1. The stereotypical American family is prosperous, and suburban with the mother and father happily married, and with two or three kids. Yet this is exactly what the two main families in James McBride's autobiographical The Color of Water are not. The McBrides/Jordans and the Shilskys are two extraordinarily unique families. However, the one element that binds the

wife Hudis Shilsky in an arranged marriage for money, which happens to be his motivation for nearly everything in life. With no love for his meek, near-crippled wife and his children, he simply uses them to run his store and make money. According to Ruth, it is a family with endless rules where nobody says "I love you." In the end, Mr. Shilsky runs off with another woman, leaving his wife to die. Ruth, too, escapes from the commotion and harsh treatment of her father, and changes her name and her life-styles.

The Shilskys provide quite the contrast to the McBrides/Jordans. After several nomadic years in America, this Jewish, Polish immigrant family settles in Suffolk, Virginia. There, Rabbi Fishel Shilsky owns and operates a store catering to the town's black population. The father enforces strict rules on his three children Gladys, Sam, and Rachel (who later calls herself Ruth). He marries his

biracial, Brooklyn-dwelling McBrides/Jordans and the Polish immigrant, Jewish Shilskys together is James McBride's mother, Ruth. The characteristics and basic principles of these families differ in almost every way. Each family model is held together by its own system of values, relationships, and unwritten rules.

This memoir was a way for McBride to fulfill himself and understand his mother. It was a way for him to answer his childhood questions and at the same time praise his mother for her strength and determination, which is the one thing that kept their family going. In t

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