The Color of Water is a nonfiction autobiography published in 1996 by the American author and musician James McBride. Subtitled A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, The Color of Water chronicles the author’s challenges growing up in the 1960s and 1970s as a child with a white Jewish mother and Black father. Interspersed with the author’s recollections are interview transcripts describing his mother’s abusive upbringing as an Orthodox Jewish woman living in the Jim Crow South. Upon its release, the book was an immediate critical and popular success, remaining on The New York Times Best Seller list for two years.

This study guide refers to the 2006 10-year anniversary edition published by Riverhead Books.

Content Warning: The source material depicts racism, discussions of racially motivated violence, and racial slurs, including the n-word, which is obscured and replicated only in quoted material. Additionally, it depicts domestic violence and abuse and recuring sexual assault of a minor.

Plot Summary

Born Ruchel Dwajra Zylska in Poland in 1921, Ruth is the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi she calls Tateh. At age two, Ruth immigrates to the United States with Tateh, her mother Mameh, and her four-year-old brother Sam. After moving around the Northeast for a few years, the family settles in segregated Suffolk, Virginia, where Tateh opens a general store serving the town’s Black clientele, even though he is virulently racist. Tateh is emotionally abusive toward Mameh, whose physical health is impacted from a childhood battle with polio. He also sexually abuses Ruth, routinely raping her from an early age.

When Ruth is in high school, she falls in love with a young Black man named Peter and becomes pregnant with his child. Terrified of what will happen to Peter in a town like Suffolk, where lynchings and other acts of anti-Black terrorism are common, she spends the summer in New York City, where her Aunt Betts arranges for her to have an abortion. Shortly after her return to Suffolk, Ruth learns that Peter is engaged to a young Black woman whom he also impregnated.

The day after she graduates high school, Ruth takes a Greyhound bus to New York, where she lives with her grandma Bubeh. She spends most of her time in Harlem, hanging out with a man named Rocky who grooms her for sex work. Ruth stops returning Rocky’s phone calls after meeting and falling in love with Andrew “Dennis” McBride, a deeply Christian Black man who works in one of her aunts’ factories. By 1942, the two live together as partners, causing Tateh to disown her. That same year, Ruth learns that Mameh is dying in a hospital in the Bronx. When she calls Aunt Betts to find out which hospital, Betts tells her that Ruth is dead to the family because she married a Black man. In her grief, Ruth finds solace by becoming a devout Christian.

Over the next decade and a half, Ruth and Dennis have seven children. They also establish the New Brown Memorial Church near the Red Hook Projects in Brooklyn, where they live during most of the 1950s. In 1957, Dennis is hospitalized with a bad cough. A few weeks later, he dies of lung cancer, leaving Ruth with seven children and one more on the way: James, the author and narrator.

Throughout his mother’s recollections of her youth, James weaves in his own life-story. Shortly after James’s birth in 1957, Ruth marries Hunter Jordan, who works for the New York City Housing Authority and is the only father James ever knows. James grows up deeply confused about his racial identity. Ruth, meanwhile, refuses to talk about her family, her Jewish heritage, or race more generally. Her attitude is exemplified by her insistence that God is neither Black nor white—he is the titular “color of water.” One illustrative example of the psychic distress James feels as a child with Black and white ancestry comes in the mid-1960s, as the Black Power movement grows and his older siblings embrace its philosophy and fashion trends. Having seen white newscasters express panic about the rise of Black nationalism, James fears that Black Panthers will kill his mother because she is white.

After having four more children with Ruth, Hunter dies of a stroke in 1971. This leaves 14-year-old James with little direction. He channels his anger into alcohol, marijuana, and various criminal activities, including breaking into cars and snatching purses. Within a couple years, however, James refocuses his energies on school, music, and Jesus, graduating from high school and earning admittance to Ohio’s Oberlin College on the strength of his writing and musical abilities.

After earning a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, James enjoys enormous professional success throughout his twenties, working highly coveted jobs at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. However, he still struggles mightily with his racial identity. In an effort to better understand his heritage, James decides to write a book about his mother. Unfortunately, Ruth buried her past so deeply that she claims to remember almost nothing from her childhood. Only after nearly a decade of interviews does Ruth finally open up about growing up in an Orthodox Jewish household in Virginia and experiencing abuse at the hands of her cruel father.