The Color of Water (24 page)

And then a few days later he died
.

Lord…he just died
.

I was home and I got a call from a doctor at the hospital about six in the morning. He asked if I was Mrs. McBride. I said I was. He said, “Mr. McBride just passed away.” I said, “That's impossible. He wasn't that sick.” The doctor said, “He had cancer,” and hung up. That's the first time they told me he had cancer. That's the first I ever heard of
it. I stood there and looked out the window over the projects. It was April 5, 1957, I remember it to the day. It was just getting to be the break of day. I looked out there, and there was a blackness that came over me. A sinking feeling like I was going right down into blackness. The children woke up and they were huddled together crying and I started to cry. Part of me died when Dennis died. I loved that man more than life itself and at times I wished the good Lord would have taken me instead of him, because he was a much better person for living than me. He just had so much more to give the world than me. He brought me new life. He revived me after I left my family, brought me to Jesus, opened my eyes to a new world, then passed on himself. Lord, it was hard. Very hard to let him go. I was angry at him for dying for a while afterwards, angry that he left me with all those kids, but more than that, I missed him
.

We buried him down in High Point, North Carolina. I was in shock a lot of the time, really, and it was your Aunt Candis and your sister Jack who got me and the kids together for the funeral in Brooklyn and then to North Carolina for the funeral down there. It was the first and last time I ever went south with him. I couldn't leave his side after the funeral in Brooklyn and would have ridden with his body in the back of the train if they let me, but they didn't, but I sat on that train and said to myself, “I'm gonna take him home. I will take him home to see him buried,” and no white man nor black man would have stopped me from doing it and I swear before God Almighty, had anyone stood before me to prevent me from doing it I would have struck them down. When we got to the train station in High Point, Dennis's Uncle Jim went to
claim the body at the counter and I went with him, and the white man at the counter said, “Who's this body for?” I said, “It's for me,” and he kept looking at me and Uncle Jim, and he asked us again, “Who's this body for?” and Uncle Jim tried to say the body was with him, so as not to make trouble with that white man, but I told Uncle Jim, “No, Uncle Jim. That is my husband there.” I told that man, “That is my husband and I've come here to bury him and he is with me.” It caused a little commotion but he gave us no trouble and signed it over to me and Uncle Jim and we buried Dennis in the Burns Hill Cemetery. I was thirty-six then and had been with Dennis nearly sixteen years and I'd never functioned without him. I remember walking through the projects with my seven kids, crying—I'd just break out in tears in the middle of the day sometimes—and your sister Helen, she was about nine years old then, she said, “Don't cry, Ma. Daddy's up in heaven,” and it just made me cry more. It was a hard, hard time
.

When we came back to New York after burying Dennis, I opened up our mailbox and found it full of checks and money orders and cash in envelopes from people in the projects who knew us, and people from Metropolitan Church in Harlem. Dozens of letters with checks and money in them. I'll never forget that as long as I live. Folks sent us oranges and apples and chickens and turkeys and clothes and if someone had anything extra, they just gave it to us. The people at his job, McCoy Publishing, the white people, they sent us money. Your sister Jack and Aunt Candis, who came up from North Carolina to stay with us, and your godparents the McNairs, and the Ingrams, and my old friend Irene Johnson, they all pitched in, but even with their help we struggled
.

I was so desperate I went back to my Jewish family to ask for help. I looked up my Aunt Betts who had gotten married to a rich man and was living in a fancy building on the East Side in Manhattan with a doorman. I had to talk my way past the doorman to get inside. When I knocked on the door of her apartment, Aunt Betts opened the door, saw who I was, and slammed the door in my face. I left there and cried openly on the sidewalk. Then I called my sister Gladys, who was living in Queens. “You promised you wouldn't leave,” she said. I told her I was sorry. But she wasn't really pleased to hear from me. “Call me tomorrow,” she said, but when I called the next day her husband picked up the phone and said, “She doesn't want to speak to you. Don't ever call here again,” and he hung up on me. See, they were done with me. When Jews say kaddish, they're not responsible for you anymore. You're dead to them. Saying kaddish and sitting shiva, that absolves them of any responsibility for you. I was on my own then, but I wasn't alone, because like Dennis said, God the Father watched over me, and sent me your stepfather, who took over and he saved us and did many, many things for us. He wasn't a minister like Dennis. He was different, a workingman who had never been late for work in the thirty years that he worked for the New York City Housing Authority, and he was a good, good man. I met him after you were born and after a while he asked me to marry him, and Aunt Candis said, “Marry that man, Ruth. Marry him!” and she'd clean the house spotless and cook up these splendid meals when your stepfather came by, to make me look good. He thought I was making up those tasty yams and pork chops and I can't cook to save my life. When I told him the truth, he said it didn't matter, that he
wanted to marry me anyway, even though his brothers thought he was crazy. I had eight children! But I wasn't ready to marry. I turned him down three times. I took you down to North Carolina to show you to Dennis's parents, Etta and Nash, in late ‘57—they only lasted four or five years after their only child died—and when I told Grandma Etta I was thinking of marrying again, she said, “God bless you, Ruth, because you're our daughter now. Marry that man.” That's how black folks thought back then. That's why I never veered from the black side. I would have never even thought of marrying a white man. When I told your stepfather about how my sister and Aunt Betts treated me, he spoke about them without bitterness or hate. “You don't need them to help you,” he said. “I'll help you for the rest of my life if you'll marry me,” which I did, and God bless him, he was as good as his word
.

“Come to God! God's in the blessing business!”

It's the October 1994, fortieth-anniversary gala of the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church, and a deacon stands before the audience to muster them up for prayer. Though New Brown is located in Brooklyn, the sixty parishioners are gathered in this tiny banquet room at the Ramada Hotel at La Guardia Airport in Queens because somebody knew one of the hotel cooks and they gave the church a discount. It isn't the Plaza Hotel four-star service, but it will do. The room is dank, dark, and cold. The meat is lousy, the waiters busy. Somebody came up with the idea of hiring a gospel band with a keyboard player, who wears shades and plays too loud, but no one's complaining. This is a celebratory
night and the parishioners are dressed in their best. For forty years New Brown, located in the Red Hook Housing Projects, one of the largest and most neglected housing projects in New York City, has stood strong. For forty years the parishioners have struggled. For forty years they have persevered and spread God's word. This is Mommy's home church. This is the church where I got married. This is the church my father Andrew McBride built.

He never lived to see his dreams fulfilled, but when I thumb through his old brown briefcase filled with his paperwork from forty-five years ago, the notes and papers he left behind reveal a man in constant thought: references to Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jackie Robinson, and notebooks upon notebooks filled with sermons and Bible verses. His writing was filled with allusions to Chronicles, Isaiah, the Book of John, and Philippians.
Sometimes without conscious realization, our thoughts, our faith, our interests are entered into the past
, he wrote.
We talk about other times, other places, other persons, and lose our living hold on the present. Sometimes we think if we could just go back in time we would be happy. But anyone who attempts to reenter the past is sure to be disappointed. Anyone who has ever revisited the place of his birth after years of absence is shocked by the differences between the way the place actually is, and the way he has remembered it. He may walk along old familiar streets and roads, but he is a stranger in a strange land. He has thought of this place as home, but he finds he is no longer here even in spirit. He has gone on to
a new and different life, and in thinking longingly of the past, he has been giving thought and interest to something that no longer really exists. This being true of the physical self, how much more true it is of the spiritual self
.…He wrote Bible verses on anything he could find—small slips of paper, the back of train schedules, pay stubs. Next to some of the verses he'd scribbled the names and phone numbers of doctors who he thought might be able to help him, cure him of the lung cancer that got him at age forty-five, but they couldn't help him then. It was his time to go and he knew it.

He left behind no insurance policy, no dowry, no land, no money for his pregnant wife and young children, but he helped establish the groundwork for Ma's raising twelve children which lasted thirty years—kids not allowed out after five o'clock; stay in school, don't ever follow the crowd, and follow Jesus—and as luck, or Jesus, would have it, my stepfather helped Mommy enforce those same rules when he married her. The old-timers at New Brown used to say God honored Rev. McBride. The man died without a penny, yet his children grew up to graduate from college, to become doctors, professors, teachers, and professionals all. It was the work, they said, of none other than Jesus Christ Himself.

At the moment, the lady who helped Jesus Christ shepherd Rev. McBride's children to adulthood—and the surviving founder of the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church—is sitting at the end of a long table on the dais,
the only white person in the room, wearing a blue print dress and holding my two-year-old daughter, Azure, in her lap. It took a lot to get Mommy here. She didn't want to come. The church got a fine new minister in 1989, and one of his first acts was to order my father's picture to be taken down from behind the pulpit of New Brown, to be placed in a new vestibule constructed with money from the we-still-need-more church fund, all of which fell into the nebulous category of we're-building-up-God's-house, which meant it might not happen while Mommy is still alive. To compound this, he made the mistake of not formally recognizing her during service when she came to visit the church. That was a huge error on his part that could have been easily remedied: if somewhere between reading the “prayer for the sick and shut in” list and the “happy birthday to our members” list he could have squeezed in a “We welcome our original founder, Mrs. McBride, to church today, can I get an amen,” the whole thing would have blown over. But he didn't. Instead he treated her like an outsider, a foreigner, a
white person
, greeting her after the service with the obsequious smile and false sincerity that blacks reserve for white folks when they don't know them that well or don't trust them, or both. I saw that same grin on a black waiter's face when the
Washington Post
once sent me to the White House to cover a Nancy Reagan shindig. A smile for Miss Ann the White Lady. Not good.

Ma was so hurt she resolved never to go back there again, a promise she broke again and again, braving the two-hour subway and train commute from her home in Ewing, New Jersey, to sit in church, the only white person in the room, a stranger in the very church that she started in her living room. In all fairness, the minister
was
new. He hadn't much experience and did not know her. In fact, none of the new people at the church knew her and at some point the man corrected his error, but that, Ma said, was not the point. “These new ministers have no vision,” she fumed. “They just want a chicken sandwich. Now your father, he had vision.” She compared them all to my father, but there really was no comparison. Those were different times, different circumstances, different men.

For years, Mommy rarely talked about my father. It was as if his death was so long ago that she couldn't remember; but deep inside she saw her marriage to him as the beginning of her life, and thus his death as part of its end, and to reach any further beyond that into her past was to go into hell, an area that she didn't want to touch. In order to steer clear of the most verboten area, the Jewish side, she steered clear of him as well. Her memory was like a minefield, each recollection a potential booby trap, a Bouncing Betty—the old land mines the Viet Cong used in the Vietnam War that never went off when you stepped on them but blew you to hell the moment you pulled your foot away. But when
she did speak of him it always began with reverence and ended with sadness, with her saying, “I never knew how sick he was.” I used to stare at his pictures and wonder what his voice sounded like until I met my cousin Linwood Bob Hinson from North Carolina, who looks just like him. “If you want to know what your father was like,” Ma said, “talk to Bob.” Bob is about forty. He talks with a pleasant, down-home North Carolina twang. He manages a post office in a small, all-white town, solving problems for angry postal customers. Bob was one of sixteen blacks who first integrated his high school in Mount Gilead, North Carolina, where my father was born. He is a quiet, humorous, religious man of solid accomplishment. He lost his fourteen-year-old son, Tory, in a tragic car accident that sent an entire North Carolina community of blacks and whites reeling in sorrow, and he comforted others even as his own heart was torn in two. If my son grows up to be like Bob, I'll be a happy man.