The Color of Water
by James McBride
"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."
Read excerpt »
Hoop Roots
by John Edgar Wideman
"The playground game is generated by desire. The desire to play. In this sense also it's truly a player's game. It exists nowhere except where and when the players' minds and bodies construct it."
Read excerpt »
"There Are Some Things I Had to Figure Out"
by Mawuli Davis
"There are some things I had to figure out, painful. There are some things I never had to figure out, thankful..."
Read excerpt »
"Black Power," "Dennis," from The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride , © 1996 by James McBride. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
© 2001 John Edgar Wideman. Reprinted with permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.
The playground game is generated by desire. The desire to play. In this sense also it's truly a player's game. It exists nowhere except where and when the players' minds and bodies construct it. If I hadn't watched the game and listened to the stories, how would I have discovered its existence. How could I play it. The game's pure because it's a product of the players' will or imagination. If the players' desire cools, there is no game. Or at best some sloppy substitute of game not worth bothering with.
On the other hand the game's also sensitive to the call and response of its physical environment, the nature of the play mediated by location, the condition and size of the playing surface, weather, the skill and numbers of players. Some courts draw players from all over a city. Other spots gain their rep from the players who reside near enough to be summoned by the drum of action. The history of a court, the roll call of greats who once competed there, the vagaries of urban renewal (removal), the official posture of the city, the welcome or rejection extended by the court's residential neighbors all leach into the game's soil.
To be worthwhile in any venue, the action must be improvised on the spot. You got to go there to know there. Like a one-more-time thing. Every note, move, solo, pat of the ball happens only once. Unique. Gone as soon as it gets here. Like a river you can't enter twice in the same spot. Each performance created for/within an unrepeatable context, a specific, concrete situation that hasn't appeared before or since. The hoop moves, the notes materialize in the flow of playing, then disappear instantly, preserved only in memory or word of mouth. Performance is all. The present tense presides. Films of playground hoop, recordings of jazz may achieve their own variety or art, repeatable, portable, stopping time, outside time in their frozen fashion, but the action is always long gone as soon as the players step off the court, off the bandstand. Gone in the limbo of fine lost things where lyric poetry seeks its subject.
Playground hoop is doing it. Participating in the action. Being there. The chance to be out there flying up and down the court. Its duration finite. Its time the only time, yet so intimate, inalienable, saturated, whole, it's all time, Great Time. Each isolated moment briefer than brief (was I there, did it happen to me, tell me about it) also provides continuity, the novel, constantly evolving, improvised context allowing the solo, the move to happen one more time because the players share lore — assumptions, standards, common memories (an aesthetic) about making music, playing the game. These understandings persist. Are the ground against which the figures become visible.
You can pick up in the playing if you listen hard, listen easy enough, the chorus saying, We are doing this together and it's just us out here but the game has been here before, other players have found themselves in the middle of this same deep, good shit and figured out how to deal. Similar moments set in transient yet abiding structures registered in the minds of players who are also the truest fans. The medium the message. Fragments of performance suggestive of a forever unfinished whole, the perfect whole tantalizingly close to now and also forever receding, each fleeting segment vital, absolutely necessary and equal and right if the show's going to go on. The context that provides possibilities for the unexpected, the unknown, does not compromise or bully the moments. Playground hoop was invented to offer room, become room, to bust open and disappear except as invisible frame for what's in the break. For what's next, for what no one's ever done, ever seen before. Maybe the primary reason the game exists and persists is because it reliably supplies breaks, moments a player dreams of seizing and making his or her own when he or she thinks music or thinks basketball. Moments when weight, the everyday dominoes collapsing one after the other of linear time, is shed. When the player's free to play.
Introduction
by James McBride
"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."
Read excerpt »
by John Edgar Wideman
"The playground game is generated by desire. The desire to play. In this sense also it's truly a player's game. It exists nowhere except where and when the players' minds and bodies construct it."
Read excerpt »
by Mawuli Davis
"There are some things I had to figure out, painful. There are some things I never had to figure out, thankful..."
Read excerpt »
The Color of Water by James McBride
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
by James McBride
When I was a boy, I used to wonder where my mother came from, how she got on this earth. When I asked her where she was from, she would say, "God made me," and change the subject. When I asked her if she was white, she'd say, "No. I'm light-skinned," and change the subject again. 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 cards at 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.
"I don't care if you believe me or not," he sniffed. "Mommy's not your real mother. Your real mother's in jail."
"You're lying!"
"You'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 light as 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."
"Nope," Richie replied. "Just you, and you're going back to your real mother in jail."
"I'll run away first."
"You 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..."
"You 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 kitchen table in my tattered Fruit of the Loom underwear. "You're not adopted," she laughed.
"So you're my real mother?"
"Of course I am." Big kiss.
"Then who's my grandparents?"
"Your grandpa Nash died and so did your grandma Etta."
"Who were they?"
"They were your father's parents."
"Where were they from?'
"From down south. You remember them?"
I had a faint recollection of my grandmother Etta, an ancient black woman with a beautiful face who seemed very confused, walking around with a blue dress and a fishing pole, the bit, tackle, and line dragging down around her ankles. She didn't seem real to me.
"Did you know them, Ma?"
"I knew them very, very well."
"Did they love you?"
"Why do you ask so many questions?"
"I just want to know. Did they love you? Because your own parents didn't love you, did they?"
"My own parents loved me.""Then where are they?"
A short silence. "My mother died many, many years ago," she said. "My father, he was a fox. No more questions tonight. You want some coffee cake?" Enough said. If getting Mommy's undivided attention for more than five minutes was a great feat in a family of twelve kids, then getting a midnight snack in my house was a greater thrill. I cut the questions and ate the cake, though it never stopped me from wondering, partly because of my own growing sense of self, and partly because of fear for her safety, because even as a child I had a clear sense that black and white folks did not get along, which put her, and us, in a pretty tight space.
*******
In 1942 Dennis and I were living in a room in the Port Royal on 129th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and one night after work I walked into the hallway of our building and this black woman punched me right in the face. She hit me so hard I fell to the floor. "Don't disrespect me!" she said. She was a raving lunatic. I never even knew who she was. I somehow got off the floor and she chased me up to our room and I slammed the door on her and waited for my husband to get home. Dennis went to speak to her when he got home from work. "That white woman don't belong here," she said. That's what she told him. Dennis didn't attack her. He just said, "Leave my wife alone," and she did. Even though we were not married, we considered ourselves husband and wife.
Some black folks never did accept me. Most did, but there were always a few running around saying "Nubian this" and "Nubian that" and always talking about Africa and all this. Well, I'm a mother of black children, and nobody will ever deny me my children, and they can put that in their Nubian pipe and smoke it. All this Nubian. If you want to go back to Africa, James, well, you can go. I don't see the point in your going when you have your family here. But if you feel you want to go to Africa to find your roots I won't stop you. I'll still be your mother when you come back. And you'll still be my son.
There was no turning back after my mother died. I stayed on the black side because that was the only place I could stay. The few problems I had with black folks were nothing compared to the grief white folks dished out. With whites it was no question. You weren't accepted to be with a black man and that was that. They'd say forget it. Are you crazy? A nigger and you? No way. They called you white trash. That's what they called me. Nowadays these mixed couples get on TV every other day complaining, "Oh, it's hard for us." They have cars and televisions and homes and they're complaining. Jungle fever they call it, flapping their jaws and making the whole thing sound stupid. They didn't have to run for their lives like we did. Me and Dennis caused a riot on 105th Street once. A bunch of white men chased us up the street and surrounded Dennis and tried to kill him, throwing bottles and hitting and kicking him until one of them made the rest of them stop. He said, "Get out of here while you can!" and we ran for it. See, most interracial marriages did not last. That's what Dennis would say when we argued. I'd say, "I'm leaving," and he'd say, "Go ahead. Go ahead. That's what people want us to do. That's what they expect." And he was right.
See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That's all. The rest you can deal with. It's not about black or white. It's about God and don't let anyone tell you different. All this Jungle fever! Shoot! The Jungle fever goes away, honey and then what are you gonna do? I say that now in hindsight, because Dennis was afraid to marry me at first. We were acting as husband and wife and having so much fun I didn't care that we weren't married. Our little room on 129th off Seventh was smack dab in the middle of all the action in Harlem. There were parades and dignitaries marching all up and down Seventh Avenue and back in those days. Adam Clayton Powell used to stand on a podium right on 125th Street and make political speeches. Malcolm X, too. On Saturdays we'd go to the Apollo Theater, and if you got there by eleven A.M. you could sit there all day through three shows. They'd start with newsreels on the war, comedy shorts, cartoons, or sometimes a movie western with Hoots Tebicon, or a musical with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Then at one P.M. they played the Apollo theme song, "I Think You're Wonderful," and the bands would bust loose, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Louis Jordan, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine. Those musicians worked like slaves, three shows a day. Then on Sunday we'd go to the Metropolitan Baptist Church on 128th and Lenox Avenue to hear Rev. Abner Brown preach.
Hoop Roots
Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race and Love
by John Edgar Wideman
Nearly everything essential to the playground game resides in players' heads. The game's as portable as a belief. Fluid, flexible, and as open to interpretation as a song. Basketball on the playground requires no referee, coach, clock, scoreboard, rule-book. Players call fouls, keep score, mediate disputes, police out-of-bounds, decide case by case, mano a mano how close to mugging and mayhem the pushing and shoving and jockeying for position are allowed to escalate. They agree to seriously challenge each other physically but not maim one another in this game where everybody is constantly moving and extremely vulnerable, unprotected by helmets or pads as they fly through the air, sprint full speed, set picks and screens within the relatively small scale of a court's dimensions, a court that shrinks precipitously, dangerously, the bigger, stronger, and faster the players are, the more both teams want to win.
The playground game is generated by desire. The desire to play. In this sense also it's truly a player's game. It exists nowhere except where and when the players' minds and bodies construct it. If I hadn't watched the game and listened to the stories, how would I have discovered its existence. How could I play it. The game's pure because it's a product of the players' will or imagination. If the players' desire cools, there is no game. Or at best some sloppy substitute of game not worth bothering with.
On the other hand the game's also sensitive to the call and response of its physical environment, the nature of the play mediated by location, the condition and size of the playing surface, weather, the skill and numbers of players. Some courts draw players from all over a city. Other spots gain their rep from the players who reside near enough to be summoned by the drum of action. The history of a court, the roll call of greats who once competed there, the vagaries of urban renewal (removal), the official posture of the city, the welcome or rejection extended by the court's residential neighbors all leach into the game's soil.
To be worthwhile in any venue, the action must be improvised on the spot. You got to go there to know there. Like a one-more-time thing. Every note, move, solo, pat of the ball happens only once. Unique. Gone as soon as it gets here. Like a river you can't enter twice in the same spot. Each performance created for/within an unrepeatable context, a specific, concrete situation that hasn't appeared before or since. The hoop moves, the notes materialize in the flow of playing, then disappear instantly, preserved only in memory or word of mouth. Performance is all. The present tense presides. Films of playground hoop, recordings of jazz may achieve their own variety or art, repeatable, portable, stopping time, outside time in their frozen fashion, but the action is always long gone as soon as the players step off the court, off the bandstand. Gone in the limbo of fine lost things where lyric poetry seeks its subject.
Playground hoop is doing it. Participating in the action. Being there. The chance to be out there flying up and down the court. Its duration finite. Its time the only time, yet so intimate, inalienable, saturated, whole, it's all time, Great Time. Each isolated moment briefer than brief (was I there, did it happen to me, tell me about it) also provides continuity, the novel, constantly evolving, improvised context allowing the solo, the move to happen one more time because the players share lore -- assumptions, standards, common memories (an aesthetic) about making music, playing the game. These understandings persist. Are the ground against which the figures become visible.
You can pick up in the playing if you listen hard, listen easy enough, the chorus saying, We are doing this together and it's just us out here but the game has been here before, other players have found themselves in the middle of this same deep, good shit and figured out how to deal. Similar moments set in transient yet abiding structures registered in the minds of players who are also the truest fans. The medium the message. Fragments of performance suggestive of a forever unfinished whole, the perfect whole tantalizingly close to now and also forever receding, each fleeting segment vital, absolutely necessary and equal and right if the show's going to go on. The context that provides possibilities for the unexpected, the unknown, does not compromise or bully the moments. Playground hoop was invented to offer room, become room, to bust open and disappear except as invisible frame for what's in the break. For what's next, for what no one's ever done, ever seen before. Maybe the primary reason the game exists and persists is because it reliably supplies breaks, moments a player dreams of seizing and making his or her own when he or she thinks music or thinks basketball. Moments when weight, the everyday dominoes collapsing one after the other of linear time, is shed. When the player's free to play.
"There Are Some Things I Had to Figure Out" by Mawuli Davis
"There Are Some Things I Had to Figure Out"
by Mawuli Davis
Mawuli Davis
Read the text of the letter that Hubert's brother shares in the film.
There are some things I had to figure out, painful.
There are some things I never had to figure out, thankful.
Had to figure out how to be honest to my sons' mother,
To be a husband to their mother,
And not to try to own their mother, my wife, my woman.
To keep my hands off of my sons' mama.
To heal my past pains so that I have room to absorb my sons' pains when they come.
How to be present even when my money is not right, because he is in high school.
And there are things that he can't learn from high school buddies about women, fighting, drugs, drinking, life that I can't tell him in drive-by lectures.
But there are other things that I did not have to figure out, things you taught me well.
I never had to figure out how to get myself up every morning, and work long hours away from my family to support my family.
How to go on family trips,
How to dance around the house with my son,
How to hold my son's hand,
How to let my son know that I'm disappointed without breaking his spirit,
How to show my son how to take something apart around the house to fix it and not be able to put it back together again,
How to make my son think I'm the toughest and strongest man in the world,
How to cry in front of my son,
How to blame their mother for being late to everything,
How to love my sons in a way, that no matter what I do or not do, and no matter where they go or what they do, they'll always be able to know in their hearts that I love them.
I love them. I love them.
There are some things I had to figure out, painful.
And there are some that I never had to figure out, thankful.