The Color of Water

In November 1982, at age 24, James experiences a racial identity crisis while working as a feature writer for The Boston Globe. This crisis compels him to drive to Suffolk to learn more about Ruth’s family. The only information he manages to retrieve from Ruth herself is that she had a best friend named Frances. She also scribbles the rough location of her house on a map of Suffolk.

Upon his arrival, James stops in a McDonald’s. As he looks at the map, he realizes the McDonald’s sits precisely where Tateh’s store used to be. Outside, he knocks on the door of an old nearby house. James tells the elderly Black man who answers the door that his mother’s family name is Shilsky. The man, Eddie Thompson, laughs uproariously at the irony of the deeply racist Tateh having a Black grandson.

Eddie tells James of Mameh and Ruth’s kindness. When James asks what people thought about Tateh, Eddie reluctantly tells him, “You won’t find anyone around here who liked him enough to even talk about him. [...] His dislike for the colored man was very great” (208). He adds that Mameh was terrified of Tateh. When James asks where he can find Tateh, Eddie points to the ground, suggesting Hell.

James calls Ruth long-distance so Eddie can speak to her. James can only hear one side of the conversation, as Eddie tells Ruth not to cry.

In 1941, when Ruth is still visiting Suffolk, Mameh’s sisters send a letter asking if she wants three rooms of furniture they no longer need. Ruth says, “That’s how they told us Bubeh was dead” (213). A few weeks later, Ruth leaves Suffolk for good. She will never see Mameh, Tateh, or Dee-Dee again. On her way out of town, Tateh tells her if she marries a Black man, she will be dead to the rest of the family.

The following year, Dennis learns from Aunt Mary that Mameh is dying in a hospital in the Bronx. When Ruth calls Mary to ask which hospital, Mary tells her, “You’re out of the family, Stay out. We sat shiva for you” (216)—a reference to the Jewish mourning ritual. Afraid of making Mameh even sicker with her presence, Ruth lets it go. A few days later, Dennis tells her Mameh is dead.

Devastated by her guilt and grief, Ruth begins to attend services at Metropolitan Church in Harlem.

In August 1992, James visits Ruth’s old synagogue in Suffolk. He looks around for any cops who might question a Black man’s presence in front of a “white man’s building” in Virginia (220). Earlier, when he called the current rabbi to ask if he could look around inside the synagogue, the rabbi was noncommittal and hung up.

James reflects on the research he has conducted into his family over the past few years. He has confirmed Sam’s death in World War II in 1944, but the US Army reveals no further details. Dee-Dee disappears from public records one semester before she would have graduated from Suffolk High School. Tateh pops up in New Jersey, Manhattan, and finally Brooklyn, before also disappearing in the 1960s.

James’s mind then turns to an earlier trip to Suffolk. In 1982, he met Aubrey Rubenstein, a state employee whose father took over Tateh’s story after he skipped town. Thrilled to meet James, Aubrey called many other Jews in town, all of whom treated James warmly. Aubrey characterized Tateh as a good man who lost his way, causing tragedy for everyone around him. When Aubrey asked if James goes to temple, James answered that Ruth did not raise her children Jewish. With a candor that surprised James, Aubrey replied, “Well, maybe that’s for the best” (226). At the end of their conversation, James allowed Aubrey to record a message for Ruth. Although James was awestruck by Aubrey’s big-hearted and open-minded message, he never played it for Ruth, fearing that it would bring up too many emotions she would rather leave behind.

On the last night of his 1992 trip to Suffolk, James wakes in the middle of the night, unable to stop thinking about Mameh. She died at 46, unloved by her husband and kept far from the rest of her family in a forbidding Southern town. James thinks to himself, “My life won’t be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children’s. I left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing” (229).