This Leaves Me Okay: Race, Legacy, and Letters From My Grandmother
by Walter Pryor

With This Leaves Me Okay, Pryor puts the reader into a rural corner of the deep South. There, like a time traveler, we accompany his grandmother Lucille through the Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights eras. We learn about what it means to be Black in White America from one determined Black woman who found the space to make a life for herself and a path that changed the lives of her descendants. —Eric Holder, co-author, Our Unfinished March, former U.S. Attorney General

“How extraordinarily lovely. The interweaving of memory, story, and social commentary is deftly achieved, and the handwritten letters carry a poignancy that makes me wish I had met Mama Ceal.” —Stacey Abrams, author, Our Time Is Now, lawyer, politician

“A rare offering of Black portraiture that is at once a finely quilted, poignant testimonial exposing the obscured dynamics of the American South through the intimately personal gaze of a grateful grandson. Touching, warm, tender, and thoughtful as a handwritten letter or a homemade quilt, This Leaves Me Okay will never leave you.” —Saul Williams, poet, winner, Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize; Cannes Camera D’Or

“I’ve interviewed many folks about parenting, including Barack Obama, but oh, how I love the mothers and fathers in This Leaves Me Okay. I marvel at how these families, dealing with marginalization and few opportunities, found ways of coping and advancing by working together — all for the sake of their children. Pryor’s ‘jolie-laide’ story inspires.”

—Tatsha Robertson, co-author, The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children; editor-in-chief, The Root

Lucille “Mama Ceal” Hatch Eldridge wrote her grandson Walter Pryor weekly for nearly 30 years, from the time he was very small until she died in 1995 at 80. What is most extraordinary is that she was not a well-educated person, having completed only the eighth grade, and as a live-in maid raising other people’s children, she had little leisure time. Her letters, sprinkled throughout This Leaves Me Okay (Heliotrope Books, May 2025), though brief, helped Pryor grow up feeling he mattered.

The granddaughter of slaves, Mama Ceal was born during World War I, in the Jim Crow era. She grew up and spent most of her life in rural Arkansas near Forrest City, named for the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Her mother died when she was only four years old, and she and her sister were sent to live with relatives who neglected and mistreated them. Her life was full of traumatic events that she somehow managed to endure and overcome.

After marrying, Mama Ceal, a washerwoman, and her sharecropper husband struggled in poverty. They made the agonizing decision to send their only child, LaRuth, Pryor’s mother, to live with cousins so that she could attend a good school. It was the only way they saw for their child to escape to a better life. Within months of that decision, Mama Ceal’s husband drowned, leaving her as a single parent without an income. She went to work for a well-off White family in the area and lived in a room without hot water as their maid for the next 40 years.

“When I stopped to stretch my hands and considered how hard it was to make her Christmas candy recipe, I thought about Mama Ceal doing the same, only with hands that had become arthritic from picking and chopping untold pounds of cotton, washing clothes on washboards in lye soap, and sweeping and mopping miles of floors.” —Walter Pryor

Not only does This Leaves Me Okay share a local’s perspective of the lesser-known rural Arkansas Black experience, but Mama Ceal’s story weaves through the times and social mores of some of the most well-known civil rights struggles.

Aunt Elizabeth tries to distance LaRuth from the stereotypical and disrespected aspects of the Black community but can’t shield her from the systemic racism they still face. While in college in 1963, LaRuth’s friends participate in lunch counter integration sit-ins and equal rights protests. They are teargassed, set upon by dogs, chased by police, beaten with nightsticks, and ultimately arrested or expelled. We feel LaRuth’s pain as she grapples with the tough decision of whether to join them or play it safe and graduate.

“Decisions made long before I was born or thought of have reverberated for generations to influence who, what, and where I am today. In addition to standing on the foundations of our ancestors’ achievements, we are also standing on the platforms of their suffering, suffering that is just as critical as their achievements. Their sacrifices, their hurts, their pains, and disappointments all shaped them and, in turn, influenced the parents and grandparents they were to me. Their experiences shaped me as well.” —Walter Pryor

Pryor recalls the impact of hearing Angela Davis speak. She said that failing to teach children about racism is like sending them outside in a rainstorm without an umbrella. He shares the demoralization he feels knowing Mama Ceal’s great-grandchildren must grapple with many of the same types of race and equity challenges that she had to face. He asks — how did this person who was devalued in the larger society figure out how to make her small world better and stay hopeful for her family’s future?

His thoughts lead him and his wife to the decision to raise their children with a keen awareness of family and Black history but also with a “country club” sense of entitlement. They learn to take up space wherever they are, not because of any amount of money or accomplishment they have attained, but because they are human beings worthy of the dignity, respect, and consideration of every human being. Someone who appreciates and walks in their inherent worth of self. Someone like his grandmother, Mama Ceal.