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.