I swallowed the white man's fear of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole." His mother worked as a typist at Chase Manhattan Bank from 3pm to 2am, and didn't have time, James remembers, for "identity crises." His mother considered the achievements of the civil rights movement to be her own, but, at the same time, her "contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island. In 1966, when James was nine, "black power" struck fear into his heart: "I thought black power would be the end of my mother. When Zaydeh died, Ruth remembers thinking he was asleep, and was frightened that the family had buried him alive. Tateh had gone over first, and they initially lived with Mameh's parents, Zaydeh and Bubeh (Yiddish for "grandfather" and "grandmother"). Ruth, her mother, and her older brother Sam arrived in America on August 23, 1923. Tateh only married her to get a ticket to America, because much of her family had already moved to the States and could offer the sponsorship necessary to be admitted. Ruth explains that her mother came from a wealthy family with a lot of class. School is important" and "Don't tell nobody your business."Īs the book unfolds, it alternates between the mother's voice and the son's. His mother implemented a system of dividing "the big kids" from "the little kids", and instilled in them basic tenets to live by, such as: "Educate your mind. She was "commander in chief" of the family, and James asserts that his childhood growing up in the Red Hook housing projects in Brooklyn was chaos. His mother, he recalls, would ride her odd-looking bicycle around town as though she was completely oblivious to the rest of the world. James, having never known his biological father, thought of Hunter Jordan as his real father, and when he died of a stroke at 72, 14-year-old James almost dropped out of high school, and began hanging out with friends and drinking. She later married Hunter Jordan, and together they added four more children to the family. Ruth and her first husband, Andrew McBride, had eight children, but before Ruth could bear him a ninth, Andrew died of lung cancer. Ruth reflects: "had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live." Rachel began going by "Ruth" in high school, and when she left for New York at age 19 and married a black man, her family mourned her as if she were dead. Ruth describes Tateh (Yiddish for "father") as a "fox" and Mameh (Yiddish for "mother") as "gentle and meek." Mameh was crippled on her left side because she had suffered polio as a child, and was nearly blind in her left eye. Her father, Fishel Shilsky, was a traveling Orthodox Jewish rabbi who married his wife, Hudis, according to the Jewish laws of contract: theirs was never a marriage of love. In America, her name was changed to Rachel Deborah Shilsky. The girl who was born Ruchel Dwajra Zylsky on Apin Poland, and who immigrated to America, settling in a small town in Virginia, is gone.
Ruth begins her story by telling James that she is "dead".
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