James McBride's autobiography/memoir is the type of story that is made all the more riveting by the fact that it is true. Countless times during my reading I stopped and shook my head in wonderment at what he and his mother endured throughout their lives.
McBride has crafted a book that tells not only his story but that of his mother which only makes sense as our stories are irrevocably intertwined with our children's. He tells these life tales by alternating chapters between the first-person accounts of his mother, raised by a second-rate Jewish rabbi and his neglected, abused wife in the 1930s/40s, and his own accounts, of being raised multi-racial in the all-black housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn by his white mother. James's telling of his mother's story, which he did not know until an adult, seems to be a way of cementing his own identity, with which he struggles continuously as he is growing up. His mother's strength in her own identity (truly found once she accepted Jesus Christ), love for her husbands (both James's father, who passes away before his birth, and his stepfather), and passion for her children and their future defy all the odds of segregation and racism so rampant in the 50s and 60s as she is raising her own children, fathered by black men. What Ruth McBride Jordan endured during her life is by turns horrific and inspiring. The woman she becomes because of it is triumphant, as evidenced in the success of her 12 children.
Bottom line: An eye-opening, unbelievable tale of redemptive love and how it can change, create, and define despite what the past seems to dictate. A story of identity lost and found. WELL worth the read.
