The Hartford Courant

A Black Man's Search For Self

New Book Chosen For Community Study

By JEFF RIVERS
Courant Staff Writer

June 13 2003

James McBride says his 2002 novel "Miracle at St. Anna" is better written. What could be better still is the novel he's now struggling to write because, he says, the "characters won't appear to me."

But, McBride says, he knows "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother" could prove to be the fulfillment of God's purpose for him.

Since the bestseller was published in 1996, it's been used all over the country as a community reader to foster conversations about race, religion, identity and family.

Today, the Hartford Public Library is announcing that McBride's book will be the One Book for Greater Hartford selection for 2003.

"When we embark on a regional conversation, we discover our similarities transcend gender, ethnicity and social standing," says Louise Blalock, chief librarian at Hartford Public Library.

Beginning Sept. 13, the city's library branches will coordinate and present "The Color of Water" as a community reader. Training will be provided at various sites to teach people how to lead discussions on the book.

The One Book Project will culminate with a talk by McBride and a performance by him and his jazz band on Oct. 9 at Hartford's Asylum Hill Congregational Church.

McBride, writer, jazz musician, award-winning composer and a former newspaper and magazine journalist, says he's proud of the role his book has played in uniting communities and fostering conversations about some of society's most pressing and compelling concerns.

Still, he says, he has sometimes found it awkward that his chronicle of his search for himself through an examination of his Jewish mother's life has been construed by some to be every black man's tale.

"You only have to go to any black barbershop to see that black people don't agree," McBride says.

Further, he says, he's been concerned that his mother's ability to rear 12 children who went on to earn college degrees and enjoy successful careers could be used by some to suggest that women today could do just as well, and without government help.

"It's a lot harder now," says McBride, 45, who is married and the father of two children.

The village that came together to help support his mother's efforts to raise her children doesn't exist for many families today, McBride says.

Nevertheless, despite his misgivings about some people's reaction to the book, he's proud to present the humanity of black people in his work, a quality he says is too often lacking in the press and in literature.

In his book, McBride alternates between talking about himself, a native New Yorker who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and his mother Ruchel Dwajra Zylska, a Polish immigrant who came to America in 1923 at age 2.

Once in the United States, his mother would become Rachel and then Ruth Shilsky.

She survived her father's abuse. She endured and overcame her new nation's anti-Semitism, the ravages of the Depression and the deaths of two husbands, Andrew McBride and Hunter Jordan.

Always compelled to move and strive, she lived in various parts of the country, converted to Christianity, had an affair with one black man and married two others, bearing her husbands 12 children.

Through the years, she helped found a church in New York, her spiritual home. The church continues.

At age 65, she received a bachelor's degree in social work from Temple University.

In the book, McBride's mother, who has since survived heart surgery and a stroke, comes off as a poetic soul with an indomitable will and spirit.

"Even as a girl, I was a runner. I liked to get out of the house and go. Run," she says.

Amy Sailor, a Hartford native, daughter of parents who looked askance at the black revolution of the 1960s and mother of a teenage biracial son, says reading the book has helped her come to grips with some of her own issues of identity. As manager of the Hartford Public Library's arts and cultural programs, she believes the book will have a similar effect on others.

Like grunge rock and the designer-coffee and dot-com booms, the idea for a community book-reading originated in Seattle.

In 1998, bolstered by a Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund grant, the Seattle Public Library's Washington Center for the Book coordinated "If All Seattle Read the Same Book." About 20,000 people read Russell Banks' "The Sweet Hereafter." Since then, communities have read such books as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Grapes of Wrath."

Last year, Greater Hartford read for its first book, "Breath, Eyes, Memory" by Edwidge Danticat.

The Rev. Gary Miller, senior minister at Asylum Hill Congregational Church and an honorary co-chairman of the Hartford book project, says these programs continue to be needed to help people break through the isolation that is caused by a particular kind of "tribalism."

Today, Miller says, people live in "comfort zones" that are bounded by their experiences, biases, backgrounds and worldviews. If people are to break out of their cultural boxes, they must find ways to forge new connections.

He believes that reading "The Color of Water," which takes its title from Ruth McBride Jordan's description of God's hue, is such a way.

Indeed, he plans to recommend that his congregation read it, as he has.