Geiger, H. Jack. “Rachel and Her Children” New York Times. Sunday, March 31, 1996
McBride, James. James McBride.com http://www.jamesmcbride.com/
McBride, James. The Color of Water. New York. The Berkley Publishing Group. 2006
Sparknotes.com. The Color of Water. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/colorofwater/
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Historical Context
Example 1- In the book, James recalls a time when he was afraid that a Black Panther would hurt his mother because she was white. This is important to the book because it shows that though James has pride in his African American roots, he also has feelings of love for his mother that cause him to have mixed feelings. This is important to history because the mention of the Black Panthers shows the historical background to this book.
Example 2- When Ruth’s brother dies in WWII, it becomes an aspect of her life that pushes us further away from her family and her Jewish heritage. It also sets the stage for the history present in the novel. It shows just what a different world Ruth lived in than we do today.
Example 3- Throughout the book, Ruth and her family suffer the stigma and confusion associated with being in an interracial couple during the time the book takes place.
Example 2- When Ruth’s brother dies in WWII, it becomes an aspect of her life that pushes us further away from her family and her Jewish heritage. It also sets the stage for the history present in the novel. It shows just what a different world Ruth lived in than we do today.
Example 3- Throughout the book, Ruth and her family suffer the stigma and confusion associated with being in an interracial couple during the time the book takes place.
Links to use when teaching this book
http://www.jamesmcbride.com/
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/colorofwater/quotes.html#explanation1
http://www.readwritethink.org/
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/colorofwater/quotes.html#explanation1
http://www.readwritethink.org/
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Important quotes
“Finally one afternoon he came by where she was selling church dinners and asked Ma, ‘Do you go to the movies?’
‘Yeah’ she said. ‘But I got eight kids and they go to the movies too.’
‘You got enough for a baseball team,’ he said.
He married her and made the baseball team his own, adding four more kids to make it an even twelve. He made no separation between the McBride and the Jordan children, and my siblings and I never thought of or referred to each other as half brothers and half sisters…” (McBride 118)
This quote is important to the book as a whole because it portrays the aspect of family that is essential to the book. It shows that Hunter accepts all of the things that come with Ruth when he marries her. It shows the way that families become groups of survivors in the ideal sense. James’ family survives through poverty and prejudice and being a blended family (half brother and half sisters) and still pushes through to become a loving, happy, and successful family.
“ ‘Why do you cry in church?’ I asked her one day 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. I thought it was because she wanted to be black like everyone else in church, because maybe God liked black people better, and one afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white.
A deep sigh. ‘Oh boy…God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit…God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.’ (McBride 50)
This quote is important because, not only is the title derived from this moment, but it shows how unimportant skin color is to Ruth. She is going to love people for the goodness and kindness that is within them, regardless of their race, because that is the way her God loves people – God does not see Black or White or Asian, of Latino, God only sees the goodness that is in people’s hearts. Ruth does her best to instill this sense of love in her children and this love is reflected in James’s telling of his mother’s story.
“I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.” (McBride 270)
This quote is important because it shows James’ struggle for identity and the struggle for identity in general. This book is not merely about James and his struggle to find his identity through the duality in his life, but also his mother’s struggle to find herself as well. She is Jewish, Christian, white, and part of an African American family. Reconciling all these things would be a struggle today, but could have been an epic battle in the days she was fighting.
‘Yeah’ she said. ‘But I got eight kids and they go to the movies too.’
‘You got enough for a baseball team,’ he said.
He married her and made the baseball team his own, adding four more kids to make it an even twelve. He made no separation between the McBride and the Jordan children, and my siblings and I never thought of or referred to each other as half brothers and half sisters…” (McBride 118)
This quote is important to the book as a whole because it portrays the aspect of family that is essential to the book. It shows that Hunter accepts all of the things that come with Ruth when he marries her. It shows the way that families become groups of survivors in the ideal sense. James’ family survives through poverty and prejudice and being a blended family (half brother and half sisters) and still pushes through to become a loving, happy, and successful family.
“ ‘Why do you cry in church?’ I asked her one day 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. I thought it was because she wanted to be black like everyone else in church, because maybe God liked black people better, and one afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white.
A deep sigh. ‘Oh boy…God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit…God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.’ (McBride 50)
This quote is important because, not only is the title derived from this moment, but it shows how unimportant skin color is to Ruth. She is going to love people for the goodness and kindness that is within them, regardless of their race, because that is the way her God loves people – God does not see Black or White or Asian, of Latino, God only sees the goodness that is in people’s hearts. Ruth does her best to instill this sense of love in her children and this love is reflected in James’s telling of his mother’s story.
“I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.” (McBride 270)
This quote is important because it shows James’ struggle for identity and the struggle for identity in general. This book is not merely about James and his struggle to find his identity through the duality in his life, but also his mother’s struggle to find herself as well. She is Jewish, Christian, white, and part of an African American family. Reconciling all these things would be a struggle today, but could have been an epic battle in the days she was fighting.
Book Review
Rachel and Her Children
By H. Jack Geiger
Published: Sunday, March 31, 1996
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THE COLOR OF WATER A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. By James McBride. 228 pp. New York: Riverhead Books. $22.95
There are two voices in this complex and moving narrative, and -- on the surface -- they could not seem more different. One is the voice of a black musician, composer and writer who traces his own evolution and that of his 11 brothers and sisters from childhood in a Brooklyn housing project to accomplished maturity.
The second voice is that of Rachel Shilsky, daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox Jewish rabbi in a virulently anti-Semitic and violently racist small Southern town. She recalls her own bitter childhood, her flight to the Jewish Bronx and then to the Harlem of the early 1940's, and her marriage to a black minister.
With him, she bore her first eight children, fervently adopted Christianity and founded a black Baptist church. Widowed, she remarried -- this time to a solid, kindhearted black furnace fireman for the housing authority -- and bore four more children. Widowed again, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family and assure her children's success.
Inevitably, these voices are connected and ultimately convergent, for Rachel Shilsky and James McBride are mother and son. Just as inevitably, their accounts are suffused with issues of race, religion and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book -- and of their lives -- is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church.
Not that it was easy. James's early childhood, in addition to containing all the ordinary joys, pangs and struggles of life in the orchestrated chaos of a large family, was touched by multiple confusions. His father died of cancer before he was born; his stepfather died when he was young. His mother's whiteness puzzled, often embarrassed and sometimes alarmed him, for he perceived danger from whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world -- "Look at her with those little niggers!" was what he often heard in public -- and from blacks who saw her as an interloper. And there were other startling moments: shopping with her black children and bargaining heatedly in Hasidic stores, his mother would suddenly shout -- in Yiddish -- "I know what's happening here!" to end the argument.
Since conflict about racial identity was a part of their lives, "written into our very faces, hands and arms," Mr. McBride writes, in his house "the question of race was like . . . a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable and thus completely ignorable." Not completely. Is God black or white, he asked his mother in frustration. In the answer that gives the book its title, she said: "God's not black. He's not white. . . . God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color."
Black Power, the era of Bobby Seale and Malcolm X, hit the family like a tidal wave. The oldest McBride brother, already an Ivy League medical student, was simultaneously a civil rights activist and union organizer. But James, a high school honor student, drifted into truancy, then petty crime, then drugs. Sent to Kentucky to live with an older sister, he flirted with more serious crime. Back home in high school, he discovered music and writing, won a scholarship to Oberlin College and was on his way.
It was "in her sense of education . . . that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us," he thinks now, and that is what sustained him. She schemed shrewdly to have all her children bused to schools in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there. "Every morning we hit the door at 6:30, fanning out across the city like soldiers armed with books, T squares, musical instruments." She paraded them "to every free event New York City offered: festivals, zoos, parades, block parties, libraries, concerts."
But only as an adult did James McBride convince his mother -- now Ruth McBride Jordan -- to tell the story of Rachel Shilsky, to describe her past. And it is her voice -- unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic -- that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.
"I'm dead," she begins, referring to the ritual Orthodox memorial observance her Jewish relatives held when she married but, in a larger sense, describing her Jewish identity. Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers and ultimately abandoned his wife. Rachel had only one friend. She couldn't get a part in her high school musical because the other girls refused to dance next to a Jew. She couldn't go to her graduation because it was held in a church. A grandmother and aunts in New York provided summertime relief. She moved north, worked for her relatives -- and then found Harlem, freedom in a new identity and a new life in the lives of her children.
Near the end of the book, Mr. McBride lists his siblings' careers: two doctors, a social worker, a historian and professor of African-American history, a graduate student in nurse-midwifery, a chemistry professor, a medical practice office manager, two teachers, a computer engineer and a businessman. The author himself has been a staff writer at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. And there is one more achiever: at 65, Ruth McBride Jordan went back to school and earned a college degree in social work.
She is living now with a daughter in New Jersey, her son reports. "Every day she rises, spirits her two grandchildren off to school and drives around central New Jersey. . . . Sometimes she'll get up in the morning and disappear for days at a time, slipping away to her old stomping grounds, the Red Hook Housing Projects. . . . Despite the fact that my siblings often urge her to stay out of the projects, she won't. 'Don't tell me how to live,' she says." The two stories, son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time (we are constantly told) of racial polarization. Together, I think, they give new meaning to some tired phrases. Try "multicultural" and, even more, "family values."
< PREVIOUS PAGE 1 2
H. Jack Geiger is the Arthur C. Logan Professor ofCommunity Medicine at the City University of New York Medical School.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/31/books/rachel-and-her-children.html?scp=12&sq=Reviews%20of&pagewanted=2
By H. Jack Geiger
Published: Sunday, March 31, 1996
SIGN IN TO RECOMMEND
SIGN IN TO E-MAIL
SINGLE-PAGE
REPRINTS
SHARE
THE COLOR OF WATER A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. By James McBride. 228 pp. New York: Riverhead Books. $22.95
There are two voices in this complex and moving narrative, and -- on the surface -- they could not seem more different. One is the voice of a black musician, composer and writer who traces his own evolution and that of his 11 brothers and sisters from childhood in a Brooklyn housing project to accomplished maturity.
The second voice is that of Rachel Shilsky, daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox Jewish rabbi in a virulently anti-Semitic and violently racist small Southern town. She recalls her own bitter childhood, her flight to the Jewish Bronx and then to the Harlem of the early 1940's, and her marriage to a black minister.
With him, she bore her first eight children, fervently adopted Christianity and founded a black Baptist church. Widowed, she remarried -- this time to a solid, kindhearted black furnace fireman for the housing authority -- and bore four more children. Widowed again, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family and assure her children's success.
Inevitably, these voices are connected and ultimately convergent, for Rachel Shilsky and James McBride are mother and son. Just as inevitably, their accounts are suffused with issues of race, religion and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book -- and of their lives -- is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church.
Not that it was easy. James's early childhood, in addition to containing all the ordinary joys, pangs and struggles of life in the orchestrated chaos of a large family, was touched by multiple confusions. His father died of cancer before he was born; his stepfather died when he was young. His mother's whiteness puzzled, often embarrassed and sometimes alarmed him, for he perceived danger from whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world -- "Look at her with those little niggers!" was what he often heard in public -- and from blacks who saw her as an interloper. And there were other startling moments: shopping with her black children and bargaining heatedly in Hasidic stores, his mother would suddenly shout -- in Yiddish -- "I know what's happening here!" to end the argument.
Since conflict about racial identity was a part of their lives, "written into our very faces, hands and arms," Mr. McBride writes, in his house "the question of race was like . . . a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable and thus completely ignorable." Not completely. Is God black or white, he asked his mother in frustration. In the answer that gives the book its title, she said: "God's not black. He's not white. . . . God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color."
Black Power, the era of Bobby Seale and Malcolm X, hit the family like a tidal wave. The oldest McBride brother, already an Ivy League medical student, was simultaneously a civil rights activist and union organizer. But James, a high school honor student, drifted into truancy, then petty crime, then drugs. Sent to Kentucky to live with an older sister, he flirted with more serious crime. Back home in high school, he discovered music and writing, won a scholarship to Oberlin College and was on his way.
It was "in her sense of education . . . that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us," he thinks now, and that is what sustained him. She schemed shrewdly to have all her children bused to schools in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there. "Every morning we hit the door at 6:30, fanning out across the city like soldiers armed with books, T squares, musical instruments." She paraded them "to every free event New York City offered: festivals, zoos, parades, block parties, libraries, concerts."
But only as an adult did James McBride convince his mother -- now Ruth McBride Jordan -- to tell the story of Rachel Shilsky, to describe her past. And it is her voice -- unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic -- that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.
"I'm dead," she begins, referring to the ritual Orthodox memorial observance her Jewish relatives held when she married but, in a larger sense, describing her Jewish identity. Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers and ultimately abandoned his wife. Rachel had only one friend. She couldn't get a part in her high school musical because the other girls refused to dance next to a Jew. She couldn't go to her graduation because it was held in a church. A grandmother and aunts in New York provided summertime relief. She moved north, worked for her relatives -- and then found Harlem, freedom in a new identity and a new life in the lives of her children.
Near the end of the book, Mr. McBride lists his siblings' careers: two doctors, a social worker, a historian and professor of African-American history, a graduate student in nurse-midwifery, a chemistry professor, a medical practice office manager, two teachers, a computer engineer and a businessman. The author himself has been a staff writer at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. And there is one more achiever: at 65, Ruth McBride Jordan went back to school and earned a college degree in social work.
She is living now with a daughter in New Jersey, her son reports. "Every day she rises, spirits her two grandchildren off to school and drives around central New Jersey. . . . Sometimes she'll get up in the morning and disappear for days at a time, slipping away to her old stomping grounds, the Red Hook Housing Projects. . . . Despite the fact that my siblings often urge her to stay out of the projects, she won't. 'Don't tell me how to live,' she says." The two stories, son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time (we are constantly told) of racial polarization. Together, I think, they give new meaning to some tired phrases. Try "multicultural" and, even more, "family values."
< PREVIOUS PAGE 1 2
H. Jack Geiger is the Arthur C. Logan Professor ofCommunity Medicine at the City University of New York Medical School.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/31/books/rachel-and-her-children.html?scp=12&sq=Reviews%20of&pagewanted=2
Updated biography
"James McBride is an author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, "The Color of Water," is considered an American classic and read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, "Miracle at St. Anna" was translated into a major motion picture directed by American film icon Spike Lee. It was released by Disney/Touchstone in September 2008. James also wrote the script for the film, now available on DVD. His newest novel, "Song Yet Sung," was released in paperback in January 2009.
James is the worst dancer in the history of African Americans, bar none, going back to slavetime and beyond. He is legally barred from dancing at any party he attends. He dances with one finger in the air like a white guy.
He is also a former staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine and The Washington Post. His work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His April, 2007 National Geographic story entitled “Hip Hop Planet” is considered a respected treatise on African American music and culture.
James is a saxophonist who tours with his six piece jazz/r&b band. He served as a sideman with jazz legend Jimmy Scott among others. He has written songs (music and lyrics) for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Purafe, Gary Burton, and even for the PBS television character "Barney." He did not write the "I Love You" song for Barney but wishes he did. He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical "Bo-Bos" co-written with playwright Ed Shockley. His “Riffin’ and Pontificatin’ ” Tour was captured in a 2003 Comcast Television documentary. He has been featured on national radio and television programs in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
James is a native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools. He studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Columbia University in New York at age 22. He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is married with three children."- James McBride's website
James is the worst dancer in the history of African Americans, bar none, going back to slavetime and beyond. He is legally barred from dancing at any party he attends. He dances with one finger in the air like a white guy.
He is also a former staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine and The Washington Post. His work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His April, 2007 National Geographic story entitled “Hip Hop Planet” is considered a respected treatise on African American music and culture.
James is a saxophonist who tours with his six piece jazz/r&b band. He served as a sideman with jazz legend Jimmy Scott among others. He has written songs (music and lyrics) for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Purafe, Gary Burton, and even for the PBS television character "Barney." He did not write the "I Love You" song for Barney but wishes he did. He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical "Bo-Bos" co-written with playwright Ed Shockley. His “Riffin’ and Pontificatin’ ” Tour was captured in a 2003 Comcast Television documentary. He has been featured on national radio and television programs in America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
James is a native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools. He studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his Masters in Journalism from Columbia University in New York at age 22. He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is married with three children."- James McBride's website
Summary
"In The Color of Water, author James McBride writes both his autobiography and a tribute to the life of his mother, Ruth McBride. Ruth came to America when she was a young girl in a family of Polish Jewish immigrants. Ruth married Andrew Dennis McBride, a black man from North Carolina. James's childhood was spent in a chaotic household of twelve children who had neither the time nor the outlet to ponder questions of race and identity. Ruth did not want to discuss the painful details of her early family life, when her abusive father Tateh lorded over her sweet-tempered and meek mother Mameh. Ruth had cut all ties with her Jewish family.
After arriving in the United States when she was two years old, Ruth spent her early childhood traveling around the country with her family as her father sought employment as a rabbi. Tateh eventually gave up hope of making a living as a rabbi. He settled the family in Suffolk, Virginia, and opened a store in the mostly black section of town, where he overcharged his customers and expressed racist opinions. When Ruth was a child, Tateh sexually abused her and made harsh demands on her to work constantly in the family store. Tateh cheated on his wife, in an affair of which practically everyone in town was aware. Ruth's brother Sam left home at age fifteen, and soon after, Ruth too felt she must leave. She wanted to escape the oppressive environment of both her family and the South. She was also pregnant by Peter, her black boyfriend in Suffolk, and wanted to deal with the pregnancy away from her family. She took trips to New York to stay with relatives, and later moved permanently to Harlem. Ruth's family disowned her when she left, disgusted with her preference for marrying a black man instead of a Jewish man, her general failure to embrace Judaism, and her defiance of her father. Ruth promised her sister Dee-Dee that she would return to Suffolk, but she could not reconcile her family's desires for her life with her own desires for her life. She betrayed her promise to return for Dee-Dee, and her relationship with her sister suffered as a consequence. This separation from her family recurs throughout the memoir as a painful element in Ruth's life.
In Harlem, Ruth met Dennis, to whom she was immediately attracted. She married him, converted to Christianity, and became very involved with church activities. The couple experienced a certain degree of prejudice as a result of their interracial marriage. However, Ruth recalls these years of her life as her happiest ones. Dennis and Ruth opened the New Brown Memorial Church together in memory of Reverend Brown, their favorite preacher. They had several children, and eventually moved to accommodate their growing family. When Ruth became pregnant with Dennis's eighth child, James, Dennis fell ill with lung cancer, and died before James was born. Ruth mourned his death deeply and became desperate to find a means to support herself and her eight children. She approached her relatives for assistance, but they refused to have any sort of contact with her. Ruth met her second husband, Hunter Jordan, soon after. They married and eventually had four children together.
James weaves his own life story into his mother's story. Ruth's philosophies on race, religion, and work influence him greatly. Ruth always sent her children to the best schools, no matter the commute, to ensure they received the finest possible educations. She demanded respect and hard work from her children, and always treated them tenderly. She had an unwavering faith in God and strong moral convictions. To Ruth, issues of race and identity took secondary importance to moral beliefs.
James's confusion over his identity, along with his grief for the death of his beloved stepfather, drove him to a phase of drug use and crime. After spending time with working with black men in Louisville, Kentucky, where his sister Jack lives, James became convinced of the importance of self-reliance and hard work. He began to trust in God and to work toward self-improvement, honing his skills in jazz music and writing. During his senior year of high school, James was pleasantly surprised when he learned he had been admitted to Oberlin College. He and his eleven siblings complete college and lead successful careers. Ruth remains close with her children, and, later, her grandchildren, holding holiday gatherings that remind James of his household during childhood: chaotic, but delightfully active and stimulating."- Sparknotes
After arriving in the United States when she was two years old, Ruth spent her early childhood traveling around the country with her family as her father sought employment as a rabbi. Tateh eventually gave up hope of making a living as a rabbi. He settled the family in Suffolk, Virginia, and opened a store in the mostly black section of town, where he overcharged his customers and expressed racist opinions. When Ruth was a child, Tateh sexually abused her and made harsh demands on her to work constantly in the family store. Tateh cheated on his wife, in an affair of which practically everyone in town was aware. Ruth's brother Sam left home at age fifteen, and soon after, Ruth too felt she must leave. She wanted to escape the oppressive environment of both her family and the South. She was also pregnant by Peter, her black boyfriend in Suffolk, and wanted to deal with the pregnancy away from her family. She took trips to New York to stay with relatives, and later moved permanently to Harlem. Ruth's family disowned her when she left, disgusted with her preference for marrying a black man instead of a Jewish man, her general failure to embrace Judaism, and her defiance of her father. Ruth promised her sister Dee-Dee that she would return to Suffolk, but she could not reconcile her family's desires for her life with her own desires for her life. She betrayed her promise to return for Dee-Dee, and her relationship with her sister suffered as a consequence. This separation from her family recurs throughout the memoir as a painful element in Ruth's life.
In Harlem, Ruth met Dennis, to whom she was immediately attracted. She married him, converted to Christianity, and became very involved with church activities. The couple experienced a certain degree of prejudice as a result of their interracial marriage. However, Ruth recalls these years of her life as her happiest ones. Dennis and Ruth opened the New Brown Memorial Church together in memory of Reverend Brown, their favorite preacher. They had several children, and eventually moved to accommodate their growing family. When Ruth became pregnant with Dennis's eighth child, James, Dennis fell ill with lung cancer, and died before James was born. Ruth mourned his death deeply and became desperate to find a means to support herself and her eight children. She approached her relatives for assistance, but they refused to have any sort of contact with her. Ruth met her second husband, Hunter Jordan, soon after. They married and eventually had four children together.
James weaves his own life story into his mother's story. Ruth's philosophies on race, religion, and work influence him greatly. Ruth always sent her children to the best schools, no matter the commute, to ensure they received the finest possible educations. She demanded respect and hard work from her children, and always treated them tenderly. She had an unwavering faith in God and strong moral convictions. To Ruth, issues of race and identity took secondary importance to moral beliefs.
James's confusion over his identity, along with his grief for the death of his beloved stepfather, drove him to a phase of drug use and crime. After spending time with working with black men in Louisville, Kentucky, where his sister Jack lives, James became convinced of the importance of self-reliance and hard work. He began to trust in God and to work toward self-improvement, honing his skills in jazz music and writing. During his senior year of high school, James was pleasantly surprised when he learned he had been admitted to Oberlin College. He and his eleven siblings complete college and lead successful careers. Ruth remains close with her children, and, later, her grandchildren, holding holiday gatherings that remind James of his household during childhood: chaotic, but delightfully active and stimulating."- Sparknotes
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