Given how reticent Ruth McBride was to talk about her family, her past, it’s a wonder her son managed to get information out of her to do a book.

Journalist and jazz musician James McBride did even better. He gave his mother her own voice in “The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.”

McBride’s 1996 work was chosen as this year’s class book at the University of Maine – the book that first-year students read for English class.

The author will come to campus Wednesday for a variety of events, all open to the public.

Growing up as one of 12 black children in an African-American neighborhood, McBride literally did not know what color his mother was for some years.

When he broached the subject, his mother would say that she was “light-skinned,” or that she was no color. After all, she told her son, “God is not black or white. He is the color of water.”

McBride frequently felt shame about his white mother and her ways that seemed so strange. But the proof was in the pudding – she pushed all 12 of her children to graduate from college, and several earned advanced degrees.

Her son knew only the part of her life that he experienced as he grew up without the father who died before McBride was born in 1957; later lost his stepfather as well; lived in poverty; watched his mother cope with her losses with unbridled busyness.

Only McBride’s persistent journalistic skills could elicit the story of her birth as Ruchel Shilsky to Jewish parents in Poland, the family’s immigration to the United States in the 1920s, and the horrendous emotional and sexual abuse she suffered from her father.

She fell in love with a black teen-ager who was the first man to ever treat her kindly, and her family totally cut her off when she married Andrew McBride, who was also black.

Ruchel Shilsky made her own choices, marrying men who were as different from her father as they could be, and becoming Christian while retaining a strong sense of being a Jew.

McBride interspersed pieces of his mother’s story with his own, thus introducing readers to the side of the family he never knew.

A graduate of Oberlin College and Columbia School of Journalism, McBride is proud of his black family, but also honors his Jewish heritage.

“Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds,” he wrote. “My view of the world is not merely that of a black man but that of a black man with something of a Jewish soul. I don’t consider myself Jewish, but when I look at Holocaust pictures of Jewish women whose children have been wrenched from them by Nazi soldiers, the women look like my own mother and I think to myself, there but for the grace of God goes my mother – and by extension, myself.”

James McBride will hold a book signing 2:30-3:30 p.m. Wednesday in the UM bookstore in the Memorial Union. He will give a talk, “A Meditation on Race and Humanity,” at 4 p.m. at 120 Little Hall. He will join a student panel during the Socialist and Marxist Controversy Series 12:30 p.m. in the Bangor Lounge, Memorial Union. He also will attend a buffet dinner and question-and-answer session at 5:15 p.m. at the University Club on the second floor of Fogler Library. For the dinner, seating is limited, and tickets at $15 each may be reserved by calling Ellen Woodhead at 581-3143. The other events are free, with no reservation required.