, Dennis came home from the leather factory and told her that Mameh was sick, and in a Bronx hospital. Ruth called her Aunt Mary, but she told her to stay away. The family had sat shiva for Ruth; she was dead to them. A few days later, while she was at work, Dennis called her to say that Mameh had passed away. It took a long time for Ruth to pull herself out of her grief. Dennis told her that she had to forgive herself, and Ruth knew that her mother had given her the passport because she had been aware that she was dying. Dennis talked to her about God, and said that she would be forgiven. She started going to the Metropolitan Church in Harlem, where Reverend Brown was the well-loved minister. Ruth says, "that's when I started to become a Christian and the Jew in me began to die." She then describes an incident when Mameh was waving a live chicken over her head, and told Ruth that death to the chicken would give her life, and that a bird that wasn't able to fly wasn't special anyway.

In 1992, James stood in front of the synagogue in Suffolk, contemplating the fact that his blood ran through this place. Hudis Shilsky, he discovered, was buried in a Long Island graveyard. Sam Shilsky had died in 1944 while in the service. He traced the Rabbi to a Brooklyn address in the 1960s, but, after that, he had vanished. Dee-Dee had also vanished from Suffolk; she withdrew from school one semester short of graduating, just before Mameh's death. James knew he could probably find her, but didn't have the heart to reopen old wounds. In the state building, James met Aubrey Rubinstein, a man in his early sixties. His father had taken over Shilsky's store in 1942, when the Rabbi had left town. He said that most Jews had eventually left Suffolk to make their lives elsewhere.

James spent the night in a motel in town, but woke in the middle of the night. Alone, he walked out to the river, where he experienced something of his grandmother's loneliness.

Analysis

When James begins to describe his adult life, he illustrates how much of his indecision about his career path was rooted in a fundamental confusion about his personal identity. His visit to Suffolk marks the beginning of his writing project, along with the journey to discover the girl his mother had been growing up. The fact that Shilsky's store has been replaced by a McDonald's is ironic, and echoes how Hunter Jordan's beloved brownstone had been torn down to become an empty lot. As time passes and people pass and things are covered over, it becomes apparent how easily forgetfulness sets in.

On his journey to Suffolk, however, James met several people who did remember his mother as a girl, as well as her family. The story that Eddie Thompson told James about Mameh, who used to slip them candy and fruit, corroborates the image of Ruth's mother as a good woman. His words also support Ruth's contentions about how people viewed the Rabbi: with suspicion and dislike. James's interactions with individuals from his mother's past only add depth to his mother's story.

The theme of death and rebirth resurfaces with Ruth's two intense experiences of death. Mameh's passing is prefaced by the death of Bubeh. Ruth claims that she can still hear the sound of Mameh weeping in the night, like a ghost. This weeping contrasts with Ruth's howling when Dennis gave her the news of Mameh's passing. While describing her grief, Ruth tells the story of Mameh with the chicken. Mameh once told her that a bird that couldn't fly wasn't all that special, and that a chicken's death only fosters continued life; the implication is that Mameh was a bird who couldn't fly, and was thus not special.

Chicken Man, who stood on "the Corner" in Louisville, was another bird that couldn't fly. James learned many lessons about life from Chicken Man's unfortunate fate, which prompted his commitment to a fresh start in Wilmington. With Mameh's death, Ruth, who had already taken steps to assume a life of her own choosing, began the difficult road to recovery and release. Ruth explicitly states that when Mameh died, the Jew in her died as well, and she found that she was able to step willingly into a Harlem church, something she wasn't able to do on her graduation day in Suffolk. The image of "flying" connotes both physical and spiritual liberation.

While James underwent a rebirth into a conscientious, serious student, Ruth was reborn into Christianity. Shortly before her mother's death, she learned that the family had sat shiva for her, and that she had figuratively "died" in the eyes of the Jewish community, as well as in the eyes of her family. Her rebirth in Christianity gave her the spiritual infrastructure to cope with her mother's death, and enabled her to ground herself in a new community that espoused love and support.

When James revisited Suffolk and found the synagogue where his grandfather had been a rabbi, he mused about how black men are usually associated with violence, and not with synagogues. The ironic gesture deepens the reader's skepticism when it comes to the usual stereotypes of religion and race. James also highlights how the core of the family splintered by gesturing to the various directions in which the members of the family "flew" after Mameh's death.

James's nocturnal experience, in which he walks to the river in the middle of the night and experiences the loneliness that he imagines his grandmother must have felt, is a poignant and deeply emotional moment in the book. It shows how, through the process of learning about his mother's history, he has become familiar with his grandmother's experience of isolation in America on a visceral, potent level. As an immigrant and outsider who couldn't speak the native language and lived in a small, Southern town with a husband who didn't love her, Mameh was entirely powerless. Her powerlessness can be likened to the experiences of other racial groups and ethnic minorities, who face similar difficulties in America. Some even say that the American Dream, for many, is merely a myth. However, while Hudis Shilsky may not have lived the Dream during her lifetime, she was able to "fly" in the end. By writing down his mother's (and grandmother's) story, James grants the long-suffering women immortality and a voice.

Although Ruth ultimately found her true path in life, she never took the easiest road towards happiness. Some blacks, she explains, never accepted her, and she is aware that most interracial marriages fail because there are too many pressures on interracial couples. In her view, however, the requirements of marriage have nothing to do with race: "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." In 1942, Ruth became a Christian and joined a Harlem church presided over by Reverend Brown. Those were her "glory years." Dennis "came from a home where kindness was a way of life. I wanted to be in this kind of family. I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me." Ruth and Dennis finally agreed to marry at New York's City Hall, but arrived there only to be confronted by discrimination. Reverend Brown later married them in his private office at the church, and the ceremony was followed by a lovely reception at a friend's home. Ruth could never go South with Dennis after that; it was too dangerous. In the end, however, she did venture back to bury his body.

Ruth and Dennis's first baby arrived in 1943, and in no time at all they were parents to four children. The family lived for nine years in a one-room, cockroach-riddled apartment in Harlem, but Ruth states that it was the happiest time of her life. Ruth and Dennis put in an application to move to the Red Hook Housing Projects in Brooklyn, and were given a two-bedroom apartment with its own bathroom. The projects were beautiful then; integrated, with a diverse population: "It was a real American life, the life I'd always dreamed of." She was content: "My soul was full."

Kids dropped "like eggs", but the family was supported by their faith. Dennis found the calling to become a preacher, and graduated from the Shelton Bible School in 1953. He and Ruth founded a church in their living room. Eventually, they rented a building, and the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, named for Reverend Brown, was born. Then, one day in 1957, Dennis came home with a bad cold. The cold escalated into a fever, and he became seriously ill.

Ruth missed her period, and realized that she was pregnant once again. When she told Dennis, who had been admitted to the hospital, he told her to name the child James. After a few weeks in the hospital, Dennis asked Ruth to bring the children by. They stood outside, waving up at his window, and something sank in Ruth's heart. A few days later, a call came while she was at home. Dennis had died of cancer.

Ruth says, "Part of me died when Dennis died. I loved that man more than life itself." It was very hard to let him go, but her burden was lightened by the show of support from the community. When she returned from burying Dennis's body in North Carolina, her mailbox was full of checks, money orders, and cash from their friends and the members of their congregation. Aunt Candis and Jacqueline came to help, but things remained desperate. In the end, Ruth went to her Jewish family for help, only to have Aunt Betsy slam the door in her face. Dee-Dee was in Queens, and her absence was a painful reminder to Ruth that she had broken her promise. The two sisters never spoke again. To the Shilskys, Ruth was dead, and no longer their responsibility. Ruth believes that God responded to her need by sending her Hunter Jordan. Aunt Candis urged her to marry him, and she agreed after his third proposal. If Ruth wed him, Jordan promised, he would take care of her for the rest of his life.

In 1994, New Brown Memorial Baptist Church celebrated its 40th anniversary. The old-timers said that God had honored Reverend McBride by seeing all of his children graduate from college. The new minister, however, forgot to honor Ruth. According to James, "he treated her like an outsider, a foreigner, a white person." In general, Ruth doesn't believe that modern ministers have "vision", having told James, "Now your father, he had vision." Times back then, she believes, made for different men. At the celebration, Ruth attempted to read a speech, but after a couple of tries she put it away and spoke from her heart. She said that the church had begun in her living room, and that she was a witness to God's word. She told James that, in order to be a minister, "You need foresight. And vision. You got vision?"

James next tracked down his mother's friend Frances Moody, now Frances Falcone, whom he found living in Portsmouth. The last time that the two women had seen each other was in 1941, when Ruth threw Frances a wedding shower. James writes: "Her reunion with her old friend is one of the small, beautiful side benefits of a book experience that Mommy was truly never interested in."

As James lists all of his mother's children, along with their education and accomplishments, he states that "Mommy created her own nation, a rainbow coalition." The book closes with a meditation on James's friendship with David Lee Preston, a Jewish reporter and the only son of a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by hiding in the sewers. David asked James to bring his mother to his wedding, so Ruth attended the ceremony as a guest. She said to her son: "You know that could've been me."

Analysis

As the book draws to a close, the reader watches as Ruth achieves her dream. After a loveless childhood, she finally married a man she adored, and who loved her passionately in return. Her marriage, in contrast to Mameh's, was one based on open love and affection. When Ruth became a Christian, she became a member of a community defined by love that welcomed her with open arms. The American Dream became real for Ruth McBride when her family moved to Brooklyn.

The reader finally sees how her first marriage came to end, and how quickly Dennis's death came. Her desperate financial situation forced Ruth to approach her Jewish family. While her biological family rejected her, she was surrounded with love and support by her neighbors. They heaped money and food donations upon her, and Aunt Candis and Jacqueline arrived to help her with the children. Everyone, it seems, linked their fates together to create a common destiny and to draw from the strength that is found in numbers. Ruth was offered a second miracle in the arrival of Hunter Jordan. The support that she found in the wake of Dennis's death only heightened Ruth's faith, and when the church celebrated its 40th anniversary, she was able to proclaim that she was a witness to God's word.

The reader also glimpses the early years of James's life in the final section of the book. Ruth first realized that she was pregnant while Dennis was in the hospital, and Dennis named his unborn child "James" just prior to his death. James's earliest memories are of Hunter Jordan, whom he viewed as his real father, and of the knowledge that his father had died before he was born.

The fact that Hunter Jordan asked Ruth to marry him three times is an allusion to the Jewish faith. According to tradition, a person who wishes to become a Jew must be rejected three times in order to test the strength of the person's desire. Hunter Jordan insisted that he wanted to marry Ruth, and that he wanted to help take care of her and all of her children. The fact that Ruth made Hunter ask her three times speaks to the perseverance of the values that were instilled in her during her childhood.

When James observed how the new minister of the New Brown Memorial Church treated his mother as an outsider because she was white, he saw before him the strength - and inaccuracy - of racial stereotypes. On the surface, Ruth could easily be viewed as an outsider in a black church, but in truth she had been one of the church's founders. Her commitment, in other words, was something that she had searched for; her faith lay beneath her skin. Her alliance with the community was not based on the color of her skin, but on her relationship with the community itself. James's description of his mother as a "foreigner" alludes to Ruth's early experiences as an immigrant in America, as well as to the experiences of Mameh.

James's father, according to Ruth, had "vision": he was a remarkable, almost prescient man. "Vision" speaks to forward motion, and the ability to see the future: vision inspires individuals to link their fates together in pursuit of a common goal. A leader assumes the responsibility of expressing a vision that is in the best interest of the community at large. According to Ruth, Dennis had vision where modern ministers do not because the times were different then. The period before and during the Civil Rights Movement required visionaries to come forth to lead the community to justice. When James admits to his mother that he doesn't think he has "vision", the statement is revealed as ironic because in writing the book he displays his own unique vision. By searching his mother's memory and history, James discovered his own origins. Vision is necessary in this endeavor because in order for a story to have resonance, it must look towards the future. By exploring the experiences of his own family in The Color of Water, James reveals how Americans can, collectively, bridge divisions of race and religion. The answers lie in love, community, and the ability to recognize that the substance and the heart of a person are found deep under the skin.

The list of the accomplishments of each of Ruth's twelve children has an almost biblical resonance. Ruth's children prove to be a testament to Ruth's own qualities of perseverance and goodness, and to the spirituality of her first husband. The book closes on the note of James's close friendship with a Jewish reporter because the friendship is based on a mutual understanding between overtly dissimilar individuals: David Lee Preston understands the meaning of Ruth's actions, and James understands the meaning of David's mother's survival. When Ruth attends David's traditional Jewish wedding, she is no longer a "Jew", but has come full-circle to observe the world she left behind, inspiring her to muse about the other life she could have lived. By taking the road that was less traveled, Ruth became an American and achieved an identity that she defined on her own terms.

• Biography of James McBride
• About The Color of Water
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Glossary of Terms
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1-4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-8
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-12
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 13-16
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 17-19
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 20-22
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 23-Epilogue
• Related Links on The Color of Water
• Suggested Essay Questions
• Loving v. Virginia (1967)
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
• Purchase The Color of Water and Other Works
• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
• Test Yourself! Quiz 3
• Test Yourself! Quiz 4
• Message Board on The Color of Water