This Leaves Me Okay

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Lucille Mama Ceal Hatch Eldridge wrote to her grandson Walter Pryor weekly for nearly 30 years from his boyhood until she died at 80. Most extraordinarily Mama Ceal was not a well-educated person having completed only the eighth grade. As a live-in maid raising other people's children she had little leisure time to write. Yet her letters sprinkled throughout </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This Leaves Me Okay</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> (Heliotrope Books May 2025) helped Pryor profoundly to feel he mattered. His reflective memoir shares a local's perspective of the lesser-known rural Arkansas Black experience through his grandmother's story and interweaves well-known civil rights struggles that Pryor and his family recall. A CAO and General Counsel now at a financial institution that supports underserved communities Pryor shares the demoralization of knowing Mama Ceal's great-grandchildren must still grapple with too many race and equity challenges that she had to face. He asks and the story answers: how did this woman who was devalued in American society figure out how to make her small world better and stay hopeful for her family's future?</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)></span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This Leaves Me Okay</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 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.  </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> -Eric Holder co-author </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Our Unfinished March</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> former U.S. Attorney General</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> -Saul Williams poet winner Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize; Cannes Camera D'Or</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> I've interviewed many folks about parenting including Barack Obama but oh how I love the mothers and fathers in </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This Leaves Me Okay</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. 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. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> - Tatsha Robertson editor-in-chief The Root</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p></p>