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 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), helped Pryor grow up feeling he mattered. It shares a local’s perspective of the lesser-known rural Arkansas Black experience and tells Mama Ceal’s story while weaving through the times and social mores of some of the most well-known civil rights struggles. Pryor shares the demoralization he feels knowing Mama Ceal’s great-grandchildren must still grapple with many of the same types of race and equity challenges that she had to face. He asks, and the story answers, 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?

“This Leaves Me Okay 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 poignant reflection on the power of familial love…and the Black experience in America.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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

“Using as his guide the wisdoms of a grandmother whose unceasing letters shaped his heart and inflamed his ambitions, Walter Pryor has written a moving and elegant reconstruction of the struggles and triumphs of a Black family’s journey from the imposed poverty of segregation to the fragile prosperity of today’s divided America. It is a story essential for understanding the lives of millions of African-Americans, the depth of still lingering injuries from our past, and most of all, the extraordinary human capacity to endure or overcome almost anything—with love.” —Douglas A. Blackmon, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“In his grandmother’s letters, Walter Pryor will forever hear his ancestor’s voice. These short, priceless, timeless notes, written in beautiful non-standard English, expose the way old Black people once communicated. The joy of these letters is that they are unfiltered and uncorrected.Now, as Walter tells the story of the woman who loved and nurtured him, we, the reader, get to see how so many Black, rural women lived vicariously through the children they raised. This is a song of praise, a celebration of a warrior spirit who meant for her “boy” to prosper. As Momma C prepared to go to Washington, D.C., to see her baby graduate, I literally cried. I felt her pride, her joy, her belief that God had not let her down. Read this book, and you’ll know how Black people survived.” —Dr. Daniel Black, author, Isaac’s Song, Perfect Peace; professor of African American Studies