TOW #24: "The Color of Water" (Part 2)

          The issue of race has become such an integral part of our culture. There are distinct divisions between black and white neighborhoods and stereotypes fill social media. This wasn't always a widespread issue, shown in The Color of Water by James McBride. He wrote the rest of his novel in the same fashion as before, with chapters illustrating his own life and then his mother's journal entries in between. The first half of the book centered on the fact that people would look at McBride weirdly as a child because of the difference between the dominate race in the neighborhood and his mother's skin color, yet as a child, he was blissfully unaware. The second half of the book focuses more on how his mother influenced him using her ideas on race, religion, and education.
          At first, I thought that the book's purpose was to establish a different perspective on race. Usually, the books on race involve tales of those fighting for their freedom or against segregation, yet this novel was completely different. It showed a white woman living in the world of the black race and how she kept her head high and acted honorably even when everyone discriminated against her. While it was first believed that McBride's idea was to show how prominent the idea of race could really be, after reading the rest of the story, it displayed something else: He wanted to express his feeling that to understand the present, one must be familiar with the past. Towards the end of the book, McBride explains, "I felt like a Tinkertoy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt." This comes from his description of the idea that his mom's life was completely bound to his, and that his mother's history helped him understand his own life. Also, to more understand McBride's dual racial identity, he needed to know what happened to his mother and why she would choose to make a family with a black man as a white woman even with all of the ridicule.