In a tribute to his mother, along with all mothers,
James McBride, recipient of the National Book Award in 2013, shares his mother’s
story along with his own story for everyone else to experience. It is with his
past in which he conveys to his readers that the concept of race, of identity
and of religion, are not our central issues. These qualities can easily be
overcome by love and sheer will power, and such is expressed by his mother as
she endured her hardships from life.
The first half of the
book is a telling of the two’s childhoods; it tells of how his originally
Jewish mother moved to America when she was only two years old, and how James
McBride grew up in Queens as a mixed child in a predominantly black community.
His mother, Rachel McBride, lived with a strict and largely unaffectionate
family. Her father only stayed for the benefits of being an American, and her
mother suffered from polio which disabled her entire left side. When she moved
from her hometown of Virginia to New York where she married two black men, she
was ostracized from her Jewish community, the white community, and the black
community alike, however she powered through the discrimination thrown her way
to focus on her twelve children, James being the eighth. James never had much
alone time with his mother, and to gain some was truly a feat in his early
years, but as he grew older, his question of his identity grew ever stronger.
He wondered constantly whether he was black or white, despite his mother’s
constant attempts to steer him from unnecessarily focusing on such ideas, and
he often tried to figure out her past through his pestering of what exactly he
and his siblings were supposed to be considered (most of them sided with the
black community).
His take on identity,
race, and religion shows very little throughout the first half of the book on
his side, a fleeting mention during a certain time as he reminisces his past,
but his mother’s idea of the concepts shows constantly in her unwavering
answers to his stubborn curiosity. James once asked what color God was, but
when his mother answered that he was a spirit, he merely asked what color his
spirit was instead. “’It doesn’t have a color,’ she said. ‘God is the color of
water. Water doesn’t have a color’” (McBride 51). As she pushes for this idea,
McBride structures the text in which their stories switch in perspective with
every chapter, and from his plain text we jump into his mother’s italics as she
retells her own past, and it is in these moments where we see just how affected
she was as a teenager by the mere thought of race, identity, and religion. Her
struggles, forming a jigsaw with her current ideals, allows us as a reader to
piece together the bits and pieces ourselves, and through this we can hope to better
understand the validity in the McBrides’ claims simply through their personal
experiences. The casual approach that comes along with it also helps the
audience put the two narrators on a more human and mundane viewpoint. The book
is told almost as if we were conversing with the McBrides ourselves, and it
aids in allowing us to feel sympathy more easily for the events they share,
bringing us even closer to understanding the unimportance those three ideas
should really have in our lives overall as we try to relate to their obstacles
in life.
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