Ruth's brother Sam left home at age fifteen, and soon after, Ruth too felt she must leave. Tateh cheated on his wife, in an affair of which practically everyone in town was aware. When Ruth was a child, Tateh sexually abused her and made harsh demands on her to work constantly in the family store. He settled the family in Suffolk, Virginia, and opened a store in the mostly black section of town, where he overcharged his customers and expressed racist opinions.
Tateh eventually gave up hope of making a living as a rabbi. Ruth spent her early childhood traveling around the country with her family as her father, Tateh (or Fishel Shilsky), sought employment as a rabbi. Ruth had cut all ties with her Jewish family, as they had essentially disowned her when she married James's father.īorn Ruchel Zylska to an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland, Ruth arrived in the United States when she was two years old. Ruth did not want to discuss the painful details of her early family life when her abusive father, Tateh, lorded over her sweet-tempered and meek mother, Mameh ("tateh" and "mameh" are Yiddish terms of endearment for "father" and "mother," roughly equivalent to "daddy and "mommy" ). James's childhood was spent in a chaotic household of twelve children who had neither the time nor the outlet to ponder questions of race and identity. Ruth married Andrew Dennis McBride, a black man from North Carolina. In The Color of Water author James McBride writes both his autobiography and a tribute to the life of his mother, Ruth McBride.
The chapters alternate between James McBride's descriptions of his early life and first-person accounts of his mother Ruth's life, mostly taking place before her son was born. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, is the autobiography and memoir of James McBride first published in 1995 it is also a tribute to his mother, whom he calls Mommy, or Ma.
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