The Color of Water (6 page)

Mommy loved God. She went to church each and every Sunday, the only white person in sight, butchering the lovely hymns with a singing voice that sounded like a cross between a cold engine trying to crank on an October morning and a whining Maytag washer. My siblings and I would muffle our laughter as Mommy dug into hymns with verve and gusto: “
Leaning…oh, leannning…safe and secure on the
—” Up, up, and away she went, her shrill voice climbing higher and higher, reminding us of Curly of the Three Stooges. It sounded so horrible that I often thought Rev. Owens, our minister, would get up from his seat and stop the song. He'd sit behind his pulpit in a spiritual trance, his eyes closed, clad in a long blue robe with a white scarf and billowed sleeves,
as if he were prepared to float away to heaven himself, until one of Mommy's clunker notes roused him. One eye would pop open with a jolt, as if someone had just poured cold water down his back. He'd coolly run the eye in a circle, gazing around at the congregation of forty-odd parishioners to see where the whirring noise was coming from. When his eye landed on Mommy, he'd nod as if to say, “Oh, it's just Sister Jordan”; then he'd slip back into his spiritual trance.

In the real world, Mommy was “Mrs. McBride” or “Mrs. Jordan,” depending on whether she used my father's or stepfather's name, but in Rev. Owens's church, she was Sister Jordan. “Sister Jordan brought quite a few of her children today,” Rev. Owens would marvel as Mommy stumbled in with six of us trailing her. “
Quite
a few.” We thought he was hilarious. He was our Sunday school teacher and also the local barber who cut our hair once a month when we grew big enough to refuse Mommy's own efforts in that direction—she literally put a bowl on your head and cut around it. He was a thin man who wore polyester suits and styled his hair in the old slicked-back conk, combed to the back in rippling waves. He could not read very well—I could read better than he could when I was only twelve. He'd stand on the pulpit, handkerchief in hand, wrestling with the Bible verses like a man possessed. He'd begin with, “Our verse for today is…ahh, ummm, ahh …” flipping through the pages
of his Bible, finally finding the verse, putting his finger on it, and you could hear the clock going
tick, tock, tick, tock
, as he struggled with the words, moving his lips silently while the church waited on edge and my sister Helen, the church pianist, stifled her giggles and Mommy glared at her, shaking her fist and silently promising vengeance once church was over.

Rev. Owens's sermons started like a tiny choo-choo train and ended up like a roaring locomotive. He'd begin in a slow drawl, then get warmed up and jerk back and forth over the subject matter like a stutterer gone wild: “We…[silence]…know…today…arrhh…um…I said WEEEE…know…THAT [silence] ahhh…JESUS [church: “Amen!”]…ahhh, CAME DOWN…[“Yes! Amen!”] I said CAME DOWWWWNNNN! [“Go on!”] He CAME-ON-DOWN-AND-LED-THE-PEOPLE-OF-JERU-SALEM-AMEN!” Then he'd shift to a babbling “Amen” mode, where he spoke in fast motion and the words popped out of his mouth like artillery rounds. “Amens” fired across the room like bullets. “It's so good AMEN to know God AMEN and I tell you AMEN that if you AMEN only come AMEN to God yourself AMEN there will be AMEN no turning back AMEN AMEN AMEN! Can I get an AMEN?” (“AMEN!”)

And there we were in aisle 5, Sister Jordan in her church
hat and blue dress, chuckling and smiling and occasionally waving her hands in the air like everyone else. Mommy loved church. Any church. Even Rev. Owens's Whosoever Baptist Church she loved, though he wasn't her favorite minister because he left his wife, or vice versa—we never knew. Mommy was a connoisseur of ministers; she knew them the way a French wine connoisseur knows Beaujolais red from Vouvray white. Rev. Owens, despite his preaching talents, wasn't even in the top five. That elite list included my late father, the late Rev. W. Abner Brown of Metropolitan Baptist in Harlem, our family friend Rev. Edward Belton, and a few others, all of whom were black, and with the exception of Rev. Belton, quite dead. She considered them old-timers, men of dignity and dedication who grew up in the South and remembered what life was like in the old days. They knew how to fire up a church the old-fashioned way, without talk of politics and bad mouthing and negativity but with real talk of God and genuine concern for its parishioners. “Your father,” she often mused, “he'd give anybody his last dime.” She did not like large churches with political preachers, nor Pentecostal churches that were too wild. And despite her slight dislike of Rev. Owens and his odd style—he once preached a sermon on the word “the”—T-H-E—she had respect for him because his church and preachings were close in style to that of her “home” church, New Brown Memorial.
Unlike New Brown, however, Whosoever wasn't a storefront church. It was a tiny brick building that stood alone, about fifteen feet back from the sidewalk, with a sign above the door that was done by a painter who began his lettering without taking into account how little space he had. It read: WHOSOEVER BAP
TIST
C
HURCH
.”

I never saw Mommy “get happy” at Whosoever Baptist, meaning “get the spirit” and lose control—thank God. When people got happy it was too much for me. They were mostly women, big mamas whom I knew and loved, but when the good Lord climbed into their bones and lifted them up toward Sweet Liberty, kind, gentle women who mussed my hair and kissed me on my cheek and gave me dimes would burst out of their seats like Pittsburgh Steeler linebackers. “Oh
yessss
!” they'd cry, arms outstretched, dancing in the aisles, slithering around with the agility of the Pink Panther, shuddering violently, purse flying one way, hat going another, while some poor old sober-looking deacon tried grimly to hang on to them to keep them from hurting themselves, only to be shaken off like a fly. Sometimes two or three people would physically hold the spirited person to keep her from hurting herself while we looked on in awe, the person convulsing and hollering, “Jesus, Jesus! Yes!” with Rev. Owens winging along with his spirited “AMEN'S” and “ah yes's!” I never understood why God would climb into
these people with such fervor, until I became a grown man myself and came to understand the nature and power of God's many blessings, but even as a boy I knew God was all-powerful because of Mommy's utter deference to Him, and also because she would occasionally do something in church that I never saw her do at home or anywhere else: at some point in the service, usually when the congregation was singing one of her favorite songs, like “We've Come This Far by Faith” or “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” she would bow down her head and weep. It was the only time I ever saw her cry. “Why do you cry in church?” I asked her one afternoon after service.

“Because God makes me happy.”

“Then why cry?”

“I'm crying ‘cause I'm happy. Anything wrong with that?”

“No,” I said, but there was, because happy people did not seem to cry like she did. Mommy's tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a place far away, a place inside her that she never let any of us children visit, and even as a boy I felt there was pain behind them. I thought it was because she wanted to be black like everyone else in church, because maybe God liked black people better, and one afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white.

A deep sigh. “Oh boy…God's not black. He's not white. He's a spirit.”

“Does he like black or white people better?”

“He loves all people. He's a spirit.”

“What's a spirit?”

“A spirit's a spirit.”

“What color is God's spirit?”

“It doesn't have a color,” she said. “God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color.”

I could buy that, and as I got older I still bought it, but my older brother Richie, who was the brother above me and the guy from whom I took all my cues, did not. When Richie was fourteen he'd grown from a tittering, cackling torturer of me to a handsome, slick high school kid who was an outstanding tenor sax player. He got accepted at Music and Art High School in Manhattan and had reached a point in his life where jazz was the beginning, the end, and the middle. He took to wearing a leather jacket and a porkpie hat like legendary tenor man Lester Young, joined a neighborhood R&B band, and Ma had increasing difficulty in getting him to go to school. The dudes in the neighborhood called him “Hatt” and respected him. The girls loved him. He was bursting with creative talent and had ideas he acted upon independently without the approval of, or the knowledge of, Ma. A few blocks from our house was an eight-foot-high stone with a plaque on it that commemorated some civil historic event, and one morning on the way
to the store, Mommy noticed that the rock had been painted the black-liberation colors, red, black, and green. “I wonder who did that,” she remarked. I knew, but I couldn't say. Richie had done it.

All my siblings, myself included, had some sort of color confusion at one time or another, but Richie dealt with his in a unique way. As a boy, he believed he was neither black nor white but rather green like the comic book character the Incredible Hulk. He made up games about it and absorbed the character completely into his daily life: “I'm Dr. Bruce Banner,” he'd say as he saw me eating the last of the bologna and cheese. “I need a piece of your sandwich. Please give it to me now or I'll get angry. I must have it! Please don't make me angry. Give me
that sandwich
!!! GIVE ME—Oh no! Wait…ARRHHHHHHGGGHHHH!” and thereby he'd become the Hulk and if I hadn't gobbled my sandwich by then, well, the Hulk got it.

One morning in Sunday school Richie raised his hand and asked Rev. Owens, “Is Jesus white?”

Rev. Owens said no.

“Then how come they make him white here in this picture?” Richie said, and he held up our Sunday school Bible.

Rev. Owens said, “Jesus is all colors.”

“Then why is he white? This looks like a white man to me.” Richie held the picture high so everyone in the class
could see it. “Don't he look white to you?” Nobody said anything.

Rev. Owens was stuck. He stood there, wiping his face with his handkerchief and making the same noise he made when he preached. “Welllll…ahh. Wellll…ahhh …”

I was embarrassed. The rest of the kids stared at Richie like he was crazy. “Richie, forget it,” I mumbled.

“Naw. If they put Jesus in this picture here, and He ain't white, and He ain't black, they should make Him gray. Jesus should be gray.”

Richie stopped going to Sunday school after that, though he never stopped believing in God. Mommy tried and tried to make him go back, but he wouldn't.

Mommy took great pride in our relationship to God. Every Easter we had to perform at the New Brown Church, playing our instruments or reciting a story from the Bible for the entire church congregation. Mommy looked forward to this day with anticipation, while my siblings and I dreaded it like the plague, always waiting till the morning of the event before memorizing the Bible story we would recite. I never had problems with these memory-crunching sessions, but one year my older brother Billy, whose memory would later serve him well enough to take him through Yale University Medical School, marched to the front of the church wearing suit and tie, faced the congregation, started out, “When Jesus
first came to …” then blanked out completely. He stood there, twitching nervously, dead in the water, while my siblings and I winced and held our breath to keep from laughing.

“Oh, that's all right now …” murmured my godfather, Deacon McNair, from his seat on the dais next to the minister, while Mommy twitched in her seat watching Billy, her face reddening. “Try it again,” he said.

“Okay,” Billy said, swallowing. “When Jesus first came to…No, wait.…Um. Jerusalem was…Wait a minute. …” He stood there, stalled, gazing at the ceiling, biting his lip, desperately trying to remember the Bible story he had memorized just a half hour before, while the church murmured, “Oh it's all right now…just keep trying,” and Mommy glared at him, furious.

A few more embarrassing seconds passed. Finally Deacon McNair said, “Well, you don't have to tell us a Bible story, Billy. Just recite a verse from the Bible.”

“Any verse?” Billy asked.

“Any verse you want,” the deacon said.

“Okay.” Billy faced the church again. Every face was silent, watching him.

“Jesus wept,” he said. He took his seat.

Dead silence.

“Amen,” said Deacon McNair.

After church, we followed Mommy as she stalked out, and my godfather met her at the door. “It's all right, Ruth,” he said, chuckling.

“No it's not,” Ma said.

When we got home, Mommy beat Billy's butt.

Our store was at an intersection at the edge of town on a long, sloping hill. If you stood in front of the store and looked right, you saw the town—the railroad tracks, the department stores like Leggets and Woolworth. If you looked straight ahead, you saw the courthouse, the jailhouse, the county clerk's office, and the road to Norfolk. To the left was the Jaffe slaughterhouse and the wharf where the Nansemond River met the Main Street Bridge. The wharf was huge and dark. Boats from all over the world would stop there to lay over or make repairs, and often the sailors would come into the store and invite me and my sister Dee-Dee to see their boats. “No, no thank you,” my mother would say. She couldn't understand a word they were saying, but as soon as they'd say, “Come with us,” she'd hop out of her chair by the door and stand in front of
those big sailors shaking her head. “No, no, go away. Tell them to go away,” she'd say in Yiddish. She'd never take her eyes off them
.