Authorexplores the intersecting roles of
race, family, and community in , his memoir of growing up in a biracial
family. As this is his memoir, self-identity is developed primarily through reflecting on his
own experience, but he learned that his mothers journey was also particularly
relevant.
As one of twelve children, coming of age for McBride meant
asserting a definite role in a highly hierarchical structure, which the children, more than
their parents, enforced. In an unusual family dynamic for the time, McBrides mother was white,
and his father was black; after his father died, she remarried, and her second husband was black
as well. Because of segregation, they lived in a black neighborhood, and his mother rarely
associated with other white people.
While the question of race was generally
paramount in Jamess mind, his mother downplayed it. She gained acceptance in their community, in
part because of communal recognition for her strong role in raising the children. Despite
acknowledging the differences in their appearance, his mother preferred not to talk about skin
color, noting when she did that each of the children was a somewhat different tone and
emphasizing their similarities to water, which constantly changes color.
In
the turbulent 1960s, as Jamess coming of age coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, he became
intensely aware of race. Venturing out of his community, he first came to understand how these
issues affected his position as a black man navigating a primarily white world. But he also had
to confront the unusual situation of his own family, which included hard questions that he posed
to his mother. As she told him of her difficult childhood and revealed that she was Jewish by
birth and upbringing, he realized what huge steps she had taken in leaving home, converting to
Christianity, and loving and marrying an African American pastor. Jamess own journey to
self-identity depended heavily on trying to understand his mothers earlier life as
well.
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