The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

When I first read The Color of Water, a memoir by James McBride, that reads like a novel, I loved it so much I got Janet to listen to it with me on a vacation drive we took from Florida to Rhode Island (24 hours in the car!). She fell in love with it too!

So, here’s the gist: Each chapter flips back and forth between McBride and his mother, Ruth. Both characters deal with the struggle of not fully fitting into their communities, but for different reasons. Ruth is a Jewish woman from the South who moves to Harlem, New York, and is living with her African-American preacher husband and their multiple children. McBride is a mixed-race teenage boy living with a white mother in the projects during the Black Power era. This is a must-read for anyone living in a heterogeneous world. And, hey, that’s pretty much all of us!