The Color of Water: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

After her second husband’s death, Ruth “stagger[s] through the motions of life.” She does her best to maintain her household, but emotionally she is falling apart. James doesn’t like being around the house with his devastated mother, and so he begins sneaking out, and eventually staying out and not going to school. Looking back, James understands he was beginning his own “process of running, emotionally disconnecting myself from [Ruth], as if by doing so I could keep her suffering from touching me.”

At fourteen, James is finally the oldest child in his house, but instead of ruling over his siblings he is out of the house as much as possible, smoking marijuana, drinking, and playing in a soul band. James handle watching his mother suffer, and is afraid of taking on the responsibility of looking after his family, so instead of trying to help pay the bills or keep the house in order he ignores the chaos. Instead, together with his new friends Beanie, Marvin, Chink, Pig, and Bucky, he shoplifts, breaks into cars, and robs freight cars on the nearby railroad. One particularly debaucherous night, the police find James and his friends with cases of stolen wine. James runs and hides, and when it’s clear he’s home free he gets so drunk in celebration that he can’t walk. When he eventually makes it home Ruth whips him in punishment, but it doesn’t change his behavior. James explains, “my friends became my family, and my family and mother just became people I lived with.”

James snatches purses and even robs a drug dealer with his straight razor and his friend Joe’s gun. When James robs women he feels guilty, but not guilty enough to stop. He believes he is “getting back at the world for injustices I had suffered,” although he admits that he wouldn’t be able to name those injustices if asked. As an adult he can see the connection between when he watched his own mother’s purse get stolen as a child and his purse stealing now, but at the time James felt they were unrelated. He does his best to repress his feelings by drinking and smoking.

James forges his report card for a while, and enlists Kathy to help. However, Kathy gives him C grades instead of his usual As, which prompts Ruth to call the school. Ruth then discovers that James is not even a C student—he’s entirely dropped out. Ruth is unable to punish James. She enrolls him in summer school but he gets thrown out, his older brothers come home and beat him, but nothing works. Eventually, Ruth sends James to spend the summer in Kentucky with his sister Jack, Andrew Dennis McBride’s daughter from a previous marriage.

Kentucky is not a punishment for James. He loves Jack, and feels free running around Louisville. He spends a lot of time with Big Richard, Jack’s husband, and the “boys on the ‘the Corner,’” a group of blue collar workers and hustlers who hang out in front of the liquor store. Most of them are “good-natured alcoholics,” and they obey loose codes of ethics—no cheating at dice, don’t pull out a gun if you don’t intend to use it. Chicken Man is James’s favorite of the bunch. He’s a sweet man, incoherent when drunk, and a minor philosopher when sober. James notices that the men on the Corner don’t pay much attention to white people, and are indifferent to the police. James likes that “their world was insular, away from the real world that I was running from.” Here, his dead father and white mother are his own private business.

The men on the Corner look out for James. He steals a few car batteries with one man, Pike, but when they are shot at by an angry car owner Pike refuses to continue to endanger James. Eventually, James gets a real job pumping gas, but is fired after he fights with one of his boss’s friends, a gay man who is sexually harassing him. Unemployed and angry, James spends all of his free time on Corner, plotting revenge against his harasser and former boss. Chicken Man cautions him to “forget it,” and warns him that he’ll get himself arrested and end up on the Corner permanently, with the middle-aged drunks and jobless. James argues that he’s too smart for that to happen, but Chicken Man points out that if James were so smart he wouldn’t be flunking out of school, and forced to spend summers in Louisville because he can’t be trusted in New York.

A few days later, James gets a real look at what permanent life on the Corner could look like. He sees a man, Mike, arguing and hitting girlfriend because he believes she’s unfaithful, and the next day watches Mike return to the Corner with a sawed-off shotgun ready to shoot her lover. The lover never arrives, and Mike and his girlfriend eventually make up. Chicken Man tells James “that’s why I don’t have no arguments with no woman,” because they’ll just lead to a man embarrassing himself. But Chicken Man eventually does get into an argument with a woman, who shoots and kills him in a liquor store.