The Color of Water

One day in 1942, while Ruth is living with Dennis on 129^th Street, a Black woman punches Ruth in the face without provocation. When Dennis confronts the assailant, the woman says, “That white woman don’t belong here” (231). Yet the anger Ruth faces from Black women is nothing compared to what Dennis faces from white men. On one occasion, a group of white men chases Dennis and Ruth; they brutally beat Dennis, only stopping when one of the assailants tells the others to do so.

Enraptured by Reverend Abner Brown’s sermons at Metropolitan Baptist Church and still reeling from the death of her mother, Ruth tells Dennis she is ready to accept Jesus Christ into her life. Once she becomes an official member of the church, Ruth can no longer bear living with a man who is not her husband. Though worried about white people will do to them if they are married, Dennis finally agrees. Reverend Brown is happy to marry them in his private office—they aren’t the first congregants he has secretly married.

The following year, Dennis and Ruth have their first baby in a one-room kitchenette filled with roaches. Over the next nine years, they raise three more children living in that room.