The Color of Water

by Russell B. Hilliard, Sr.

Reflections on the Memorable Memoirs of James McBride’s Mother.

I grew up on a farm in swampy South Georgia, so I could identify with Ruth Shilsky. Her son, James McBride, skillfully and wisely drew forth the memories of his mother during a period of fourteen years, and the bestselling memoir that resulted reminded me remarkably of my childhood and teenage years in the segregated South.

Growing up alongside African American farm workers gave me an early
understanding of their gentleness, their hard work without complaints,
and, above all, their singing the marvelous spirituals. Somehow I was
spared from seeing Gladys, Marion, “Miss” Laura, Alex, and Jesse with
eyes other than with gladness and gratitude. They could hand tobacco
better than anyone, certainly faster than I could, and with my mother
and Aunt Sadie stringing, we could fill at least two barns of
flue-cured tobacco in one day.

My father, a former sailor, cursed us all for not working
harder: he frequently left me feeling terrorized. Eventually, he was
changed, but during those painful and precarious years he and my mother
were engulfed with prejudice. I came to believe, even in those years of
my teenage turbulence, that prejudice is as deep as Babel was high. I
also suffered serious sickness as a lad; enduring it helped free me
from prejudice by

God’s grace. I came to see everyone just as persons, so that when I heard the language of segregation, it made no sense to me.

So in reading The Color of Water, I identified with the African
Americans and with Ruth’s family in rural Suffolk, Virginia. Ruth was a
young Jewish lady who married an African American minister, the
Reverend Andrew D. McBride. They had seven children and founded a
Baptist church in Brooklyn; after he died, she had five more children
by her second husband, Hunter L. Jordan, Sr. Her consuming passions,
like mine as a youth, were school and church, and her twelve
outstanding children became chemists, doctors, journalists, and
professors.

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother
brought my wife and me to tears; it will long live in our hearts and
minds. It is a book that must be read if we are ever to find our roots,
as prize-winning author James McBride was seeking, and to discover a
way out of prejudice into feeling life’s joys and pains together.