The Color of Water: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

Ironically, although his mother was raised as an Orthodox Jew, James doesn’t realize that Jewish people exist outside of the Bible until he goes shopping for school clothes in a Jewish neighborhood. He’s surprised to hear Ruth haggle in Yiddish, but when he asks her, she refuses to tell him how she learned to speak it.

James recognizes that Jewish people are different from other white people, but he doesn’t feel any connection to them. Ruth, drawing from her own childhood, testifies that “some Jews can’t stand” her mixed-race children, but she also tells her children that certain Jewish people will treat them more kindly than other white people.

In her parenting Ruth draws upon her Jewish traditions, especially one of academic excellence. Ruth makes sure to take every opportunity she can to transfer James and his siblings from their neighborhood schools to better-performing, predominantly white and Jewish public schools.

While most of the other children in James’s neighborhood walk to the local schools, James and his siblings take buses to white and Jewish schools miles away. At these schools James is the only black student in his fifth grade class. He feels like “the token Negro,” and is aware of harassment from teachers (who round down his test scores) and fellow students (who call him slurs in class). Although he knows his siblings would fight back against this kind of treatment, James is too quiet to say anything.

In late elementary school James begins to escape from reality through music, books, and his own imagination. He imagines a boy in the mirror who represents his true, untroubled self. This imaginary James doesn’t have a white mother, and always has enough to eat.

James is generally a good kid—he does well in school, goes to church, and even has “good” or curly hair. Still, he feels incomplete because he doesn’t know where his mother comes from, and he’s aware that he doesn’t look like her, white celebrities he looks up to, or his black role models and relatives. James learns the term “Tragic mulatto” in a book and asks Ruth about it. She becomes upset and refuses to answer his question regarding whether he’s black or white. Some of James’ older brothers identify as black, but no one considers mixed-race to be an identity.

James describes the question of race as “a silent power” which dominates his childhood household. Ruth, however, tries to keep her children too busy with school, free concerts, library visits, and other low-cost activities to think about their racial identities. Because the family is poor, she does everything as cheaply as she can, even getting her children’s teeth cared for by half-trained dentistry school students.

The revolutionary spirit of the 1960s disturbs Ruth’s carefully constructed household. Helen, who had run off at fifteen, returns five years later with a baby, signaling that the other children don’t have to follow the rules so closely either. Many of James’s siblings become excited by the Black Power movements, and express newfound black pride.

James’s older brother Richie is arrested by the police during a summer home from college. Richie is absentminded and has money in his pockets for his student loan. The police find what they think is a bag of heroin on the street, and pin it on Richie because he’s black and because he has money. Ruth, panicked, goes to his trial, and because the judge is white and Ruth is white, Richie is released and the charges are dropped. Unfortunately this makes Ruth even harsher on her younger children, as she attempts to keep them safe and out of trouble.

As he gets older, James becomes more embarrassed of his white mother. One day, instead of walking to the store with her, he insists he go alone. Unfortunately, the white storeowner purposefully sells him expired milk. Ruth is outraged, and marches back to the store to demand a refund. When the storeowner refuses to reimburse her she eventually turns to leave, but after she hears a whispered (presumably racist) remark, she throws the milk at him.

As a child, James felt it would be easier if he were just black or white, and he wishes his mother were black. As an adult, however, he appreciates the diversity of his black and Jewish upbringing. He doesn’t identify as Jewish, but believes he is “a black man with something of a Jewish soul,” and often sees Ruth in Jewish women he encounters. As an adult James “belong[s] to the world of one God, one people,” but admits that as a child he preferred being black.

James remembers one day in school when his classmates forced him to dance like James Brown. Even though he explained he couldn’t dance, his white classmates didn’t believe him, and eventually he did a James Brown impression for his class. Everyone applauded, but James realized that even by entertaining his white classmates he was no closer to fitting in. He thinks of the boy in the mirror, who is free, while he feels trapped.