THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 17, 1996 TAG: 9610170032
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY PHYLLIS SPEIDELL, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 193 lines
JAMES MCBRIDE, a New York-born journalist and musician, had a mission in mind when he first visited Hampton Roads 14 years ago:
He was bound for Suffolk - a city he knew by hearsay as something between Mayberry RFD and Manhattan - to unravel the mysterious background of his mother, Ruth McBride Jordan, and to shine some light on his own heritage.
Equipped with only a few names and vague landmarks, he sought to learn more about the young woman who had fled Suffolk 40 years earlier to reinvent herself in New York and later to become his mother.
Tonight, McBride will share his mother's story and talk about how it evolved into his book, ``The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother,'' at a sold-out dinner sponsored by the Suffolk Art League. The book was published in January.
McBride always suspected there was something different about his mother, but as one of 12 siblings growing up in a housing project in Brooklyn in the 1960s, he had more important matters to worry about.
``We were more concerned with whether there was any bologna and cheese left or who would get new school clothes that year,'' McBride said.
Sometimes, though, his curiosity piqued, he questioned his mother. With her light complexion and curly hair, her occasional Yiddish expressions, could she actually be white while her kids were all obviously black?
When he asked, Ruth McBride Jordan simply replied that she was ``light-skinned.'' Focusing attention on her boisterous brood, she dodged questions about her background and cautioned her children, ``Don't tell nobody your business.''
Whenever required to check a box indicating her race, Jordan checked ``other,'' McBride said. ``She did not want to categorize herself. To her, color was not important.''
On another day, when a young McBride asked his mother if God were black or white, she answered with some maternal exasperation, ``God is the color of water. Water does not have a color.''
It took 14 years for McBride to coax from his mother details of her remarkable life story.
``There was something inside of me, an ache I had, like a constant itch that got bigger and bigger as I grew . . . ,'' McBride said.
Only as an adult was he able to confirm that his mother was white and that she had been raised in the Jewish faith as Rachel Shilsky, daughter of a Suffolk shopkeeper who was also an itinerant Orthodox rabbi.
So intrigued was McBride with his mother's story that he vowed to research it with or without her help. Reluctantly, she agreed, more as a favor to him than from any desire to revisit her painful past.
``I got rid of that name (Rachel Deborah Shilsky) when I was 19 and never used it again after I left Virginia for good in 1941,'' she said in an interview from New Jersey. ``Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I am concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live.''
In ``The Color of Water,'' McBride alternates chapters of his mother's incredible story - told in her own direct, often humorous, voice - with anecdotal chapters of his life and his search for the past his mother had denied for 40 years.
Born in Poland, Rachel Shilsky came to America with her parents when she was 2 years old. They settled in Suffolk about six years later, in 1929.
``Suffolk was a one-horse town back then: one big Main Street, a couple of movie theaters - one for black folks, one for white folks - a few stores, a few farms nearby and a set of railroad tracks that divided the black and white sections of town,'' she remembers in the book.
After a brief stint as rabbi for Suffolk's small Jewish community, her father, Fishel Shilsky, opened a small grocery on Main Street, not far from the Nansemond River wharves and in a primarily black neighborhood. His disdain for blacks was well known, as was his inclination to gouge them even as he relied on their business, she relates in the book.
Along with her brother and sister, Rachel worked in Shilsky's store every day after school and all day on Sunday. It was a lonely time for the young girl with a stern, abusive father and a crippled mother who spoke no English.
Jordan remembers Suffolk as being filled with ethnic bias and rumors of Ku Klux Klan activities - an uncomfortable place to be Jewish or black. Some classmates taunted her as ``Jew Baby.''
Her one close friend was a quiet girl named Frances Moody, also new in town. They met while waiting in line to enter their fourth-grade classroom and remained friends through their days at Suffolk High School.
But close as the girls were, even Moody never knew the real Rachel Shilsky, the girl who felt ostracized by the town, the girl who fell scandalously in love with a black man, or the girl who left town soon after high school graduation in 1938, determined to create a whole new life.
Jordan fled first to her grandmother in New York City and then to Harlem, where she felt at ease in the black community. She narrowly escaped becoming a prostitute and later married Andrew D. McBride, a young black minister who rescued her from a life on the streets.
While raising their eight children, Jordan helped her husband establish an all-black Baptist Church in the Red Hook housing projects in Brooklyn. She was pregnant with James when her husband died.
Jordan married again, to another black man, Hunter L. Jordan, who raised her eight youngsters as his own as well as the four children they had together. Seemingly oblivious to the opinions or dangers around her, Jordan called upon her Jewish upbringing, her adopted black culture and Christian religion, and sheer force of will to raise her children out of poverty, through college and graduate school and into professional careers.
One of McBride's favorite images of his mother recalls her as a still- slender, pretty, 51-year-old woman, recently widowed for the second time, who loved to pedal an ancient blue bicycle around their neighborhood in Queens.
``The image of her riding that bicycle typified her whole existence to me. Her oddness, her complete nonawareness of what the world thought of her, a nonchalance in the face of what I perceived to be imminent danger from blacks and whites who disliked her for being a white person in a black world. She saw none of it. She rode so slowly . . . a middle-age white woman on an antique bicycle with black kids zipping past her on Sting-Ray bikes and skateboards, popping wheelies and throwing baseballs that whizzed past her head, tossing firecrackers that burst all around her. She ignored it all.''
Ever an individualist, Jordan's style of parenting was not democratic; she did things her way. Her single-mindedness left no doubt among her children that they would be successful and helped make her a hero to James McBride.
At 65, Jordan enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia to earn her own degree in social work. Today, at 75, she lives in New Jersey and works with literacy and reading groups at the local library, taking yoga classes and jaunting back to Red Hook in her spare time.
Some Suffolk folks objected to McBride's descriptions of their city in the 1930s as too harsh, but others recognize that much of what Jordan remembers was the ethnic prejudice common to many cities then.
``The portrayal of Suffolk in terms of how Jewish people were treated is not flattering, but it was not unlike life in Richmond or Atlanta 50 or 60 years ago,'' McBride said, adding that he was describing a feeling more common to an era than to a specific locality.
On his first visit to Suffolk, McBride was nervous. ``After listening to Mommy talk, I expected animosity, but the South she was talking about was 50 years ago and does not exist today. I knew I had nothing to fear.''
In 1992, McBride brought his mother back to Suffolk and to a warm reunion with Frances Moody, now Frances Falcone of Portsmouth, for the first time since 1941.
That trip and the book have lightened much of his mother's mental baggage, McBride said. The book also impacted the lives of McBride and his brothers and sisters.
``They were very moved and changed,'' he said. ``They never knew that Mommy was truly Jewish, and their perception of themselves as black Americans shifted.''
McBride, a former reporter for The Boston Globe, People magazine and The Washington Post, now concentrates on his career as a professional saxophonist and composer. He is writing a novel about a World War II GI's liberation of a Nazi war camp. MEMO: Book elicits mixed reactions
``THE COLOR OF WATER'' was written with contributions of oral history
from some of the people who grew up with Ruth McBride Jordan. The
finished project drew mixed reactions from those people, as well as
others who lived in Suffolk at that time.
Here's what some had to say:
``The social climate in Suffolk was as difficult as the book said,
with the Jews having the same type of time the blacks did. There were a
lot of suspicions, but I never had any problems anywhere in Suffolk.'' -
Elgin Lowe, 82, retired educator, who spent his teenage years delivering
firewood all over Suffolk. He now lives in Suffolk.
``I really didn't encounter any of that problem even though I was
very active in Suffolk High School and was friendly with everyone.'' -
Selma Morris Lubin, 72, retired medical laboratory technician who went
to school with Rachel Shilsky's younger sister. Lubin now lives in
Norfolk.
``When I was about 3 years old, we lived across from Shilsky's store.
Our nanny would take my sister and me across the street to buy 5 cents
worth of candy. I remember Mr. Shilsky standing there, patient, as we
decided what to buy. I thought it was the greatest place on earth.'' -
John Taylor, 69, artist who still lives and works in Suffolk
``We were all so innocent then; we just had a good time because
Suffolk was a great place. Everyone was teased, but it was not
malicious, and I don't even remember the Ku Klux Klan.'' - Viola
Rollings, 77, retired secretary who graduated from Suffolk High School
with Rachel Shilsky in 1938. Rollings now lives in Suffolk.
``Fifty years ago, those feelings were prevalent, but we can't be
unduly harsh on Suffolk because it was no different than any other small
town. - Gerald Jaffe, 69, retired president of Suffolk Packing Company.
Jaffe, who now lives in Virginia Beach, is the son of the butcher Jaffe
mentioned in ``The Color of Water.''
``I read the book, and I liked it. Ruth was my first best friend, but
I don't remember everything the same way she does. . . . I never knew
some things that were in the book. - Frances Moody Falcone, 75, Rachel
Shilsky's classmate and best friend in Suffolk. Falcone now lives in
Portsmouth. ILLUSTRATION: JUDY LAWNE
Author James McBride
McBride's mother (then Rachel Shilsky) right, with her close friend
Frances Moody at their graduation from Suffolk High in 1938.
Ruth McBride Jordan, the author's mother, hugs grandchild Maya Mann
at the home of Frances Moody Falcone, left.
KEYWORDS: AUTHOR BOOKS by CNB