The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, Paperback

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Look out for Mc Bride's new book, Five-Carat Soul From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good Lord Bird, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction, and Kill 'Em and Leave, a James Brown biography. The incredible modern classic that launched James Mc Bride's literary career. Over two years on The New York Times bestseller list Who is Ruth Mc Bride Jordan? A self-declared ""light-skinned"" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James Mc Bride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James Mc Bride grew up in ""orchestrated chaos"" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. ""Mommy,"" a fiercely protective woman with ""dark eyes full of pep and fire,"" herded her brood to Manhattan's free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, Mc Bride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion--and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain. In The Color of Water, Mc Bride retraces his mother's footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents' loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned. At seventeen, after fleeing Vi