A young editor, a new small house and an aspiring author who needed hands-on technical help combined with unwavering faith in the book he wanted to write. The result: an astonishing, inspirational memoir that climbed bestseller lists and has become a minor classic, required reading in high school and college classrooms.
The year was 1997. The editor was Celina Spiegel (universally known as Cindy), the house was Riverhead, the author was then journalist James McBride and the book, of course, was The Color of Water, which sold 1.5 million copies in hardcover.
In chronicling the history of his family—a black father and a white mother who kept secret from her children that she was the daughter of a rabbi—McBride surprised readers with a story that is uniquely American. Now he is poised to do so again, this time with a fictional account of a real incident involving four black soldiers in WWII, deemed expendable by their superiors and caught behind enemy lines during the carnage of the Italian campaign. As though his segue into fiction is not enough of a surprise, McBride has chosen to combine his realistic war story with a lyrical, touching fable about the miraculous power of love. Writing The Miracle at St. Anna was a risky proposition, but the team of McBride and Spiegel may thrive on taking risks.
When we meet Spiegel in the downtown offices of Riverhead, she talks warmly about the origins of their working relationship and at the same time reveals her aspirations as an editor. She admits that she didn't have many books signed up when she first lunched with agent Flip Brophy five years ago. "She handed me a manuscript and said, 'You have to read this. It's not a book yet, and the author needs help.' " Spiegel recalls. The manuscript consisted of the interviews McBride had done with his mother, material that eventually formed half of the book. "There was nothing to give it perspective. But the voice was amazing. I fell in love with it."
"I had a vision of the book," she goes on. "It happens sometimes when you're lucky. I felt instinctively that I could bring something to it that someone else couldn't. I realized that McBride needed to tell his family's story from his own perspective as well as his mother's." McBride was eager to fulfill Spiegel's vision. He wrote three more drafts, all without a contract, Spiegel notes. When he returned the third time with a few chapters, Spiegel felt that lightning had struck.
The next hurdle was to convince Susan Petersen Kennedy, Riverhead's publisher, but persuasion turned out to be unnecessary. According to Spiegel, Kennedy loved the book immediately, and her commitment and enthusiasm galvanized the sales force and motivated rights director Kathy Rice to write "passionate letters" to editors abroad. The Color of Water took a while to build, but now its appeal continues unabated. "It's so moving to publish a book that can make a difference in people's lives," Spiegel says, with a shy smile and the characteristic duck of her head that accompanies any statement that she might feel is vainglorious. Although she was eager to edit McBride again, when he handed her the first 30 pages of the novel he was trying to write, she thought they were "horrible." McBride was undaunted, continuing his research into the records of the black 92nd Infantry Division, the so-called Buffalo Soldiers, and moved to Italy with his family to interview surviving witnesses to the brutal combat between U. S. and German forces in 1945.
"I was stunned when he handed me the next revision," Spiegel says. "It was all there." Even so, the book went through five or six more revisions. One technique that she never had to prompt, she says, was McBride's incandescent use of metaphors. A prize-winning jazz musician, McBride unfurls words with panache. In passages of ear-perfect dialogue, he captures the speed and jostle of black lingo, its jazzy rhythms and raunchy vernacular.
Finding authors with fresh voices is Spiegel's commitment as an editor, and one of Riverhead's raisons d'être. She and Julie Grau, two of the four original editors, are now co-editorial directors; sharing that title was "very natural and organic" at first, and has proven to be mutually enhancing. "We get along very well; we value each other's opinions. In all these years, I can remember only one fight, and I can't recall what it was about." One of the advantages of the shared title is flexibility. Because she has two small children and wants to be home with them in the late afternoon and evening, Spiegel comes to the office early. Grau arrives midmorning and works later. The house has six editors and issues about 30 books per year.
All of Spiegel's books reflect a desire to tell a story from a new point of view, especially those that speak of ethnic differences: the Korean-American background of Chang-rae Lee's first novel, Native Speaker; the mixed race family of Danzy Senna's Caucasia; Pearl Abraham's female Hasidic protagonist in The Romance Reader.
But the most striking aspect of Spiegel's list is its strong spiritual component. While she was an editor at Ticknor and Fields, she and Christina Bauman produced an anthology for Fawcett called Out of the Garden, Women Writers on the Bible. She also bought Dakota by Kathleen Norris, and was able to acquire Norris's three subsequent bestselling books at Riverhead. Aryeh Stollman, whose The Far Euphrates verges on mysticism, calls her "my extraordinary editor."
"Susan says that all my books are about God," Spiegel says with a laugh. "I think it's more true to say that I'm interested in finding some larger purpose beyond ourselves." Lest that sound pretentious, she adds, "but that's very common, isn't it? We're all looking for a way of living in the world."
