James McBride continues
his endeavor to reveal the proof in which love triumphs all divisions formed as
a result of societal prejudice in America. He finds that, especially through
religion, love can overcome all of these boundaries if one allows it. As a
person with a mixed family, he mainly reaches out to other similar families in
order to spread this message.
His mother, Ruth McBride
knew her first future husband long before she came to marry him. They spent a
long fourteen years together, those years being the happiest Mrs. McBride had
ever been as they symbolized her beginning before Dennis passed away due to
cancer. The grief that followed was harsh, almost as harsh as the grief
following her mother’s death, but she was able to remarry again to Andrew
McBride. Her second husband, like the first, also died of cancer, but the two
left a large impact on her life, mostly from Dennis. His family, for example,
bypassed this issue of race in the form of unconditional love, and although her
pale skin initially shocked them, she was still accepted as one of their own
nonetheless. This pure form of kindness embedded itself into her being, and she
carried it on with her as she raised all twelve children.
This second half of the
book is where James McBride’s sense of identity really starts to come together
as something more than just the color of his skin, and in a final section of
the book, one that was added in commemoration of its ten-year anniversary, he
addresses his point head on. He compares the strength of love to the
impossible, stating, “The plain truth is that you’d have an easier time
standing in the middle of the Mississippi and requesting that it flow backward
than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each
other[…]” (McBride 292-293). His use of the words “plain truth” acts to
solidify his argument as undeniable: that the bonds formed through love cannot
simply be weakened because of race, religion, or identity, and the line did not
fail to stick out for me. The placement of it, after the entire story, after
even the Epilogue, only seems more convincing for the reader after being given first
and second-hand evidence of the argument holding true to its claims. Despite
all the struggles James McBride’s family went through, his mother still held
them all together on her own through sheer willpower and love, and she refused
to allow apparently simple issues such as race deter her by much. By sharing
their life story, despite it being one among many others similar, McBride was
able to prove himself that love was fully capable of transcending all
differences.
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