The Color of Water Read Online Free Page B

Answering questions about her personal history did not jibe with Mommy’s view of parenting twelve curious, wild, brown-skinned children. She issued orders and her rule was law. Since she refused to divulge details about herself or her past, and because my stepfather was largely unavailable to deal with questions about himself or Ma, what I learned of Mommy’s past I learned from my siblings. We traded information on Mommy the way people trade baseball cardsat trade shows, offering bits and pieces fraught with gossip, nonsense, wisdom, and sometimes just plain foolishness. “What does it matter to you?” my older brother Richie scoffed when I asked him if we had any grandparents. “You’re adopted anyway.”
    My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was our way of dealing with realities over which we had no control. I told Richie I didn’t believe him.
    â€œI don’t care if you believe me or not,” he sniffed. “Mommy’s not your real mother. Your real mother’s in jail.”
    â€œYou’re lying!”
    â€œYou’ll see when Mommy takes you back to your real mother next week. Why do you think she’s been so nice to you all week?”
    Suddenly it occurred to me that Mommy
had
been nice to me all week. But wasn’t she nice to me all the time? I couldn’t remember, partly because within my confused eight-year-old reasoning was a growing fear that maybe Richie was right. Mommy, after all, did not really look like me. In fact, she didn’t look like Richie, or David—or any of her children for that matter. We were all clearly black, of various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly hair. Mommy was, by her own definition, “light-skinned,” a statement which I had initially accepted as fact but at some point later decided was not true. My best friend Billy Smith’s mother was as lightas Mommy was and had red hair to boot, but there was no question in my mind that Billy’s mother was black and my mother was not. There was something inside me, an ache I had, like a constant itch that got bigger and bigger as I grew, that told me. It was in my blood, you might say, and however the notion got there, it bothered me greatly. Yet Mommy refused to acknowledge her whiteness. Why she did so was not clear, but even my teachers seemed to know she was white and I wasn’t. On open school nights, the question most often asked by my schoolteachers was: “Is James adopted?” which always prompted an outraged response from Mommy.
    I told Richie: “If I’m adopted, you’re adopted too.”
    â€œNope,” Richie replied. “Just you, and you’re going back to your real mother in jail.”
    â€œI’ll run away first.”
    â€œYou can’t do that. Mommy will get in trouble if you do that. You don’t want to see Ma get in trouble, do you? It’s not her fault that you’re adopted, is it?”
    He had me then. Panic set in. “But I don’t want to go to my real mother. I want to stay here with Ma…”
    â€œYou gotta go. I’m sorry, man.”
    This went on until I was in tears. I remember pacing about nervously all day while Richie, knowing he had ruined my life, cackled himself to sleep. That night I lay wide awake in bed waiting for Mommy to get home from work at two a.m., whereupon she laid the ruse out as I sat at the kitchentable in my tattered Fruit of the Loom underwear. “You’re not adopted,” she laughed.
    â€œSo you’re my real mother?”
    â€œOf course I am.” Big kiss.
    â€œThen who’s my grandparents?”
    â€œYour grandpa Nash died and so did your grandma Etta.”
    â€œWho were they?”
    â€œThey were your father’s parents.”
    â€œWhere were they from?”
    â€œFrom down south. You remember them?”
    I