The Color of Water

The Color of Water has an unusual structure, consisting of alternating chapters featuring a memoir of the author’s upbringing and first-person interview transcripts of his mother Ruth describing her childhood and young adulthood. The paired chapters often mirror one another thematically. For example, in Chapter 1, Ruth describes her Jewish family’s decision to disown her after she moves in with Dennis, a Black man. Their disavowal is so complete that they sit shiva for her, the seven-day funereal rite during which Orthodox and Reform Jews mourn a recently deceased loved one. In turn, Chapter 2 revolves around Ruth’s rickety bicycle, which she compulsively rides for hours in the wake of Dennis’s death. Fourteen-year-old James views this through the lens of his own racial identity crisis, embarrassed to watch his white mother draw further attention to herself in their predominantly Black neighborhood in Queens. Yet as James grows older, he comes to view the bicycle as a symbol of his mother’s need to keep moving, to escape her past and the death sentence her Jewish family laid upon her three decades earlier, yet ultimately his narrative will show The Inescapable Legacy of One’s Heritage.

Chapters 3 and 4 also mirror each other. In these chapters, James introduces the overarching psychological conflict that dominates much of his life: his profound racial confusion Growing Up With a Diverse Racial Background in America. James’s dual identity as the son of a Jewish woman and a Black man makes it impossible for him to embrace either heritage wholeheartedly. Two major factors exacerbate his confusion. The first is his mother’s refusal to acknowledge her Jewish heritage or race more broadly—a refusal that stems from the dual traumas of her abusive childhood and her family disowning her after she moves in with Dennis. The second involves the political and socioeconomic circumstances surrounding James’s upbringing. In the mid-1960s, Black Power emerges as a parallel and somewhat countervailing movement to the mainstream civil rights movement embodied by Martin Luther King, Jr. Loosely speaking, Black Power argues for Black self-sufficiency rather than integration into white society. Some factions of the Black Power movement also take its emphasis on the importance of armed self-defense further: Members of the Black Panther Party in particular are openly critical of nonviolent protest and practice armed resistance against the police and other forms of state violence.

As an adolescent, James internalizes white America’s fears about the Black Panthers and Black Power, anxieties he sees on television, which casts Black Power as an existential threat to white America: “[P]art of me feared black power very deeply for the obvious reason. I thought black power would be the end of my mother. I had swallowed the white man’s fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole” (26). In a panic in elementary school, James punches the prepubescent son of a Black Panther member because he believes the boy’s father wants to kill Ruth—an incident that highlights how susceptible children are to the media’s capacity to incite violence—ironically under the guise of warning against violence.

Ruth’s Jewish heritage, no matter how deeply she buries it, continues to influence how she lives and how she raises her children. Though Ruth never discusses her immediate family or its cultural traditions, she embodies her immigrant upbringing: “[Ruth] represented the best and worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education” (29). This is true of her attitude toward race as well. Although Ruth quickly dismisses any discussion of race—when asked if she is Black or white, she merely says, “God made me” (21)—her actions express racial generalizations and biases: “[W]hite 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” (29).

This is why James believes his project of exploring his cultural heritage is so important. Faced with all the psychic and societal confusion that comes with his Blac and white identity, it might be easier for James to shut off his overactive brain to the complexities and nuances of his cultural heritage. Yet the legacy of the Shilskys remains, even if he pretends it does not exist, just as he will continue to internalize society’s treatment of him as a person of color, even if he pretends race does not matter.