Great Biography

I just finished reading a really great book that I got around Mother's Day called, The Color of Water, A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother....

Brief Summary:

As a boy in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked about it, she'd simply say, "I'm light-skinned." Later he wondered if he was different, too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. "You're a human being," she snapped. "Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!" And when James asked what color God was, she said, "God is the color of water"...As an adult , McBride finally persuaded his mother to tell her story -- the story of a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a Baptist church, and put tweleve children through college. The Color of Water is James McBride's tribute to his remarkable, eccentric, determined mother -- and an eloquent exploration of what family really means.

It was on the New York Times bestseller list. They said it best, complex & moving...suffused with issues of race, religion, and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book -- and of their lives -- is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakeable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church...it is her voice -- unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic -- that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution...The two stories, son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time of racial polarization.

All 12 of her children went off to college to get degrees and almost all went on to further their education afterwards.


"In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths." Proverbs 3:6