79 pages • 2-hour read
The Color of Water
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Chapter 23-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 23 Summary: “Dennis”
One day in 1942, while Ruth is living with Dennis on 129th Street, a Black woman punches Ruth in the face without provocation. When Dennis confronts the assailant, the woman says, “That white woman don’t belong here” (231). Yet the anger Ruth faces from Black women is nothing compared to what Dennis faces from white men. On one occasion, a group of white men chases Dennis and Ruth; they brutally beat Dennis, only stopping when one of the assailants tells the others to do so.
Enraptured by Reverend Abner Brown’s sermons at Metropolitan Baptist Church and still reeling from the death of her mother, Ruth tells Dennis she is ready to accept Jesus Christ into her life. Once she becomes an official member of the church, Ruth can no longer bear living with a man who is not her husband. Though worried about white people will do to them if they are married, Dennis finally agrees. Reverend Brown is happy to marry them in his private office—they aren’t the first congregants he has secretly married.
The following year, Dennis and Ruth have their first baby in a one-room kitchenette filled with roaches. Over the next nine years, they raise three more children living in that room. Ruth calls those years the happiest of her life.
In 1950, the family wins a coveted spot in the Red Hook Public Housing Projects in Brooklyn: a two-bedroom apartment with a private bathroom. After Dennis receives his divinity degree from Shelton Bible College in 1953, he holds prayer meetings with neighbors in their apartment. By then, he and Ruth have seven children. With his congregation expanded and no more room to hold prayer meetings in the apartment, Dennis buys a nearby abandoned building. Before long, his New Brown Memorial Church—named after Reverend Brown—has 60 regular members.
In early 1957, Dennis comes home with a bad cold. After the cold leaves him in bed for three weeks, Ruth takes him to St. Peter’s Hospital. Over the next few weeks, as his illness gets worse and worse, Ruth receives only vague diagnoses from the doctors. One day, Ruth receives a call from a doctor that Dennis is dead. Only then does the doctor tell her that Dennis had cancer.
Ruth realizes she is pregnant. For the first time in 16 years, she is on her own. She receives checks and gifts from her neighbors, her congregation, and Dennis’s family, but it still is not enough to support seven children and another on the way. Her Aunt Betts, now wealthy, shuts the door in her face. She calls Dee-Dee, who only says, “You promised you wouldn’t leave” (246) and hangs up.
Hunter, who is undeterred by Ruth’s eight children, becomes Ruth’s savior. In fact, she turns down numerous proposals from him until Dennis’s mother tells her, “God bless you, Ruth, because you’re our daughter now. Marry that man” (247).
Chapter 24 Summary: “New Brown”
In October 1994, New Brown Memorial Baptist Church celebrates its 40th anniversary at a Ramada near LaGuardia Airport. At first, Ruth does not want to come to the event, despite having helped Dennis build the church in “one of the largest and most neglected housing projects in New York City” (250). Ruth resents the new minister for taking Dennis’s picture down from the pulpit. Moreover, she feels that the minister treats her as a white outsider.
However, on this evening, the minister introduces her as the church’s original founder. In her keynote speech, Ruth—now 74—starts to read from prepared remarks before abandoning the script and launching into an inspiring sermon, delivered from the heart. By the end of the speech, most of the attendees, including James, are in tears.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Finding Ruthie”
James reflects on his adult life, much of which he spent in racial confusion as a young man Growing Up With a Diverse Racial Background in America. Though able to thrive in both Black and white spaces, James gravitates toward the Black community, as his mother did. Despite this, immediately after graduating from Oberlin, he receives a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University rather than a historically Black institution. He works at a series of increasingly prestigious journalism outlets, quitting all of them whenever he feels the pull of a music career. He finds newsrooms to be particularly difficult racial battlegrounds to navigate. He encounters white male tyrants and white pawns of the system. He also resents the Black men who aggressively wield their childhood hardship like a weapon because he believes they are exaggerating their challenges: “They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence” (264).
Eventually, James decides the only way to solve his psychic distress over his diverse heritage is to investigate his mother’s family history, harkening to the theme of The Inescapable Legacy of One’s Cultural Heritage. The process starts in 1982 when his Boston Globe editor assigns him a Mother’s Day piece. Based on the overwhelmingly positive public response to his essay, James investigates further, expecting the process to take six months. Yet it takes Ruth eight years to open up about Tateh, Mameh, and Bubeh. Hearing these and other Yiddish phrases come out of her mouth is a shock to James.
Around this time, Ruth earns a bachelor’s degree from Temple University in Philadelphia. She volunteers at a Philadelphia agency helping unwed pregnant women. Later, she moves to the quiet suburb of Ewing, New Jersey.
In August 1993, Ruth finally works up the nerve to return to Suffolk. There, she visits Frances, whom James spent years tracking down.
James ends the chapter with short biographies of each of his siblings. All of them have bachelor’s degrees, most have master’s degrees, and two have medical doctorates.
Epilogue Summary
James tells the story of his friend David Lee Preston, whose mother Halina Wind is a Polish Jewish woman who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. In 1992, David invites James and Ruth to his wedding. Ruth reluctantly agrees.
Though comfortable in the synagogue, Ruth tells James, “I don’t have this left in me anymore” (283). Although she seems to enjoy the celebration following the ceremony, she insists on leaving early. Only outside the synagogue does Ruth stop to reflect, lost in thought and staring at the temple in the rain.
Chapter 23-Epilogue Analysis
This section of the book deals extensively with The Layered Nature of Privilege, illustrated in James's observation of the dizzying overlap of privilege in major American newsrooms. Predominately white men hold positions of power and treat Black employees unfairly, while brilliant white and Black women are frequently passed over for promotions in favor of men. Conversely, many white men in and out of the workplace faced hardships equal or greater to James’s own. James writes, “It took years before I began to accept the fact that the nebulous ‘white man’s world’ wasn’t as free as it looked; that class, luck, religion all factored in as well; that many white individuals’ problems surpassed my own, often by a lot” (262). James also observes gradations of privilege within the Black community. He is judgmental about his Black peers’ self-proclaimed childhood hardships because they make him feel guilty for trading on his own hard-luck story:
Their claims of growing up poor were without merit in my mind. They grew up privileged, not deprived, because they had mothers, fathers, grandparents, neighbors, church, family, a system that protected, sheltered, and raised them. They did not grow up like the children of the eighties and nineties, stripped of any semblance of family other than the constant presence of drugs and violence. Their ‘I was raised with nuthin’ and went to Harvard anyway’ experience was the criterion that white editors used to hire them. But then again, that was partly how I got through too. The whole business made me want to scream (262).
James’s characterization of the complaints of those who grew up with racial discrimination and economic hardship as performative may be surprising or even uncomfortable to many readers. This attitude makes James himself uncomfortable, causing him to “want to scream.” Yet the passage above highlights a critical theme threaded throughout the novel: the profound and immeasurable difficulties and experiences of the Black men who grew up during the War on Drugs and the era of mass incarceration. The notion that Black communities in the post-Civil Rights Era face increasing systemic racism is a cornerstone of racial caste theory, which focuses on the ways in which racism was built into the foundation of social and legal systems in the United States.
The Epilogue highlights another major theme: The Inescapable Legacy of One’s Cultural Heritage. Ruth, who has throughout the novel downplayed her Jewish heritage because of her father’s abuse, attends the Jewish wedding of one of her son’s best friends. Illustrating her profound emotional progress, during the ceremony, Ruth seems neither distressed nor inspired by the Judaic rituals that made up such a huge part of her youth. Given her decades of running from her Jewish heritage and her traumatic childhood, her sanguine attitude in the synagogue is a note of hope. As is customary for this book, no tearful moment, earth-shattering epiphany, or histrionic act of catharsis accompanies the story’s conclusion. Rather, James depicts individuals who navigate the confusion and hardship of life in America with quiet resilience and grace.
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