The Story
The granddaughter of slaves, Mama Ceal was born during World War I, in the Jim Crow era.  She grew up and spent most of her life in rural Arkansas, near Forrest City, which was named for the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  Her mother dies when she is only four years old, and she and her sister are sent to live with relatives who neglect and mistreat them. Her life is full of traumatic events, which she somehow manages to endure and overcome.   
 
After marrying, Mama Ceal, a washerwoman, and her sharecropper husband struggle in poverty. They make the agonizing decision to send their only child, LaRuth, Pryor’s mother, to live with cousins so that she can attend a good school. It is the only way they see their child escaping to a better life.  Within months of that decision, Mama Ceal’s husband drowns, leaving her as a single parent without an income. She goes to work for a well-off White family in the area and lives in a room without hot water as their maid for the next 40 years. 
 
When I stopped to stretch my hands and considered how hard it was to make her Christmas candy recipe, I thought about Mama Ceal doing the same, only with hands that had become arthritic from picking and chopping untold pounds of cotton, washing clothes on washboards in lye soap, and sweeping and mopping miles of floors. – Walter Pryor
 
Not only does This Leaves Me Okay share a local’s perspective of the lesser-known rural Arkansas Black experience, but Mama Ceal’s story weaves through the times and social mores of some of the most well-known civil rights struggles.
 
Aunt Elizabeth tries to distance LaRuth from the stereotypical and disrespected aspects of the Black community but can’t shield her from the systemic racism they still face. While in college in 1963, LaRuth’s friends participate in lunch counter integration sit-ins and equal rights protests. They are teargassed, set upon by dogs, chased by police, beaten with nightsticks, and ultimately arrested or expelled. We feel LaRuth’s pain as she grapples with the tough decision of whether to join them or play it safe and graduate.

Decisions made long before I was born or thought of have reverberated for generations to influence who, what, and where I am today. In addition to standing on the foundations of our ancestors’ achievements, we are also standing on the platforms of their suffering, suffering that is just as critical as their achievements.
Their sacrifices, their hurts, their pains, and disappointments all shaped them and, in turn, influenced the parents and grandparents they were to me. Their experiences shaped me as well.
– Walter Pryor
 
Pryor recalls the impact of hearing Angela Davis speak. She said that failing to teach children about racism is like sending them outside in a rainstorm without an umbrella. He shares the demoralization he feels knowing Mama Ceal’s great-grandchildren must grapple with many of the same types of race and equity challenges that she had to face. He asks, 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?
 
His thoughts lead him and his wife to the decision to raise their children with a keen awareness of family and Black history, but also with a “country club” sense of entitlement.  They learn to take up space wherever they are, not because of any amount of money or accomplishment they have attained, but because they are human beings worthy of the dignity, respect, and consideration of every human being. Someone who appreciates and walks in their inherent worth of self. Someone like his grandmother Mama Ceal.