Every year we argue over where to have Christmas. Every year we spend hundreds of dollars on phone calls and letters, writing, faxing, cajoling, and bribing, trying to get out of the pilgrimage to Mommy’s tiny house in Ewing. Every year, all twelve of us claim we’re going to have Christmas at our own house and we’re not going to travel a zillion miles with a zillion children to sleep with a zillion people on the floor of Ma’s like we’re little kids, because we’re just tired, man, and we did this last year. But at age seventy-four, the president, CEO, and commander in chief of this here army still has the power. My wife, Stephanie, tells a funny story about the first time she came home with me for Christmas and met my family. We were sitting around Ma’s house in Ewing, all twelve siblings, doctors, professors all—the house as wild as it always was when we were little, our kids going crazy and our spouses numb, while Mommy’s original dozen fell back into nutty behavioral patterns that would make a psychologist throw up his hands in despair—when someone shouted over the din, “Let’s go to the movies!” Instantly the room sprang into overdrive.
“Good idea!”
“Yeah…let’s go. I’ll drive.”
From another room: “Wait for me!”
“Hurry up! Where’s my shoes?”
Mommy was sitting on the living room couch while all this was happening, her feet resting on the coffee table. She yawned and said softly, “I want to eat.”
The movie was instantly forgotten.
“Yeah! Let’s eat!”
“I sure am hungry!”
“Let’s order out!”
From another room: “I been waiting to eat all day…!”
Now that’s what you call power.
Epilogue
In November 1942, a twenty-one-year-old Jewish woman named Halina Wind was sent by her parents into hiding after the Nazis marched into her home village of Turka, Poland, and murdered most of the town’s six thousand Jews, eventually killing her parents, a brother, and grandmother. Halina Wind fled to the city of Lvov, where she and nine other Jews hid in a sewer for fourteen months, living admidst rats and sewer filth in a wet, underground prison, never seeing the sunlight, fed by three Polish sewer workers. Halina Wind survived that horror and lived to tell the world of it.
In 1980—nearly forty years later—Halina’s only son, David Lee Preston, a tall, thin, handsome dude with a lean face, dark eyes, and glasses, wandered over to my desk at the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal holding a story I had written about boxer Muhammad Ali. He was a reporter at the paper like I was, but we had never met.
“This is an excellent piece,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You spelled Muhammad wrong. It’s with an ‘a’ at the end, not an ‘e.’ The copy desk missed it.” The copy desk is supposed to catch those kinds of errors before they make the paper.
“Okay.” I shrugged. No sweat off my back.
“I heard you’re a sax player,” he said. “You ever heard of Albert Ayler?”
Albert Ayler was an amazing, avant-garde saxophonist known only to the most die-hard jazz enthusiasts. Rumor has it he disappeared into Manhattan’s East River wearing cement shoes. I was completely surprised. “How’d you hear of him?” I asked.
He shrugged and smiled. From that day to this, Halina Wind’s son has been one of my best friends. I didn’t know David Preston was a Jew when I first met him. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve. He was a compassionate, curious, humorous intellectual, a great writer, and his religious background never came up, nor did it seem important to me at the time. Only when I revealed to him that my mother was the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi did his Jewish background emerge, because he understood the true depth of Mommy’s experience immediately. “What a woman,” he said. This from a guy who was raised by an amazing woman himself.
As his life moved forward—today he is writing a book about his mother and working as the South Jersey columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer—so did mine. I asked him to be in my wedding when I married my African-American wife, Stephanie, in 1991. He asked me to do the same when he married his Jewish wife, Rondee, the following year. He also wanted Mommy to come to his wedding. I agreed to ask her for him, though privately I had my doubts.
“Interesting.” That was her response when I put it to her.
“He really wants you to come,” I said. I knew she liked David immensely.
“I’ll come if Kathy comes with me,” she said. Ma likes her daughters to come with her for anything emotional. Her sons she likes to brag about and say what great things they’ve done, and what schools they’ve gone to, and on and on, but in truth it’s the women of the McBride-Jordan clan who hold the family together and will do so after she is gone. Like Mommy, my sisters have learned to absorb punishment and get up off the ground after the shock of life’s blows wears off. The men, yours truly included, wallow about as life’s details mow us down and lay us out on Mommy’s couch to watch Bowl games when the family gathers at Christmas and Thanksgiving, no matter how lousy the games are. Kathy agreed to come to the wedding with her nine-year-old daughter, Maya, and we were on.
It was held at Temple Beth Shalom in Wilmington, where Halina Wind Preston had taught for three decades. I was an usher in the wedding, and as I marched down the aisle wearing a black tuxedo and a white yarmulke, behind six Jewish musicians who played the traditional Israeli folk song “Erev Shel Shoshanim,” I felt somber, moved, and proud. David Preston married his wife with the kind of gusto and enthusiasm and seriousness with which he attacks everything in life. They signed a contract. They were married under a huppah, a wedding canopy. Two cantors, one of whom was David’s sister, Shari Preston, stepped forward and sang. David’s uncle, Halina Wind’s brother, Rabbi Leon Wind, presided over the ceremony, and spoke eloquently, with reverence and power. “My heart is filled with deep and conflicting emotions today,” the seventy-eight-year-old rabbi said. “I’m overjoyed that your marriage has come. Yet my heart aches because my sister, for whom this would have been the supreme moment of her life, did not live to see it.” David’s mother, Halina Wind Preston, died after open heart surgery in December 1982 at the age of sixty-one. The rabbi’s heartfelt words moved the entire congregation, and my thoughts traveled to my own Jewish mother, who was sitting in the fourth row.
I turned to peek as Mommy wiped her reddening nose with a handkerchief, a camera strapped around her wrist. At moments like this she usually likes to shoot pictures. She catches all of her important moments with a camera, waddling down Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue from the A train to Long Island College Hospital to take pictures of my daughter Azure’s first days of life; standing my toddler son, Jordan, up against a tree in her yard so she can snap a quick picture of him in his Easter outfit. Her photos are horrible, heads cut off, pictures of nothing, a table, a hand, a chair. Still, she shoots pictures of any event that’s important to her, knowing that each memory is too important to lose, having lost so many before. However, she is snapping no pictures now. She’s staring straight ahead, wearing a white dress with a necklace this rainy afternoon, her long nose and dark eyes seeming to blend in perfectly with the mostly eastern European faces surrounding her. She’d had no problems walking into the synagogue. She looked about the lobby and nodded her approval. Oh yes, this is the memorial wall where they put the names of the ones who died, she pointed out. Oh yes, the men will leave the room if a woman cantor performs. She talked as if she were visiting a museum.
“How do you feel being here?” I asked her.
“I feel fine,” she said. “I’m happy to see David getting married. He’s a nice Jewish boy.” She laughed at the irony of it. I realized then that whoever had said kaddish for Mommy—the Jewish prayer of mourning, the declaration of death, the ritual that absolves them of responsibility for the child’s fate—had done the right thing, because Mommy was truly gone from their world. In her mind, she was a guest here. “I don’t have this left in me anymore,” she remarked at one point.
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Downstairs at the reception following the ceremony, Mommy perked up even more as the klezmer musicians played traditional Jewish folk songs. She ate kosher hummus, tahini, and baba ghanouj, and explained the importance of kosher food to my niece Maya; she laughed and joked with a group of Jewish ladies who sat next to us, and even got up to watch me help other men place David Preston in a chair, lift him up, and carry him around the room in the traditional Jewish men’s wedding dance. But not long after, she came back to our table and announced, “It’s time to go,” in a tone and manner that said she really was ready to leave.
When we opened the synagogue door, it was raining outside and we had no umbrellas. Kathy and Maya made a quick dash for the car, running ahead while Mommy and I followed. “That’s how it’s done,” Ma said as I helped her down the synagogue stairs, her arthritic knees aching in the damp weather. “That’s how the old Jews did it in my day too. You marry under that thing, the huppah. You break the glass. You know that could’ve been me,” she said as she took the last stair and her foot landed shakily on the sidewalk.
“I know,” I said, releasing her arm and walking toward the car, “and where would that have left me…?” But suddenly I was talking to myself. She was gone. I stopped and turned to look behind me. She was standing in front of the synagogue entrance, staring up at the doorway from the sidewalk, lost in thought, the rain billowing into puddles around her. She stood there for a moment in the downpour staring thoughtfully, before turning and hurrying toward the car, her bowlegged waddle just the same as it always was.
AFTERWORD TO THE
10th Anniversary Edition
The subject of this book can be found on any given Sunday morning in the Trenton, New Jersey, area, driving a late-model Toyota with manual roll-down windows, bearing down on any one of four local churches. She goes to a white Lutheran church or a black Baptist church—make that three black churches. The ensuing pages, I hope, will explain why.
At eighty-four, she drives like a demon, slowly weaving to and fro, holding up traffic behind her, motoring along at thirty miles per hour in a fifty miles per hour zone, sometimes with her turn signal blinking for several miles because she can’t hear that well anymore. She refuses to wear a hearing aid. She has a good one, a fine—custom-made—one, bought at great cost, which only gives her greater disdain for it. She calls it “The Thing.” She regards it as evidence, clear proof, that the purchaser, yours truly, got suckered once again. “What a racket,” she scoffs. “Your nickname should be ‘Sign here.”’
She never wore “The Thing.” In fact she brought it back to the doctor’s office twice, expecting to exchange it the way you exchange, say, a lamp or a pair of shoes at a discount store. After much haggling they finally agreed to give her another one, which was only further proof to her that “The Thing” was a piece of junk. It lives in a box now, next to the toys and junk she collects from the dollar store—Ping-Pong balls, water guns, bubble makers—all of which end up in her cluttered bedroom, clumped under her bed, to be doled out to grandkids, or simply forgotten.
She drives with her blinker on, at thirty miles per hour, windows rolled down because she’s claustrophobic, and electric doors and locks give her fits, with her radio blasting The Joan Hamburg Show on WWOR in New York City, with an occasional nod to a local Holy Roller station, or Howard Stern.
After holding up traffic for an appropriate time, she will turn into a church parking lot, sometimes taking up two parking spaces, since she’ll park cockeyed, with the car tires hanging over the yellow line. The motor quits, the car drifts a bit as the parking brake slams on, and she flings the door open. A gentle push—she’s not strong anymore—but still it’s a kind of get-out-of-my-way shove. She then throws her purse, sweater, shopping bag, and cheap plastic sun visor out of the car, onto the pavement where it rolls around a little. She places her walking cane out the door, grabs the handle over the doorway, and hoists herself out of the car.
And thus Ruth McBride Jordan, my mother, is ready for business.
My mother is the only person I know who goes to four churches. She goes to the white Lutheran church when she wants to get out on time. She goes to her regular black Baptist church, where the services run long and where an older minister “gets down to business,” as she puts it. Sometimes she goes to an early-morning service at my Baptist church, run by a fine, young, well-educated minister (“they’re a little uppity in there,” she complains), or she’ll skip all three and head to a tiny Baptist church, where she is crazy about the minister’s midweek “Hour of Power” Bible study lessons.
I would venture to state that in at least three of those churches, there aren’t more than ten people in the congregations who know that the elderly white woman sitting among them singing “Come to Jesus” off-key is one of the most beloved women in America. Her story, which you have just read, has sold more than two million copies worldwide. It has been translated into nearly twenty languages and was serialized by the New York Times, where it sat on that paper’s bestseller list for two years. It is studied by thousands of students every year in sociology, literature, history, and creative writing classes. She is regarded, at least by some, as one of the most inspirational figures in contemporary American literature. Yet she claims she enjoys her anonymity. “What difference does it make?” she says.
I know for a fact that Mommy secretly likes being famous. A little. She’s human. She’s tickled by it the same way that, say, a homeless woman would be tickled to suddenly find herself at a cocktail party with fancy waiters breezing up to her every five minutes, holding trays filled with delicious cocktails and stuffed chicken tidbits. And the woman would say, “Don’t mind if I do,” all the while knowing that when the clock strikes twelve the party’s over, and she has to go back to her old life. Mommy won’t mind when midnight arrives; she has perspective. She toasts her good luck, knowing that while fame is fleeting, God is forever. “I’m blessed beyond measure,” she says. She says that often.
It’s been ten years since this book was laid at the public’s feet. Neither she nor I had any idea it would become the classic that it has become. It is every author’s dream come true. It has changed my life and that of my mother immeasurably, in mostly good ways.
While I have no complaints, the past few years have not been all peaches and cream. In those ten years, Mommy survived quadruple bypass surgery and a minor stroke. She saw the death of two great-grandchildren, and the death of my brother Billy, a husband and father of four, who died of kidney cancer at the age of fifty-six, in April 2004. Billy was a medical doctor and vice president for research at Merck Pharmaceutical. To give you an idea of what kind of son he was: From the time he got his first job at fifteen in an ice cream cone plant in Brooklyn to when he graduated from Yale Medical School, he supported his mother. When he was a kid, he gave her cash. After medical school, he sent her a check. Every single month, until he died.
Nothing I offer here can effectively communicate the pain of watching Mommy howl with grief at Billy’s wake, where his body lay in state, his tie so neat, his glasses perched upon his handsome face, his hair combed just so. His death broke us down. Yet it brought us closer as well. Billy was proud of this book. He urged his mother to be proud of it as well. He helped her accept her past, and she welcomed his encouragement. And while making my family’s story public initially caused some tensions between my siblings and me, I would say they’re proud of the book too. It has made us realize how special our mother is, and how blessed we are.
I’ve been welcomed with open arms by about a dozen relatives since this book was published, many of them white and Jewish. I’m a better person, a fuller person, for knowing them. And I hope they feel the same way about me. Naturally there are some among them who have no interest in meeting their black relatives—just as there are a few on my side who have no interest in their white, Jewish relatives. This isn’t the movies; this is the real world. Nothing is perfect. Everyone has a right to his feelings. As
for me, I’m proud of my extended family—all of them. They are me and I am them.
As a result of this book, my mother and her sister reunited after more than fifty years. They were each happy to know the other is alive. But they are not close. They are different people, living in different worlds. On the other hand, Mommy has reunited with one of her favorite Jewish cousins, whom she knew as a child and whom my siblings and I adore. Mommy flew all the way to California alone to visit her cousin, and that says a lot, because Mommy is claustrophobic and afraid to fly. She traveled there at her cousin’s invitation, and they had a ball. It’s amazing to see them together. They’re so alike, yet so different.
One of the nicer things that has happened as a result of the book’s publication is that people of mixed race have found a bit of their own story in these pages. I have met hundreds of mixed-race people of all types, and I’m happy to report that—guess what, folks—they’re happy, normal people! They’re finding a way. Grandparents and grandchildren, husbands and wives, cousins and second cousins. And they will continue to survive and even thrive. The plain truth is that you’d have an easier time standing in the middle of the Mississippi River and requesting that it flow backward than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each other, stop marrying each other, stop starting families, stop enjoying the dreams that love inspires. Love is unstoppable. It is our greatest weapon, a natural force, created by God.
I have met hundreds of mothers—African American, Jewish, European, Arab, Latino, African, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist—and all of them understand that family love, a mother’s love, gives us grace, courage, and power beyond measure.
No one understands that power more than Mommy, who, when asked about her celebrity status, will be the first to confess, “I did nothing special.” Or when asked how she raised twelve kids will say, “Y’all raised yourselves,” or she’ll say, “God raised you.” She’s happy that the book speaks to so many parents. She knows how hard it is to raise kids. She read the book only once, cried after reading it, and pronounced it “okay.”