NYTimes Review

A. Read the review of The Color of Water which appeared in the New York Times when the book was released. Find examples of summary, commentary and analysis in the writing:

March 31, 1996

Rachel and Her Children

By H. JACK GEIGER

THE COLOR OF WATER

A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

By James McBride.

here are two voices in this complex and moving narrative, and -- on the surface -- they could not seem more different. One is the voice of a black musician, composer and writer who traces his own evolution and that of his 11 brothers and sisters from childhood in a Brooklyn housing project to accomplished maturity.

The second voice is that of Rachel Shilsky, daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox Jewish rabbi in a virulently anti-Semitic and violently racist small Southern town. She recalls her own bitter childhood, her flight to the Jewish Bronx and then to the Harlem of the early 1940's, and her marriage to a black minister.

With him, she bore her first eight children, fervently adopted Christianity and founded a black Baptist church. Widowed, she remarried -- this time to a solid, kindhearted black furnace fireman for the housing authority -- and bore four more children. Widowed again, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family and assure her children's success.

Inevitably, these voices are connected and ultimately convergent, for Rachel Shilsky and James McBride are mother and son. Just as inevitably, their accounts are suffused with issues of race, religion and identity. Yet those issues, so much a part of their lives and stories, are not central. The triumph of the book -- and of their lives -- is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories by family love, the sheer force of a mother's will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church.

Not that it was easy. James's early childhood, in addition to containing all the ordinary joys, pangs and struggles of life in the orchestrated chaos of a large family, was touched by multiple confusions. His father died of cancer before he was born; his stepfather died when he was young. His mother's whiteness puzzled, often embarrassed and sometimes alarmed him, for he perceived danger from whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world -- ''Look at her with those little niggers!'' was what he often heard in public -- and from blacks who saw her as an interloper. And there were other startling moments: shopping with her black children and bargaining heatedly in Hasidic stores, his mother would suddenly shout -- in Yiddish -- ''I know what's happening here!'' to end the argument.

Since conflict about racial identity was a part of their lives, ''written into our very faces, hands and arms,'' Mr. McBride writes, in his house ''the question of race was like . . . a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable and thus completely ignorable.'' Not completely. Is God black or white, he asked his mother in frustration. In the answer that gives the book its title, she said: ''God's not black. He's not white. . . . God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.''

Black Power, the era of Bobby Seale and Malcolm X, hit the family like a tidal wave. The oldest McBride brother, already an Ivy League medical student, was simultaneously a civil rights activist and union organizer. But James, a high school honor student, drifted into truancy, then petty crime, then drugs. Sent to Kentucky to live with an older sister, he flirted with more serious crime. Back home in high school, he discovered music and writing, won a scholarship to Oberlin College and was on his way.

It was ''in her sense of education . . . that Mommy conveyed her Jewishness to us,'' he thinks now, and that is what sustained him. She schemed shrewdly to have all her children bused to schools in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there. ''Every morning we hit the door at 6:30, fanning out across the city like soldiers armed with books, T squares, musical instruments.'' She paraded them ''to every free event New York City offered: festivals, zoos, parades, block parties, libraries, concerts.''

But only as an adult did James McBride convince his mother -- now Ruth McBride Jordan -- to tell the story of Rachel Shilsky, to describe her past. And it is her voice -- unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic -- that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.

''I'm dead,'' she begins, referring to the ritual Orthodox memorial observance her Jewish relatives held when she married but, in a larger sense, describing her Jewish identity. Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers and ultimately abandoned his wife. Rachel had only one friend. She couldn't get a part in her high school musical because the other girls refused to dance next to a Jew. She couldn't go to her graduation because it was held in a church. A grandmother and aunts in New York provided summertime relief. She moved north, worked for her relatives -- and then found Harlem, freedom in a new identity and a new life in the lives of her children.

Near the end of the book, Mr. McBride lists his siblings' careers: two doctors, a social worker, a historian and professor of African-American history, a graduate student in nurse-midwifery, a chemistry professor, a medical practice office manager, two teachers, a computer engineer and a businessman. The author himself has been a staff writer at The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. And there is one more achiever: at 65, Ruth McBride Jordan went back to school and earned a college degree in social work.

She is living now with a daughter in New Jersey, her son reports. ''Every day she rises, spirits her two grandchildren off to school and drives around central New Jersey. . . . Sometimes she'll get up in the morning and disappear for days at a time, slipping away to her old stomping grounds, the Red Hook Housing Projects. . . . Despite the fact that my siblings often urge her to stay out of the projects, she won't. 'Don't tell me how to live,' she says.'' The two stories, son's and mother's, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note at a time (we are constantly told) of racial polarization. Together, I think, they give new meaning to some tired phrases. Try ''multicultural'' and, even more, ''family values.''

B. Go here for an example of an analytical essay with parenthetical citations.

C. Using the analysis on the linked page, write a paragraph explaining how McBride uses the Ruth's bicycle.