What are you reading?

[Kätzchen]

I want to excerpt an extended passage of text from a book that I’ve been reading from over the past month (or so). It’s from the chapter called “School,” from the book:

The Color of Water (McBride, 1996).

“The sixties roared through my house like a tidal wave. My sister Helen’s decision to drop of out school and run off at age fifteen, though she returned home with a nursing degree and a baby girl, was the first sign of impending doom. Now that others began to act out, and the sense of justice and desire for equal rights that Mommy and father had imparted to us began to backfire. Kind, gentle, Sunday school children who had been taught to say proudly, “I am Negro,” and recite the deeds of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson now turned to Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown and Martin Luther King for inspiration. Mommy was the wrong color for black pride and black power, which nearly rent my house in two.

One by one, my elder siblings broke with her rules, coming home bearing fruits of their own confusion, which we jokingly called their “revolution.” An elder brother disappeared to Europe. Another sister had an affair at college and came home with a love child, fairly big news in 1967. My brother Richie got married over Mommy’s objections, divorced, then entered college, and was home on summer break when he got stopped by two cops while walking down the street with a friend. A group of boys who were walking about ten yards in front of Richie and his friend ditched what appeared to be a bag of heroine as the cop car approached. The cops grouped the boys together, lined them up against a fence and demanded to know which of them had jettisoned the bag, which later turned out to be filled with quinine, not heroine. All denied it, so the cops searched them all and found ninety dollars of Richie’s college-bank-loan money in his pocket. When the policeman asked him where he got the money from, Richie told him it was his college money and he’d forgotten he’d had it. If you knew Richie, you’d nod and say, “Uh-huh,” because it was perfectly in character for him to forget he was carrying around ninety dollars of precious dollars, which was a huge sum in those days. We used to call him he “Mad Scientist” when he was little. His science experiment would neatly blow up the house because whatever he created, he’d leave it bubbling and boiling while he went searching for food, forgetting it completely. He could remember the toughest calculus formula and he had nearly perfect pitch as a musician, but he literally could not remember to put his pants on. He would play John Coltrane-type solos on his sax for hours and be dressed in a winter jacket and gym shorts the whole time. He was the kind of kid, absentminded, and very smart, and later in life become a chemist. But to cops, he was another black perpetrator with a story, and he was arrested and jailed...” (pp. 96-97).

I’ve laughed and cried so hard while reading this book. I see myself in much of the story James McBride weaves about his mother and the life, all of them led (McBride and his 11 other siblings – I hope I have that figure right). Back in the day when McBride was growing up, they lived in the worst ghetto in Brooklyn, New York and because they lived in an era of pronounced segregation, he and his siblings would often travel up to two hours by bus - just to attend schools that his mother found for her children to attend. I simply have to say that if anyone wants to learn about the hardships people of color have faced and still face today, you have to read this book. McBride’s book was on the New York Times Best Seller list for a couple of years (still should be, in my heart felt opinion). ~D