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?

Walter Pryor is a son of the South, the Black Church, and a strong family unit of resilient, formidable women.  He is a cum laude graduate of Hendrix College, the only Black student in the college’s history to have been awarded the President’s Medal, and a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. His professional career has spanned a myriad of sectors in the legal arena, having worked in both large and small law firms, the U.S. Department of Justice, Capitol Hill, corporations, and higher education.  He is passionate about education and has devoted a significant amount of time to volunteer work in that space. Pryor currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Hendrix College as vice chair and the Board of Directors of the Washington Children’s Foundation.

He has also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Latin School of Chicago, the Board of Directors of Legal Prep Charter Academies in Chicago, and the Board of Trustees of National Collegiate Preparatory Public Charter High School in Washington, D.C. He and his wife Juliette have two adult children, Adjua and Wade Osei, and divide their time between Chicago, Charlotte, and Martha’s Vineyard. This Leaves Me Okay (Heliotrope Books, 2025) is his first book.