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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?
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