Hunter Jordan Sr. Character Analysis in The Color of Water

James McBride’s stepfather and Ruth’s second husband. Hunter was half black and half Native American. He lead a rich life before marrying Ruth, living in Virginia, Chicago, and Detroit, and running an illegal distillery out of his Brooklyn apartment. He treated Ruth’s eight children by Andrew McBride as his own, and was looked up to as “Daddy” by the youngest. He was an old-school man, always well dressed, and uninterested in small talk or discussing issues of race.

Hunter Jordan Sr. Quotes in The Color of Water

The The Color of Water quotes below are all either spoken by Hunter Jordan Sr. or refer to Hunter Jordan Sr. . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

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…I myself had no idea who I was. I loved my mother yet looked nothing like her. Neither did I look like the role models in my life—my stepfather, my godparents, other relatives—all of whom were black. And they looked nothing like the other heroes I saw, the guys in the movies, white men like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman who beat the bad guys and in the end got the pretty girl—who, incidentally, was always white.

Related Characters: James McBride (speaker), Ruth McBride-Jordan , Hunter Jordan Sr.

Page Number and Citation: 91

Explanation and Analysis: