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

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 This Leaves Me Okay (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?

"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

"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, editor-in-chief, The Root