The Color of Water

After Hunter’s death, James stops going to school and church. With new friends he meets after joining a soul band, James shoplifts, breaks into cars, and snatches purses. One time, he robs a weed dealer at gunpoint. He also spends most days in a haze of alcohol and marijuana. Rather than take care of his younger siblings, James cannot stand to be at home with his grieving mother.

Fed up with James’s behavior and failing grades, Ruth sends him to spend the summer in Louisville, Kentucky, with his adult stepsister Jack and her husband Big Richard. When Richard isn’t at work at the tobacco plant, he and James hang out on the corner in front of a liquor store. Here, James writes, is where he obtains his “true street education” (144).

Among the old rabble-rousers who hang out on the Corner, James’s favorite is Chicken Man. Though often drunk and incoherent, when sober, Chicken Man is a street philosopher full of valuable wisdom. One day, when James vows to obtain a gun and shoot a man who James believes slighted him, Chicken Man tries to talk him out of it. James responds by saying he is too smart to end up in jail, to which Chicken Man says, “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?” (149).

One of Chicken Man’s most important lessons is never to get into a dispute with a woman. Yet one day, Chicken Man breaks his own rule: Hours after he argues with a woman, she stabs him to death inside the liquor store.

After spending a year in New York after her abortion, Ruth returns to Suffolk to finish her senior year. She tells a heartbroken Peter that they cannot see each other anymore. Shortly thereafter, Ruth learns that Peter is engaged to a young Black woman who is pregnant with his child. With that, Ruth vows to leave Suffolk after graduation and never return. The only reason for her to stay is Mameh, whose already-poor health is worsening and whose husband does not care about her.

As part of the graduation ceremony, graduates are supposed to file into the local Protestant church to receive their diplomas. Tateh prohibits this. Ruth plans to enter the church alongside her best friend Frances, but when the time comes, she cannot do it: “In my heart, I was still a Jew” (158). Although Frances understands, she has tears in her eyes as she walks into the church.

The next day, Ruth gets on a bus to New York.

One day in 1973, shortly after James’s return from his first summer in Louisville, Ruth impulsively decides she finally wants to learn to drive. With James and his two-year-old niece Z in tow, she gets behind the wheel of Hunter’s ’68 Pontiac Catalina, which has been sitting in the driveway after his death. She speeds to the store, dodging traffic and nearly injuring Z when she slams on the brakes. Oddly enough, Ruth had been an expert driver when she worked for Tateh in Suffolk, navigating dirt roads and backing into loading docks, all while pulling a giant trailer. Yet according to James, that person was Rachel Deborah Shilsky, not Ruth McBride Jordan.

Chicken Man’s death has a profound impact on James. Upon his return to New York, he throws himself back into his studies and embraces God. The transformation does not come overnight. First, he embarks on the slow process of recovering from marijuana, alcohol, and any other substance that alleviates his anger, depression, or boredom: “Thank God crack wasn’t available,” James writes, “because then I would’ve certainly become a crack addict” (162).

After high school, Ruth stays at Bubeh’s in the Bronx while working at her Aunt Mary’s leather factory. In 1939, not long after Ruth’s arrival, Aunt Mary hires a North Carolina native named Andrew McBride, who goes by his middle name Dennis. Although Ruth takes an immediate liking to him, she is more interested in partying in Harlem than settling down with a man.

Sick of Mary mistreating her at the factory, Ruth quits and looks for a job in Harlem, but few people in that predominantly Black neighborhood are willing to hire a white woman. The exception is Rocky, the owner of a barbershop who hires Ruth as a manicurist. As Rocky takes her to clubs and rents her a room in Harlem, Ruth realizes that Rocky is grooming her to be a sex worker. Happy to be away from her family and to hang out at the coolest clubs, Ruth is perfectly content with Rocky’s plans for her. Although Bubeh starts to worry, she is too old to make any trouble for Ruth.

Ruth begins to second-guess her future with Rocky after running into Dennis at a club one night. Seeing the look in Dennis’s eyes when she tells him about Rocky, Ruth feels profoundly ashamed. She goes home to Bubeh’s and never speaks to Rocky again.

In another impulsive move, Ruth decides to uproot the family to Wilmington, Delaware, in the summer of 1974. James is ready for a fresh start: He has been trying to stay on the straight and narrow path while his friends’ criminal involvement continues to escalate. What he finds in Wilmington, however, is a deeply segregated community—predominantly white suburbs, and a predominantly Black inner city plagued by underfunded schools and crumbling infrastructure.

One night, white state troopers pull over James’s brother David—a doctoral student at Columbia—for making an illegal U-turn. After questioning him in the cold, the troopers take him before a judge to plead guilty over the minor traffic infraction. From that point forward, Ruth hates Delaware. James says she would have been overwhelmed if not for prayer.

After being rejected from a private school, James enrolls at an all-Black public school where he is selected to go to Europe as part of the American Youth Jazz Band. To pay for the trip, he works on the estate of a wealthy white couple, David and Ann Dawson. After some initial resentment toward the Dawsons, James learns to appreciate his conversations about music and literature with Ann. He realizes that despite her socioeconomic status, she has not personally harmed James or his family. Although she later fires James for sleeping on the job—a fate James says he deserves—Ann still pays his way to Europe.

Ruth is miserable. James knows that the best way to make her happy is to escape and live the life Ruth wants for him. Despite mediocre grades and low SAT scores, James is accepted to Oberlin College, a small and prestigious liberal arts school in Ohio, on the strength of his musical and writing abilities.