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SOURCE: DavidsonReads/Town of Davidson

The town has spoken. Readers and residents have selected “The Color of Water” by James McBride as the 2009 selection for the DavidsonReads townwide reading program.

“We are excited by the response from residents and are looking forward to planning a great calendar of events to celebrate this wonderful book,” said Lisa Jewel, chair of DavidsonReads. “James McBride’s novel touches on so many themes our residents can relate to. We hope people will consider this book for their book clubs in the coming months and we will announce events this summer for a busy fall season.”

DavidsonReads is a partnership between the Town of Davidson Parks & Recreation Department, the Davidson Public Library, Main Street Books and town residents. The program asks people to read the same book at the same time and attend various events to discuss the characters, plots and themes.

“The Color of Water” by James McBride is an eloquent narrative in which a young black man searches for his roots – against the wishes of his mother.

Mr. McBride is a professional saxophonist and former staff writer for the Boston Globe and The Washington Post who grew up with 11 siblings in an all-black Brooklyn, N.Y., housing project. As a child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around him: She was white, and she kept secrets. When asked where she was from, Mr. McBride recalls, she would say something like “God made me”; when asked about her ethnicity, she would say,” ‘I’m light-skinned,’ and change the subject.” No amount of prodding could get her to say much more, and McBride was left to explore his mother’s past without much help from his principal subject.

What he learned occupies the pages of this vivid, affecting memoir: When James McBride asked his mother, Ruth, what color God was, she told him He was ‘the color of water’. Growing up black in Brooklyn, James wondered at his mother’s light skin, and only later learned she had been born Ruchel Zylska, an Orthodox Jew. After her family fled from Poland during the war to settle in Virginia, she escaped her abusive father to live in Harlem, where she married a black man.

She changed her name, founded a Baptist church with her husband and put 12 high-flying children through college. This double autobiography tells the story of Ruth and her son, each reflecting the experience of the other as they grow up in a world where racial categories threaten to overcome personal identities.

For more information visit www.davidsonreads.org or www.ci.davidson.nc.us.