Read Online The Color of Water by James McBride - Free Book Online Page B

now and tell him to come home.” So I did. I wrote Sam and told him to come home, but he never did come home and I never did see him again
.
    He joined the army and got killed in World War II, my brother Sam. I didn’t find out what happened to him till long after the fact, when your daddy died in 1957. I had seven kids and was pregnant with you and I called one of my aunts to ask for help and she said, “Your brother died in the war.” I asked her what happened, and she said, “Stay out of our lives. You’ve been out. Stay out.” And she hung up on me, so there was nothing I could do for Sam but pray for him
.

8.
Brothers and Sisters
    Mommy’s house was orchestrated chaos and as the eighth of twelve children, I was lost in the sauce, so to speak. I was neither the prettiest, nor the youngest, nor the brightest. In a house where there was little money and little food, your power was derived from who you could order around. I was what Mommy called a “Little Kid,” one of five young’uns, microscopic dots on the power grid of the household, thus fit to be tied, tortured, tickled, tormented, ignored, and commanded to suffer all sorts of indignities at the hands of the “Big Kids,” who didn’t have to go to bed early, didn’t believe in the tooth fairy, and were appointed denizens of power by Mommy, who of course wielded ultimate power.
    My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but whenit came to food, they were my enemies. There were so many of us we were constantly hungry, scavenging for food in the empty refrigerator and cabinets. We would hide food from one another, squirreling away a precious grilled cheese or fried bologna sandwich, but the hiding places were known to all and foraged by all and the precious commodity was usually discovered and devoured before it got cold. Entire plots were hatched around swiping food, complete with double-crossing, backstabbing, intrigue, outright robbery, and gobbled evidence. Back in the projects in Red Hook, before we moved to Queens, Mommy would disappear in the morning and return later with huge cans of peanut butter which some benevolent agency had distributed from some basement area in the housing projects. We’d gather around the cans, open them, and spoon up the peanut butter like soup, giggling as our mouths stuck closed with the gooey stuff. When Mommy left for work, we dipped white bread in syrup for lunch, or ate brown sugar raw out of the box, which was a good hunger killer. We had a toaster that shocked you every time you touched it; we called our toast
shock
toast and we got shocked so much our hair stood on end like Buckwheat’s. Ma often lamented the fact that she could not afford to buy us fruit, sometimes for weeks at a time, but we didn’t mind. We spent every penny we had on junk food. “If you eat that stuff your teeth will drop out,” Mommy warned. We ignored her. “If you chew gum and swallow it, your behind will closeup,” she said. We listened and never swallowed gum. We learned to eat standing up, sitting down, lying down, and half asleep, because there were never enough places at the table for everyone to sit, and there was always a mad scramble for Ma’s purse when she showed up at two a.m. from work. The cafeteria at the Chase Manhattan Bank where she worked served dinner to the employees for free, so she would load up with bologna sandwiches, cheese, cakes, whatever she could pillage, and bring it home for the hordes to devour. If you were the first to grab the purse when she got home, you ate. If you missed it, well, sleep tight.
    The food she brought from work was delicious, particularly when compared to the food she cooked. Mommy could not cook to save her life. Her grits tasted like sand and butter, with big lumps inside that caught in your teeth and stuck in your gums. Her pancakes had white goo and egg shells in them. Her stew would send my little brother