As I read The Color of Water, I realized after looking through the Table of Contents and reading a couple chapters, that each chapter switched to a different character's point of view. Both point of views happened to be switched from the mother's perspective to her son's (James McBride) perspective. I noticed though, that the mother's perspective was more of a recollection of her past in a slight storytelling way, in a very negative form, and with a focus aimed at informing James about how things used to be for her. In a way they were somewhat like flashbacks, but not exactly, since she remembered most of her life and was writing about it on purpose. Her son James, wrote about how things were for him in his past too, except he didn't seem to mind writing it. Another minor way the chapters changed was when every time the chapter switched to the Mother's POV, the words were in Italics, but when it switched to the Son's POV, the words were in the normal font. Some small themes I'm already spotting in this memoir include racism, family troubles/hardships, and religious rigor. Examples for racism in this memoir that I'm already seeing include random people of any color who were not ok with James's mom (who was Caucasian) living there, hatred of interracial couples, and the assault James's mother had to take because she had mixed-race children. I'm also noticing that these chapters have a negative tone to them, as they include many of the author's fears, doubts, and pessimistic thoughts. The same goes for when it's the Mom's POV. This author already has a definite beginning in their life that affected them greatly and needed to be stated, and as stated before, the same goes for his mother.
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