The Color of Water (25 page)

But everyone can't be like Bob, or Rev. McBride, or even Ruth McBride. People are different. Times change. Ministers change. Mommy knows this and despite her personal differences with the new minister, she didn't want to see what amounted to my father's and her life's work disappear. So she gathered a few donations from my siblings and came to the dinner, sitting at the end of the dais. Next to her is the keynote speaker, Hunson Greene, head of the New York Baptists Ministers Conference and a tremendous speaker,
who also happens to be the brother of Mommy's late best friend Irene Johnson. When it comes to Jesus, Mommy, who scorns the black bourgeoisie, has friends in high places.

After a while the young minister mounts the dais and works the crowd like a warm-up comedian. His remarks are short and funny. The steak's not bad, he jokes, the vegetables not too rubbery, it's a Saturday night, eat up, y'all, we got church in the morning. He moves down the program swiftly. Three of the scheduled anointed speakers did not show, among them church founders Rev. Thomas McNair, my godfather, and Sister Virginia Ingram, both having pleaded illness or scheduling conflicts. Finally Mommy is called to the podium. The new minister introduces her as “the original founder of our church.” He scores big points there. Mommy sets my daughter down, rises, and makes her way to the stage.

It takes her forever to get there.

She's seventy-four now. Her knees don't work that well. The quick bowlegged stride is more of a waddle. The lean, pretty woman I knew as a boy has become a small, slightly stooped, cute, feisty old lady. Her face is still the same, the dark eyes full of pep and fire; the hair is still black, thanks to Clairol hair dye; and because she never drank or smoked, and practices yoga three times a week, she looks ten years younger than she is. But she has heart disease and high blood pressure now and takes medication for both. After her heart disease was diagnosed, my physician brothers wanted to
schedule her for further tests with top heart specialists, but she refused. “They're not going to get me,” she mused, the amorphous “they” being hospitals, the system, and anything else that “sticks tubes in you and takes your money at the same time.” She moves slower now, and stairs are a challenge. Lately she's been given to talking as if she won't be around much longer, prefacing each plan with, “Well, if I'm still here next year, I'd love to see …” Disneyland, a grandchild's graduation, Paris again, a new car. Some of it is smoke, some of it not. All of it sends my heart spiraling to the floor. Like most people, I don't know what I'll do when my mother makes that final walk home. When she reaches the podium I snap out of my reverie. In her hand is a crumpled piece of paper containing a half-typed, half-longhand speech. The paper is trembling in her hands. She slowly places the paper down and pulls the microphone closer to her face so that it feeds back a bit. As she does so, every hat, every tie, every spoon in the audience is completely still.

“Greetings to the honorable Reverend Reid and the pulpit guests,” she reads in a high-pitched, breathless voice. “New Brown has—” And she stops right away. Whether it's the emotion of the moment or just plain nervousness, it's hard to tell, but Mommy has never given a speech before. Ever. She clears her throat as a chorus of “Amens” and “Go on, honeys” resound about the room. She starts again: “Greetings to the honorable Reverend Reid and the pulpit
guests. New Brown has come this far by faith…” And this time she plows forward, reckless, fast, like a motorized car going through snowdrifts, spinning, peeling out, traveling in circles, going nowhere, her words nearly indecipherable as she flies through the stilted speech in that high-pitched, nervous voice. Finally she stops and puts a hand over her heart and breathes deeply as an embarrassing silence covers the room. I'm about to rush the stage, thinking she's having a heart attack, when she suddenly ditches the speech, the page fluttering to the floor, and speaks directly to the microphone. “My husband wanted to start a church but we had no money, so he said, ‘Let's start it right here in our living room.' We cleaned up the house and set up a pulpit with a white tablecloth and invited the McNairs and the Ingrams and the Taylors and the Floods over. That's how we started.”

“
Amen
!” comes from the audience. She's lit the fire now.

“We set up chairs and read the Bible and had service. We didn't have an organ player like Sister Lee. We sang without it. Those were the happiest days of my life, and I want you to know…” She stops as tears jump into her eyes.

“
Amen
!”

“
Yes
!!”

“
Tell us what you want us to know, honey
.”

She starts again: “I want you to know…”

“
Go on! Tell it
!”

She takes a deep breath: “I want you to know you are
looking at a witness of God's word. It's real,” she said. “It's
real
!” “Amen's” roar across the room as she turns and walks away from the pulpit, the pep back in her stride now, the waddle gone, seventy-four years of life dropping off her like snowflakes as she stands behind her seat on the podium facing the audience, overcome. “
God bless you all in the name of Christ
!” she shouts, striking at the air with her fist and sitting down, her face red, nose red, tears everywhere, in my own eyes as well.

Later on, on the way home in the car, I ask her, “So I guess you're not mad at the new minister now?”

“Leave that man alone,” she says, as the streetlights twinkle and wink off her face. “He's doing a good job. They're lucky to have a young minister, the way things are in these churches today. You should be a minister. You ever think about that? But you need foresight. And vision. You got vision?”

I tell her I don't think I do.

“Well, if you don't have it, don't waste God's time.”

Back in June 1993, during the course of putting together Mommy's will—something I had to force her to do—the macabre subject of her burial came up. “When I die,” she said, “don't bury me in New Jersey. Who wants to be buried in Jersey?” She spoke these words as she was sitting in the kitchen of the home she shares with my sister Kathy in Ewing Township near Trenton, a lovely area of New Jersey.

I said, “We'll bury you in Virginia, next to your second husband.”

“Oh no. Don't bury me in Virginia. I ran away from Virginia. I don't want to go back there.”

“How about North Carolina? We'll bury you where your first husband is.”

“No way. I spent all my life running from the South. Don't put me in the South.”

“Okay. New York,” I said. “You lived there forty years. You still love New York.”

“Too crowded,” she sniffed. “They bury them three deep in New York. I don't want to be smushed up under somebody when I'm buried.”

“Where should we bury you then?”

She threw up her hands. “Who cares? This is nonsense. I've got nothing to leave y'all anyway except some bills.” She got up from the kitchen table, bristling, and snapped, “Bury me
here
, bury me
there
, what are you trying to do, kill me? I don't want no tubes in me whatever you do. A doctor will kill you faster than anything.” She reached for the sun visor. “Your sister did this to me,” she said.

“Did what?”

“I had a little bump on my face and she made me see this fancy doctor. Now I gotta wear this dumb hat all the time. It makes me look like a rooster.”

Doctors found squamous cell cancer in a small mole they removed from Ma's face, a condition caused by too much exposure to the sun. Ironically, it's a condition that affects mostly white people. To the very end, Mommy is a flying compilation of competing interests and conflicts, a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman's physical problem. Fortunately the doctors got the mole
off in time, but the question of her own mortality is one she seems to be preoccupied with of late, probably because she knows death is the one condition in life she can't outrun. “Death is strange, isn't it?” she wonders. “It's so final. You know time is not promised,” she says, wagging a finger. “That's why you better get to know Jesus.”

If it takes as long to know Jesus as it took to know you
, I think,
I'm in trouble
. It took many years to find out who she was, partly because I never knew who I was. It wasn't so much a question of searching for myself as it was my own decision not to look. As a boy I was confused about issues of race but did not consider myself deprived or unhappy. As a young man I had no time or money or inclination to look beyond my own poverty to discover what identity was. Once I got out of high school and found that I wasn't in jail, I thought I was in the clear. Oberlin College was gravy—all you could eat and no one telling you what to do and your own job to boot if you wanted one. Yet I laughed bitterly at the white kids in ragged jeans who frolicked on the campus lawn tossing Frisbees and went about campus caroling in German at Christmas. They seemed free in ways I could not be. Most of my friends and the women I dated were black, yet as time passed I developed relationships with white students as well, two of whom—Leander Bien and Laurie Weisman—are close friends of mine today. During the rare, inopportune social moments when I found myself squeezed between black
and white, I fled to the black side, just as my mother had done, and did not emerge unless driven out by smoke and fire. Being mixed is like that tingling feeling you have in your nose just before you sneeze—you're waiting for it to happen but it never does. Given my black face and upbringing it was easy for me to flee into the anonymity of blackness, yet I felt frustrated to live in a world that considers the color of your face an immediate political statement whether you like it or not. It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous “white man's world” wasn't as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals' problems surpassed my own, often by a lot; that all Jews are not like my grandfather and that part of me is Jewish too. Yet the color boundary in my mind was and still is the greatest hurdle. In order to clear it, my solution was to stay away from it and fly solo.

I ran for as long as I could. After I graduated from Oberlin College in 1979 and received my master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1980, I began a process of vacillating between music and writing that would take eight years to complete before I realized I could work successfully as a writer
and
musician. I quit every journalism job I ever had. I worked at the
Wilmington News Journal
and quit. The
Boston Globe
. Quit.
People
magazine,
Us
magazine, the
Washington Post
. Quit them all. This was before the age of thirty. I must've had some modicum of talent, because I
kept getting hired, but I wore my shirt and tie like an imposter. I wandered around the cities by day, stumbling into the newsroom at night, exhausted, to write my stories. I loved an empty city room, just the blinking terminals and a few deadbeats like myself. It was the only time I could write, away from white reporters, black reporters, away from the synergy of black and white that was already simmering inside my soul, ready to burst out at the most inopportune moments. Being caught between black and white as a working adult was far more unpleasant than when I was a college student. I watched as the worlds of blacks and whites smashed together in newsrooms and threw off chunks of human carnage that landed at my feet. I'd hear black reporters speaking angrily about a sympathetic white editor and I'd disagree in silence. White men ruled the kingdom, sometimes ruthlessly, finding clever ways to gut the careers of fine black reporters who came into the business full of piss and vinegar, yet other white men were mere pawns like myself. Most of my immediate editors were white women, whom I found in general to be the most compassionate, humane, and often brightest in the newsroom, yet they rarely rose to the top—even when compared to their more conservative black male counterparts, some of whom marched around the newsrooms as if they were the second coming of Martin Luther King, wielding their race like baseball bats. They were no closer to the black man in the ghetto than
were their white counterparts. They spoke of their days of “growing up in Mississippi” or wherever it was, as proof of their knowledge of poverty and blackness, but in fact the closest most of them had come to an urban ghetto in twenty years was from behind the wheel of a locked Honda. Their claims of growing up poor were without merit in my mind. They grew up privileged, not deprived, because they had mothers, fathers, grandparents, neighbors, church, family, a system that protected, sheltered, and raised them. They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their “I was raised with nuthin' and went to Harvard anyway” experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream.

I had no true personal life in those years. Few dates, few dinners, no power lunches. My college sweetheart, a mixed-race woman from Hyde Park, Chicago—her mother was black and her father Jewish—was the apple of my eye, but I was afraid of commitment then, afraid to have children because I didn't want them to be like me. I drifted away from her and let time and distance do the rest. Since I had no personal life outside of journalism other than music, I soared as a reporter, but I always parachuted out in the end, telling my white editors after a year or two that I had to
leave to “find myself, write a book, play my sax,” whatever the excuse was. Most black folks considered “finding myself” a luxury. White people seemed to think of it as a necessity—most white people that is, except for that all-important one.