The Wisdom of Papa Will

By Waddy Wills

I loved this book! Through the many years I have had the privilege to review books in these pages, I have been inspired, convicted, learned and grown because of the printed page. Many of the books I’ve told you about were ones I would read again. Some brought a smile, a few a tear. But this one stands in a place of its own.

This is a book best read in front of a fire, propped up on a pillow or two, sipping on a hot chocolate or an adult beverage of your choice. This, you see is not really a book you read. This is a book you savor like a gourmet meal or fine wine.

Subtitled, “Creed of the Barrier Busters,” this book from WinePress Promotions tells the story of the author as a young boy learning Christian and family values from his grandfather, a sharecropper in the Brazos River Valley of Texas. There, as he learned to survive the hardscrabble life of a young black tenant farmer, his grandfather began to school him in the ways of barrier busting. Papa Will, a strong Christian once said, “The object is to break barriers constantly and improve upon everything. Nothin’ is more important than change, provided every change is a constructive change.”

The Wisdom of Papa Will is a tribute to the human spirit and how family traditions have been handed down through generations by the recitation of oral history. You can’t help but be struck by the comparisons between those early familial histories and the early Church when the only histories available many times were oral.

Of all the many things I really loved about this book, on the top of the list is the way the author uses language. He paints word pictures in a way reminiscent of Medal of Freedom winning social philosopher Eric Hoffer. The longshoreman also came from humble beginnings and while not a religious man, saw the world in simple terms, as does Wells.

Wells, however, can almost make you smell the predawn musk of the dark, rich earth that gave birth to the food that sustained his family. You’ll walk along with him in his brogan shoes and feel the aches and pains in his young body after a day in the cotton fields ends with a refreshing cool dipper of water.

Hidden in the pages of this book are such gems as the wisdom of “Juneteenth” and the two fangs of the rattlesnake. You’ll learn about the difference between a man’s and a boy’s work and where “cracklin bread” and chittlins comes from. More than once while I was reading this wonderful, inspiring, delightful book, I almost broke out singing, “Gimmie That Old Time Religion.”

Wells, a long time Oceanside resident now teaches troubled black young men from Southern California the precepts of success he’s learned and formalized in the Creed of Barrier Busters.

The book is also available on Amazon. Com.

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Paul McShane of Carlsbad is an author, businessman and journalist.