Meowington 1

Winslow Meowington

Ms. Johnson

English I, Period 5

21 December 2012

Returning Home

As I walked along the wharf and looked over the Nansemond River, which was colored an odd purple by the light of the moon, I said to myself, “What am I doing here? This place is so lonely. I gotta get out of here.” It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times, and the loneliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in this lonely southern town...suddenly rose up in my blood and washed over me in waves. A penetrating loneliness covered my, lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face. I had no tears to shed. They were done long ago, but a new pain and awareness were born inside me. The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate; the ache that the little boy who stared in the mirror felt done. My own humanity was awakened, rising up to greet me with a handshake as I watched the first glimmers of sunlight peek over the horizon. (228-229)

Searching for a place to belong and an identity is a universal quest. Many people find belonging and understanding of the self within communities of religion, culture, or language.

Others, however, do not easily fit in with any community, and as a result are forced to wander until they find their own home. This situation applies to both James McBride and his mother

Ruth McBride Jordan in the book The Color of Water. While McBride first attempted to define himself by his exterior, he is finally able to reach self-understanding when he learns that being human is more powerful than any external division.

For most of McBride’s life, he was yearning for an identity to call his own. He was not entirely black nor white; his mother told him to not associate with outsiders; he was at different times a model student and a drop-out. In short, he did not have a group to call his own, outside of his immediate family. As a result, he began a search to understand himself and his own mother’s Meowington 2 life. After learning about Ruth’s upbringing, he decides to visit her hometown of Suffolk in order to piece together her childhood. While there, he meets several people from her past, including the rabbi at the synagogue where her father had been rabbi. During his visit, he learns that Ruth is remembered by many local folks, but more importantly, he learns that according to Jewish law, he is also considered a Jew. His whole life, he has not able to understand his white mother, but now he sees that they are indeed connected. In the passage, he has just learned about his religious similarity to both his mother and her family. He is walking along a canal and has an epiphany in which he understands the deep connection that he does, in fact, share with his otherwise- unknown ancestors. It is this connection that finally gives him a sense of identity and belonging that he had been searching for before.

What gave McBride this sense of belonging was when he realized that he shared a history of pain and loneliness with his grandmother. In the passage, he explains that after thinking about his own unhappiness in Suffolk, he suddenly understood the “lonliness and agony” that his grandmother felt in the exact same place. He understood that he is not alone in his isolation.

During most of McBride’s life, he did feel isolated since he could not easily identify with one race or another. Now, he sees that feeling lost, shunned, and without a home is not just his problem -- it is something universal. In fact, it is what makes this human, and McBride demonstrates this knowledge when he explains that his “own humanity was awakened, rising up to greet me with a handshake as I watched the first glimmers of sunlight peek over the horizon” (229). With this new knowledge, McBride’s quest for an identity is over. He now sees that the only identity he needs is found within himself. Meowington 3

This passage marks an emotional climax to The Color of Water. Up until this point,

McBride’s life had been defined by disconnection and uncertainty. As a child, he understood that his family was different when he noticed that “mommy looked different than the other mothers” (13). Being a bi-racial kid with only a white parent proved to be even more difficult as he got older and dealt with more pressures from his peers. During this time, he felt the pain of isolation so acutely that he would get angry at ‘the boy in the mirror’ (his reflection) for “not having to worry about having a white mommy” (28). Even as he got older, the confusion did not stop. He nearly dropped out of school, hung out with bums on the corner, joined a black soul band, and made friends with all the radical black students in college. McBride spent most of his life trying to carve out a black identity for himself. So his moment in Suffolk, walking along the canal and sensing the connection to his deceased grandmother, feeling relief and a release from his yearning shows that he has finally found what he is looking for. Before, he tried to define himself by how he looked (since that was how society defined him); now, he truly understands who he is: a human. A human with a rich ethnic background, but a human above all.

In the end, McBride learns that the problem was not that he had no place to fit in the world; rather, it was that he was looking for himself in the wrong places. His home, and himself, have been there for him all along. His journey was, of course necessary. Without years of internal struggle, and without bugging his ‘mommy’ for details of her life, he never would have been able to appreciate this single sweet moment by the water.