From the time Walter Pryor was a boy, his grandmother, Lucille “Mama Ceal” Hatch Elridge, wrote him every week for three decades. Her letters, steeped with resilience, prove the power of the written word’s unstoppable vehicle. Truth steers, intimate narratives ride shotgun, and they’re both escorted by invisible sirens of riveting reflections on the highway to freedom and joy— just in time for National Grandparents’ Day.
Suggested Reading
The first Sunday after Labor Day is Grandparents’ Day, a 24-hour special occasion in America dedicated to honoring grandparents and celebrating the unique bond between generations. In his debut book “This Leaves Me Okay: Race, Legacy, and Letters from My Grandmother,” Walter, a brilliant lawyer who is also the brother-in-law to Saul Williams who played preacher Jedidiah in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” intricately weaved his words with Mama Ceal’s testimony, a granddaughter of slaves, describing how to overcome while still becoming— 216 pages worth.
Mama Ceal, born during World War I in the Jim Crow era, spent most of her life near Forrest City in rural Arkansas, which was named for the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. After her mother died when she was a toddler, Mama Ceal and her sister were sent to live with relatives, where mistreatment and neglect became unwelcomed companions.
After marrying, Mama Ceal and her sharecropper husband struggled in poverty, sending their only child LaRuth, Walter’s mother, to live with family to receive a better education. Months later, Mama Ceal’s husband died after drowning, leaving her to work for a white family and living in a room without hot water for the next 40 years.
When The Root asked Walter in an interview, “Were there parts you wrestled with including because of their pain, complexity, or traumas in your family’s past that felt too tender to publish,” the author confessed “it didn’t occur to me to not tell them” because it “seemed disingenuous and incomplete to leave them out.” Walter, who serves on the Board of Directors of the Washington Children’s Foundation, said he was “so focused on telling the story that I wasn’t attuned to the fact that some of these details might be embarrassing.”
Asked “If you could hand Mama Ceal just one letter in return— what would it say?” Walter said he’d tell her “that I appreciate the sacrifices she made and that I honor the difficulties she overcame.”
He added how he’d express “how much I truly love her and how much of a hero she was to me,” and “that the success that I have enjoyed is tied directly to what she did” and how “proud I am that she was my grandmother.” He’d choose to write back with his adult words, not from boyhood when the letters were penned, “because it is only as an adult that I have come to understand truly the significance of the choices and decisions she made.” Decisions that would prove to be fruitful, even without the taste of sweetness.
No sugarcoating (pun intended) here.
Even the challenges Walter’s mother LaRuth experienced in college; lunch
counter integration sit-ins, equal rights protests and police nightstick beatings, shared space on the book’s pages.
Those stories “made up the context and environment for actions that people took and dynamics that had unfolded in our lives,” Walter said, adding how he believes “staying as close as I could to the truth is what helps the story resonate as genuine to many readers.”
Walter, a cum laude graduate of Hendrix College and the only Black student in the college’s history awarded the President’s Medal, admitted he raised his children with a “country club” sense of entitlement. So much so he didn’t feel tension between honoring his roots and wanting his kids to live free of the burdens those roots carry.
“It’s that knowledge and context that contributes to my children being able to live full, empowered lives, lives that can build upon both the successes and the failures of those who’ve come before them,” Walter told The Root. He added those “awkward, difficult parts of our story provide so much insight into people and their behaviors and perspectives as well as real life lessons that offer guidance for going forward.”
Fast forward to today. Walter is a proud father of two adult children, Adjua and Wade Osei, and husband to wife Juliette. President Donald Trump helms the White House, the Republican Party holds a majority in Congress, and the Constitution’s virtue is being seemingly belittled by the hour. Would Mama Ceal be heartbroken or hopeful when presented with today’s social climate?
Walter answered she’d be “very disappointed in the way many people have contributed to the coarsening of civility and kindness,” but she’d be “supportive of any and all efforts to treat all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or immigration status with respect, equality and dignity.”
The Georgetown University Law Center graduate added while he does “believe she would be saddened to see people being rude, unkind, disrespectful, and mean to others, she would also be hopeful that there are more people who want to be kind and fair and hospitable toward others than there are ones who don’t.”
He also recalled how she never told him “that someone had expressed doubts that I could become a lawyer” to The Root as the one decision Mama Ceal made, even quietly, before he was even born that helped shape the man he became without realizing. “She was careful not to allow such negativity even the slightest chance of discouraging me or causing me to question what I could do with my life,” he said. Walter remembered how “she didn’t even mention it to my mother until after I had graduated.” He didn’t find out himself until after Mama Ceal died.
Walter told us how he wants “This Leaves Me Okay’s” future readers to “recognize someone in their own life who loved them fiercely the way Mama Ceal loved me. Someone who helped them to feel that they mattered, that they could do whatever they put their mind to, and who was always a safe place for them.” But that’s not all. He wants readers “to create an endless ripple of doing good.”
Mama Ceal died in December 1995 after a courageous battle with cancer, but her legacy lives on in her letters now published for you and I to enjoy. Walter’s book, peppered with Mama Ceal’s words, is spiced with oracles and wisdom interwoven like the threads of a hand-sown sweater designed from a touch only a Black grandmother could deliver. Readers learn about what it means to be Black in a white America from one determined Black woman, whose words can command space and make it yield, allowing her voice to live on as a profound force long after her final pen strokes.
“This Leaves Me Okay: Race, Legacy, and Letters From My Grandmother” by Walter Pryor is available for purchase now.
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