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James McBride a writer and musician, is a former staff writer for The Boston Globe. People magazine, and The Washington Post. A professional saxophonist and composer, he has received the American Music Theater Festivals Stephen Sondheim Award for his work in musical theater composition. He lives in South Nyack. New York.

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Ruth is the mother of James. She explains how she feels dead to her family because of the marriage to Andrew Dennis McBride, Ruth's biological father died. she says "He's dead now anyways, or if not he's 150 years old"(1). Ruth's biological mother is name Hudis Shilsky, she had a arranged marriage to a man named Tateh. Tateh never gave love or affection which is what affected Hudis Shilskys whole life.

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Ruth's mother picked up 2 new hobbies, Riding a Bicycle and playing the piano. He didn't mind he piano but the bicycle is what he couldn't stand. Riding her bike was her way of grieving for her husbands death, but at the time Ruth didn't know. Ruth later on realizes that his mom riding her bicycle symbolizes Ruth's quirkiness and his own embarrassment.

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James remembers when he was in kindergarten, he asked his mother, "How come you don't look like me?"(9). Ruth gave him a dismissive and indirect response. Only later in life did he realize that his mother marginalized issues of race and identity in favor of the craziness of raising twelve children.

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Ruth was 2 years old and her brother Sam was 4 years old when they immigrated to United States. Ruth explains what she finds the suffocation of the rules of orthodox Judaism. Her Grand mother Zaydeth died and Ruth believes that the rest of her profound fear of death comes from her family's responses to death.

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Ruth's dad made him and his sister Gladys work in the store a lot. While growing up Ruth's endured the significant prejudices towards Jewish people. For example "They loved anything different, or new, or from out of town, except Jews. In school the kids called me "Christ killer" and :Jew Baby."(31) Ruth also describes the secret sexual abusive his sister got from his dad which ruin not only the father daughter relationship but also Ruth's self esteem.

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Ruth became curious about race and asked his mother, "What Color was God's Spirit"(39) and Ruth's mother responded with "It doesn't have a color,  God is the color of water. Water doesn't have a color"(39) This moment had a impact on Ruth's character as a person.

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Ruth had a older brother name Sam. Sam was a sweet timid boy who ran away at the age of 5 because of the tremendous expectation of their father. Ruth and her mother convinced Sam to return back home, but later on she found out that Sam had died in WWll. She said" He joined the army and got killed in World war ll, my brother Sam. I didn't find out what happen to him till long after the fact"(48)

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At first Ruth didn't know what the K.K.K was. After learning why Black people run away/have a low profile when the K.K.K comes, Ruth becomes scared. When she first saw them she said "a car full of men wearing white sheets drove past. They had with hats covering there face, with two little eyeholes cut out so they could see."(44)

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While James talks about his family of twelves poverty he also explains their resourcefulness and vitality. James oldest Brother Dennis was a role model for all his younger sibling's, James looked up to him. However, his sister Helen quit school at the age of 15 and became a hippie. She and Dennis had a huge argument and Helen ran away, James found out that Helen was living with her brother Jack. James and them couldn't convince Helen to come back and James found out that Helen moved out and started to live in a bad neighborhood. For example it says "I found her. Shas living with some crazy women,"(58)

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Everyone looked for Helen, The people at the church, policies, and Helens friends. While James was looking for Helen he met this man that ran from the Jim Crow and told James how any kind of education is a privilege. "He had had run off from the Jim Crow in the South and felt that education, any education, was a privileges"(58) These words stuck with him.

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Ruth experienced the hardships of being Jewish during the first part of the twentieth century. He went through people calling him slurs, physical and mental pain, and he couldn't make any friends. But a gentile girl accepted Ruth even with his Jewish background. For example "a girl came up to me in the schoolyard during recess and said, "You have the prettiest hair. Lets be friends"... Ill never forget Frances for as long as I live. She was thin,, with light brown hair and blue eyes."(63)

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James and his sibling's took jobs primarily in Jewish neighborhoods to receive the best possible schooling. But this ended poorly because it resulted in him and his siblings to be the only black students making them experience and suffer from the prejudice of the white world. A example of this was when the teacher was reading a book out loud it said "the teacher dutifully read aloud from our history books on page on "Negros history," someone in the back of the class whispered, "James is a [explicit]" followed by a ripple of tittering and giggling across the room"(68)

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James step father Hunter wanted to live alone Hunter worked as a furnace fireman for the New York City Housing Authority, and adopted the eight children from Ruth's previous marriage. Hunter used his life's savings to buy a house but wanted to live alone. One day his house was torn down in order to build another housing project. This made Hunter devastated, Hunter then became hospitalized later on during James adolescence because of a stroke. After hunter cam home from the hospitals  he spoke one-on-one with James in a rare moment of intimacy and expression, urging him to take good care of Ruth and his siblings. Two days later Hunter had a relapse and died. Hunter told James "yall are special...I knew he was going to die and I had to blink back my tears. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, that I hoped with all my heart that he would get better, but I could not formulate the words in my mouth"(97)

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The man who taught James the most "Chicken Man"

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The man who taught James the most "Chicken Man"

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After his stepfather died, James began to do poorly in school, use drugs, and get involved in petty thief. He was only aware later that much of this phase related to the anger he felt at his situation. After Ruth found out James was doing poorly she sent him to her aunt in Kentucky for the summer. Chicken Man was James's favorite local man, and the one from whom he learned the most. While James was working at the gas station, he got in a fight with his boss's friend and was fired. James ranted to Chicken Man about his wish for a gun, and Chicken Man responded seriously. Chicken Man recognized his failures in life, and urged James to educate himself and work hard.

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James gained insight from his interactions with the working men on the street corner in Louisville. James witnessed the consequences of a lack of education, the tendency to drink or use drugs, and the use of violence to resolve situations. As a result, he became aware of the importance of taking an active role in his own life and future.. Chicken Man's warning articulates the lesson James learns from all of the men on the corner, most of whom have dead-end lives like Chicken Man

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After James mother, Ruth cries over the loss of hunter. James reminiscences about the time Ruth said she would stop driving in hunters car because of all the close accidents she had. Which made James laugh and recover.

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About thinking about all the advice hes got from Chicken Man and his sister Jack, he decides to seriously consider his changing his behavior, the advice they gave him were that bad things would happen if he failed to change his behavior. After thinking about it James looks for comfort and guidance from god

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Living in New York was too expensive for James and his family so they decide to move to Delaware and there James found something that inspired him. He found out about Jazz and it became a deep hobby for him.

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After finding about Jazz James wanted to become a Musician, when James went to college he chose a career about music. He chose a career in music because Jazz made a huge impact on him. Although he was interested in music and writing he was worried about his bad grades and SAT score but a college in Ohio, Oberlin, accepted him

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James Mother, Ruth, was extremely exited when James got into Oberlin, a college Ohio, to the point where she would brag about it to everyone. Ruth gave as much emotional support and encouragement to James as much as she could.

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https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/fall/feature/james-mcbride

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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For a writing assignment, he typed up a story about a man who goes to the bathroom, has a heart attack, and dies. "It was a horrible story," he says, laughing, and then guffawing, at the memory. But there was something to the writing. "You have a touch for this," Tom Taylor, his teacher, said.

A troubled student in high school, McBride found his way in college as a communications major. "When I went to Oberlin it really changed my perspective on the world. Because I became more socially and politically conscious."

Today McBride is known as the author of several distinguished books, foremost among them The Color of Water, "an instant classic," in the words of a New York Times reviewer, that has sold more than 2.5 million copies and been translated into 16 languages. His best-selling novel about four Buffalo Soldiers separated from their unit and hiding in an Italian village during World War II, Miracle at St. Anna, became a movie directed by Spike Lee, for whom he later wrote Red Hook Summer.

McBride is also the author of The Good Lord Bird, a picaresque rendering of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry as witnessed by a man who, in his youth, lived incognito as a girl, an unlikely concoction that won the National Book Award for fiction in 2013. Linguistically inventive, Good Lord Bird draws, with great brio, on colorful vernacular that McBride knew from people in his own life, from slave narratives, from jazz history, and from the linguistic investigations of Lorenzo Dow Turner.

This year McBride published Kill 'Em and Leave, a book about James Brown that took him into a fever swamp of unreliable sources and the dustup surrounding a contested financial legacy. As much about the music business and the African-American experience as about Brown, the story provides a canvas for McBride's rich and illuminating investigations.

McBride's own story has several storylines. From Oberlin he went to Columbia Journalism School. His reporting career began at Wilmington's News Journal, where he started as an intern before becoming a full-time reporter in the Newark, Delaware, bureau and winning an award for his writing. With his journalistic career shaping up, McBride quit the news business and went to Africa for a few months, seeking his roots in a mash-up of Alex Haley-type-searching and saxophone-playing adventure.

Returning to the United States, he came back to journalism, working for the Boston Globe and then People magazine, covering Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour nonstop for several months. He also wrote for Us Weekly, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post. Then he quit journalism again, to work as a full-time musician for about nine years. He played with Little Jimmy Scott, wrote music for Grover Washington Jr., Anita Baker, and Barney the purple dinosaur, but not, he says, the well-known "I Love You" song, though he wishes he had. He also began working on his memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother.

The chapters alternate between McBride's memories of growing up poor in a family of 12 children in Brooklyn and Queens and an oral history he took from his mother, Ruth, whose Jewish family came to the United States in the 1920s to escape persecution in Poland. An unhappy child living in segregated Suffolk, Virginia, under the watchful eye of a cruel father, Ruth ran away, married a black man, converted to Christianity, became a widow, married another black man, and became a widow once more. In the struggle to feed her family she left her older children in charge as she worked nights as a typist and in the morning bused her kids all over the city to the best public schools she could find. Amazingly, she found a way to send them all to college.

As a boy, McBride was always curious about his mother's much paler skin color, the object of many odd looks and some offensive remarks the family endured as they went about in public. Ruth put off his questions, insisting that the only things he needed to worry about were school and church. One day he asked a different question: What color is God? Her answer became the title of his book.

"We have more in common than we are different as human beings," says McBride. It was something he learned from his mother. "My work always pushes toward the commonality of man or slash woman."

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For a writing assignment, he typed up a story about a man who goes to the bathroom, has a heart attack, and dies. "It was a horrible story," he says, laughing, and then guffawing, at the memory. But there was something to the writing. "You have a touch for this," Tom Taylor, his teacher, said.

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https://kuow.org/stories/musician-and-author-james-mcbride-details-always-tell-story/

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As you listen to this episode of Speakers Forum, keep in mind that author James McBride gave this talk without any notes. In it he riffs on his family, career, books and life in America with thoughtful, humorous and inspiring improvisation.

McBride began his career as a musician, earning an undergraduate degree in music composition from Oberlin College in 1979. He went on to tour as a saxophonist with jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott.

Later, as a composer, he won the American Music Theater Festival's Stephen Sondheim Award for his jazz/pop musical "Bobos."

McBride also earned a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and pursued a writing career with The Boston Globe, People Magazine and The Washington Post. He gained acclaim for his memoir "The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother."

Then in 2013 he won the National Book Award for fiction for "The Good Lord Bird." In it, McBride re-imagines the story of the abolitionist John Brown, seen through the eyes of a young slave named Henry "Onion" Shakleford. The National Book Award judges called McBride's voice "as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain." As you'll hear, McBride has something to say about that.

McBride is currently a distinguished writer-in-residence at New York University.

Seattle Arts and Lectures presented this talk by McBride at Town Hall Seattle on October 15, 2014. The presenting sponsor was The Seattle Times.

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Musician And Author James McBride: 'The Details Always Tell The Story'

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As you listen to this episode of Speakers Forum, keep in mind that author James McBride gave this talk without any notes. In it he riffs on his family, career, books and life in America with thoughtful, humorous and inspiring improvisation.

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https://libwww.freelibrary.org/programs/onebook/obop04/char04.cfm

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One Book, One Philadelphia: James McBride

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The mission of the Free Library of Philadelphia is to advance literacy, guide learning, and inspire curiosity.

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James McBrides website about all his books/himself

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James McBrides website about all his books/himself

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https://www.jamesmcbride.com/#:~:text=His%20debut%20novel%2C%20Miracle%20at,a%20script%20written%20by%20McBride.

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Birdand the bestselling modern classic The Color of Water, comes one of the most celebrated novels of the year.
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters-caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York-overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.

Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.

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James McBride is an author, musician and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, "The Color of Water," rested on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. It is considered an American classic and is read in schools and universities across the United States. His debut novel, "Miracle at St.

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https://www.jamesmcbride.com/bio/

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James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States.

His debut novel, Miracle at St. Anna, was turned into a 2008 film by Oscar-winning writer and director Spike Lee, with a script written by McBride.

His 2013 novel, The Good Lord Bird, about American abolitionist John Brown, won the National Book Award for Fiction and will be a Showtime limited series in fall 2020 starring Ethan Hawke.

McBride has been a staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The Washington Post, and his work has appeared in Essence, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His 2007 National Geographic story "Hip Hop Planet" is considered an important examination of African American music and culture.

A noted musician and composer, McBride has toured as a saxophonist sideman with jazz legend Jimmy Scott, among other musicians. He has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Pura Fé, Gary Burton, and even for the PBS television character "Barney." (He did not write the "I Love You" song for Barney, but he wishes he did.) He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical Bobos, co-written with playwright Ed Shockley. His 2003 Riffin' and Pontificatin' musical tour was filmed for a nationally televised Comcast documentary. He has been featured on national radio and television in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. He often does his public readings accompanied by a band.

In addition to being an author and a musician, McBride has other attributes. He admits to being the worst dancer in the history of African Americana, bar none (he claims he should be legally barred from dancing at any event he attends). And when he takes off his hat, fleas fly out. Little things, little talents.

A native New Yorker and a graduate of New York City public schools, McBride studied composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received his master's degree at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. In 2015, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama "for humanizing the complexities of discussing race in America." He holds several honorary doctorates and is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

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James McBride is an award-winning author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States.