The Color of Water: Chapter 25 Summary & Analysis

In 1993, as James puts together Ruth’s will, the two of them discuss where she wants to be buried. She doesn’t want to be buried in New Jersey, where she now lives, or in Virginia, or North Carolina, or anywhere in the South. Ruth recently had a cancerous mole removed, a condition that mostly affects white people, which James sees as the ultimate representation of his mother—“a black woman in white skin, with black children and a white woman’s physical problem.”

James believes it took him so long to uncover Ruth’s past because he spent so long wrapped up in his own questions of race and identity. After college and journalism school, James vacillates between music and journalism. He gets good writing jobs but always quits them, feeling trapped between blackness and whiteness in the workplace. He doesn’t identify with racist white editors “finding clever ways to gut the careers of fine black reporters,” but neither does he feel like a radical black man trying to make a difference in the media. He also resents conservative black men at work, who make a big deal of their race, even though he feels they do not understand the urban black experience.

Ruth hates that James keeps quitting his jobs, but just like she ran from her troubles, James feels that by moving from job to job he can outrun his identity confusion. He only finds out his mother’s maiden name in college when he needs to fill out a form, and it isn’t until 1982, when he writes a Mother’s Day piece, that he begins to deeply investigate Ruth’s past. He asks her if she’d like to collaborate on a book, and she says she will if he wants to and if it will make him rich.

It takes James over a decade to get Ruth to sit down for his interviews, a process he hoped would take a few months at most. Although Ruth eventually opens herself to him, James understands that her Jewish side is gone, and in talking to him about her childhood she is essentially raising the dead.

At sixty-five Ruth gets her college degree in social work, and moves in with her daughter, Kathy, in New Jersey. She keeps busy volunteering, taking yoga classes, and driving around. She still takes trips back to Red Hook to visit her church and old friends, even as the neighborhood gets more dangerous. James describes his mother as living her life like she’s piloting an airplane. She lets it get out of control, but at the last minute rights the craft, and then wipes her memory of the whole ordeal.

In 1993, James and Ruth return to Suffolk. It’s the first time Ruth has been in fifty years, but she comments that “nothing’s changed.” The two of them are looking for Ruth’s childhood friend Frances, whose address they find in the Suffolk town library. Together the pair drive to Frances’s new home in Portsmouth, and Ruth gets increasingly nervous. But once they’ve arrived and met each other, the two seem to pick up where they left off. Their friendship is instantly rekindled—a happy side effect of a book Ruth at first didn’t want to participate in.

Ruth sees her life work as her children’s achievements. She’s proud of all her sons and daughters, who have endured hardship but “carry themselves with a giant measure of dignity, humility, and humor.” Every year the whole family gathers at Ruth’s house in Ewing, New Jersey, and all the siblings immediately revert to their crazy childhood dynamics, full of bickering and chaos, but also unwavering deference to their mother, who still wields absolute power.