The book struck a chord, selling more than 2 millionĬopies and appearing on The New York Times's paperback best-seller list for more than 100 weeks. That resolute woman, and James McBride's recollections of her, became the basis of ''The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother'' (Riverhead Books, 1996). The stares and remarks, the glances and cackles that we heard as we walked about the world went right over her head.'' ''She had absolutely no interest in a world that seemed incredibly agitated by our presence. ''Whenever she stepped out of the house with us she went into a sort of mental zone where her attention span went no farther than the five kids trailing her,'' James McBride later wrote. Sometimes they had to endure the most despicable racial epithet. Her son James, one of a dozen children from her two marriages, was often embarrassed, sometimes scared. There were the quizzical looks, the dirty looks, the snide remarks and far worse when Ruth McBride Jordan walked down the street with a gaggle of her children in tow.
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