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.