January 16, 2010
Ruth McBride Jordan, Subject of Son’s Book ‘Color of Water,’ Dies at 88
By DENNIS HEVESI
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.
Her son James, one of a dozen children from her two marriages, was often embarrassed, sometimes scared. Sometimes they had to endure the worse racial epithet. His mother, who was white, kept walking.
“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.
“She had absolutely no interest in a world that seemed incredibly agitated by our presence. The stares and remarks, the glances and cackles that we heard as we walked about the world went right over her head.”
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 book struck a chord, selling more than 2 million copies and appearing on The New York Times paperback best-seller list for more than 100 weeks.
On Jan. 9, her son said, she died at her home in Ewing, N.J., at the age of 88.
