James C. McBride 1957–

Author

A Memorable Childhood

A Remarkable Mother

Recounted Italian Trauma

The Army’s Double Standard

Enthusiastic Critical Reception

Selected writings

Sources

James C. McBride authored a stirring 1996 memoir of his mixed heritage in The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. A dual account, containing both his recollections and those of his Polish-born Jewish parent, McBride’s book chronicles his mother’s intriguing immersion into African-American culture in the 1940s and beyond. The work spent several months on the New York Times bestseller list. Six years later McBride’s first novel, Miracle at St. Anna, also earned high marks from critics for its fictional account of black G.I.s in Italy during World War II.

McBride was born in 1957 in New York, the son of Andrew McBride, a minister who died the year McBride was born. The young McBride came of age during the civil rights and Black Power eras of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and by his own account he was a rebellious teen. But as an adult he eventually enjoyed dual careers as a successful musician and journalist. A jazz saxophonist and composer whose song credits include Anita Baker’s “Good Enough” on Giving You The Best That I Got, and a track on a Grover Washington Jr. release, Next Exit, named in honor of his mother’s street, McBride also wrote for the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and People magazine. For the Globe, he recounted his mother’s unique story in a 1981 tribute column for Mother’s Day, and was deluged with letters from readers. He considered turning her story into book form, but at first she would not agree to work on the project.

A Memorable Childhood

By 1984 McBride was writing for People, and he followed Michael Jackson’s “Victory” tour for seven months for the magazine. “The highest point for me was not meeting Michael Jackson, but meeting his mother,” he said in a Publisher’s Letter column for the magazine several months later. “Beneath her outward shyness is a woman of fierce pride, resolve and character. She holds that family together. America needs a few more mothers like that.”

McBride’s mother finally agreed to provide an oral history of her life for inclusion in a book, partly with the hope of reuniting with a long-lost sister. The Color of Water appeared in 1996, and recounted Ruth McBride Jordan’s unusual story. She was born Ruchel Shilsky in Russian Poland into an Orthodox Jewish family. Her

At a Glance…

Born in 1957, in New York; son of Andrew McBride (a minister) and Ruth McBride Jordan (a homemaker); married; three children. Education: Attended Oberlin College.

Career: Author. Worked variously as a jazz saxophonist, composer, and producer; journalist for the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and People; freelance writer.

Awards: American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award, 1996, for work in musical theater.

Address: Home —Bucks County, PA. Office —c/o Riv-erhead Books, 200 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016-3903.

father, a rabbi, brought the family to the United States and settled in Suffolk, Virginia, where he ran a store. Despite his religious background, Shilsky was a troubled man, deeply racist and sexually abusive toward his daughter. When she became pregnant in the mid-19305, the family sent her to relatives in New York City for an abortion. There she glimpsed the vibrant world of Harlem, the city’s African-American quarter, and stayed. In 1942 she married McBride’s father, originally a Harlem musician before he became a minister. They would have seven other children, and The Color of Water recounts the family’s life in a housing project in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood.

Changing her name to Ruth, McBride’s mother literally abandoned every aspect of her past when she came North. She was a white Jewish woman married to a black man at a time when such unions were relatively rare, but she proved to be an independent-minded person and a leader as well. “I stayed on the black side because that was the only place I could stay,” she asserted in the book. “The few problems I had with black folks were nothing compared to the grief white folks dished out. With whites it was no question. You weren’t accepted to be with a black man and that was that.”

After McBride’s father died, she wed Hunter Jordan, another African-American man, and had four more children. In the book McBride sketches his childhood in St. Albans, Queens, a predominantly white neighborhood, and his bafflement over his mother’s heritage. She sidestepped issues of color, denying that she was white, and sometimes told her children that she was simply light-skinned. Once, McBride recalls, he asked her what color God was, and she told him, “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

A Remarkable Mother

McBride’s mother was remarkable. She worked as a bank clerk and managed to send all twelve children to college after being widowed for the second time. She was also the founder of a Baptist church in her home, and instilled in her children a sense of color-blindness. Nevertheless, as he grew up McBride was well aware that his mother was different. In The Color of Water he recalls that by the age of ten, he feared going out in public with her in black neighborhoods, for she would sometimes be taunted. During the Black Power era, he even feared for her life. Still, she tried to instill in her children a sense that in the end, one’s skin color was unimportant. He recalls an image of his mother riding her bike on neighborhood errands, with “her complete non-awareness of what the world thought of her, a nonchalance in the face of what I perceived to be imminent danger from blacks and whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world. She saw none of it.”

The Color of Water earned praiseworthy reviews, and by September of 1997 it had advanced to the number one slot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, where it remained for 40 weeks. Nation critic Marina Budhos liked the way McBride merged two stories, with each “unfolding in alternating chapters, mother’s and son’s voices playing off each other like jazz riffs on memory.” Budhos added, “The sheer strength of spirit, pain and humor of McBride and his mother as they wrestled with different aspects of race and identity is vividly told.” Interestingly, some of the book’s most ardent early fans were older Jewish women—women just like his mother. “You can see in their faces they understand what’s important,” McBride said in an interview with Houston Chronicle writer Fritz Lanham. “I’m always so happy to see them—not because they’re white but because they understand what’s important. They know how to take an emotional hit and get up off the canvas.”

Recounted Italian Trauma

The work soon won a following from other quarters. Hettie Jones, writing in the Washington Post, deemed it “as lively as a novel, a well-written, thoughtful contribution to the literature on race.” Budhos also commended it as a work that “dishes up some important truths about growing up as a mixed-race kid in a country built on white supremacy, where one is seen as either a pathetic half-breed, or black, with no in between.” McBride was, however, somewhat mystified by the reaction the work received from some African Americans. “When my book first came out, no blacks came to the readings. I was surprised,” he told Esther Iverem, a Washington Post writer. “A black woman called a radio talk show and said, ‘Why should we lionize this white woman?’” McBride noted that other readers “don’t see it as a story about race. They see it as a story about a woman who defied the odds and insisted that her children be raised right.”

McBride moved on to fiction for his next work. He had long been fascinated by the predominantly African-American 92nd Division of the U.S. Army, nicknamed “Buffalo Soldiers.” Two uncles, a cousin, and some friends of his parents had served in it, and he originally wrote a story about a group of them who find a group of Jews recently liberated from a concentration camp. He was unhappy with the finished manuscript, however, as he told Lanham. “It failed miserably,” McBride said. “I just didn’t feel qualified to write about the Holocaust.” To rescue the plot, he traveled to Italy to research the American military presence there after a Fascist alliance between Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi Germany fell apart during World War II, when Italy surrendered to U.S.-led Allied troops in 1943. McBride spent eight months in Italy, and visited a Tuscan village decimated by the retreating German soldiers, where 560 villagers were killed in the Roman Catholic church in St. Anna di Stazzema. “When I went to the church, you could almost smell it—the spirit of the place was so eerie,” the writer told Lanham. “The hundreds of souls that departed heavenward from right there. You could feel it.”

The Army’s Double Standard

That moving experience gave McBride the inspiration to write his 2002 novel, Miracle at St. Anna. The World War II story presents a fictional account of several members of the 92nd Division who become separated from their unit in the Italian countryside, and find themselves behind enemy lines. The quartet of men under Lieutenant Stamps are members of an American army that is still segregated, but fighting for American principles. There is an illiterate Southerner, Sam Train, of immense size but as kindly as he is large. Hector is Puerto Rican and can translate for the Italians they meet, who have never before seen an African American. There is also a Kansas City preacher and con man, Bishop. He flirts with the Italian women, and in response to comments by the others, derides the value system under which they all live. “The great white father sends you out here to shoot Germans so he can hang you back in America for looking at his woman wrong,” Bishop rails. “You think that’s fair?”

Train, who carries around the head of a statue that he believes makes him invisible, befriends a mute Italian homeless youth whom he believes is an angel. Six-year-old Angelo, meanwhile, thinks of his protector as “chocolate giant.” As the Nazis close in for a fight, Italian partisans attempt to engage the Americans in a plot to root out a local traitor. Angelo knows the identity of the turncoat, for he is revealed to be the sole survivor of the St. Anna massacre. “As he slowly reveals the answers, McBride weaves his third-person narrative seamlessly among the soldiers and Italian peasants, many of whom emerge as well-rounded characters—no mean feat for a novel that tomes in at under 300 pages,” opined Black Issues Book Review critic Clifford Thompson, who also termed it” a moving, sad, ultimately joyful novel that delivers on the promise of The Color of Water.”

Enthusiastic Critical Reception

Other reviews were similarly laudatory. “This story is true to the stark realities of racial politics yet has an eye to justice and hope,” remarked Library Journal’s Jennifer Baker, while a Publishers Weekly contributor asserted that with the “sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.” Entertainment Weekly critic Bruce Fretts termed it a “strikingly cinematic novel” that “flows along with cool, clean prose,” and proves itself, in the end, “profoundly spiritual but rarely preachy.”

McBride’s mother eventually did reunite with that long-lost sister, after more than fifty years of silence. The church she established, New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, is still active in Brooklyn. A cousin of McBride’s from his Jewish side heard about The Color of Water on National Public Radio and contacted one of his black siblings; both are doctors. Having struggled for so long with his heritage, McBride is grateful for the gifts it brought him. “[As a child] I didn’t want to be White. I would have preferred that Mommy were Black,” he wrote in The Color of Water. “Now, as a grown man I feel privileged to have come from two worlds. My view of the world is not merely that of a Black man, but that of a Black man with something of a Jewish soul.”

Selected writings

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (memoir), Riverhead Books, 1996.

Miracle at St. Anna, Riverhead Books, 2002.

Sources

Books

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (memoir), Riverhead Books, 1996.

Contemporary Authors, Gale, 2000.

Miracle at St. Anna, Riverhead Books, 2002.

Periodicals

American Prospect, September 10, 2001, p. 42.

Black Issues Book Review, March-April 2002, p. 29.

Book, January-February 2002, p. 74.

Booklist, February 15, 2002, p. 1006.

Christian Century, November 19, 1997, p. 1063.

Civil Rights Journal, Fall 1998, p. 44.

Entertainment Weekly, September 26, 1997, p. 71; March 1, 2002, p. 72.

Houston Chronicle, March 17, 2002, p. 18.

Jet, April 1, 1996, p. 62.

Library Journal, February 15, 2002, p. 178.

Nation, April 22, 1996, p. 32; July 27, 1998, p. 30.

People, November-December 1984, p. 3; April 1, 1996, p. 38; February 25, 2002, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly, October 30, 1995, p. 24; February 5, 1996, p. 36; March 17, 1997, p, 17; August 14, 2000, p. 196; November 26, 2001, p. 36.

Washington Post, January 14, 1996, p. X4; May 21, 1996, p. B2; December 13, 1997, p. CI.

—Carol Brennan