Walter Pryor wrote much of his new book This Leaves Me Okay at his summer home in West Tisbury. It has an ocean view, paintings and sculptures propped against the walls (some depicting his two children), a long driveway and a refrigerator filled with food. It’s a home, he said, his grandmother Mama Ceal could not have imagined owning.

“I’m sitting here and I’m looking at this beautiful water... the speed of my mind is remembering my grandmother and where we came from,” Mr. Pryor recalled during a recent interview.

Mr. Pryor graduated from Georgetown Law School in the 1990s, and has held numerous positions in the legal profession. He now is the chief administrative officer and general counsel at Southern Bancorp in Charlotte, NC., a mission driven bank that helps provide financial services to Black communities in areas that have been discriminated against.

This Leaves Me Okay is his first book. It was published in May and tells the story of grandmother, Mama Ceal, and the impact she made on Mr. Pryor’s life.

Mama Ceal grew up in rural Arkansas during the 1920s. Her mother died of an undiagnosed illness that was likely cancer when she was a little girl, and her father, a farmer with a small plot of land, struggled to make ends meet. Mama Ceal was eventually sent to live with relatives, some who were volatile and violent.

She attended school through the eight grade, then went to work as a maid for over 40 years, navigating the complexities and viciousness of the Jim Crow south.

Mr. Pryor said his grandmother’s story embodies the Black experience during that time, battling racism and lack of opportunity.

Mr. Pryor said his wife Juliette, also a lawyer, had been suggesting for years that he write about Mama Ceal, but he kept holding off. Then in February 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, he began to take some tentative steps, putting words on the page and joining a writing group. He said the timing was significant because it helped him place his grandmother’s journey alongside the ongoing racism of present day.

“I felt there was a huge story or lesson to be learned from everyday people who are navigating the challenges of a very segregated, racist society and still able to achieve in a lot of ways,” Mr. Pryor said.

Mr. Pryor said he did not set out to educate others on Jim Crow and racism when he started writing about his grandmother as most of that history is common knowledge in Black communities. But through the writing he came to see how the struggles of his grandmother opened up a window into that time period, one that all readers could learn from.

“It certainly is not universal among people who aren’t Black or don’t have a relationship to that experience,” he said.

For the book, Mr. Pryor interviewed his relatives and researched ancestry records. However, he also had a treasure trove of personal source material, as Mama Ceal had written him letters, from the day he was born until she died of cancer in 1995. Some of the letters are reproduced in the book, depicting small encouragements and telling him to be a good boy.

It wasn’t until he was a young man that he realized the significance of the letters. In many of them, Mama Ceal would write “this leve me ok,” which Mr. Pryor originally used as a placeholder for his book title. As he dove deeper into her story and its themes, he began to see the phrase was an affirmation.

“It became clearer to me that the line wasn’t just a line to say ‘hey, I’m doing fine, I’m alright...’” Mr. Pryor said. “I imagine there were times when she wasn’t really doing okay, but she wanted to help herself be okay, or she wanted to encourage me to be okay in times when perhaps I wasn’t.”

There was no roadmap for Mama Ceal, except her inner courage and a desire to improve the future of her family. For example, the book highlights a decision Mama Ceal made to send her daughter (Mr. Pryor’s mother) to live with relatives so she could attend a better high school. That decision helped lift Mr. Pryor’s mother out of a life of rural poverty and put her on the road to a college degree, which changed the trajectory of the family tree.

As Mr. Pryor was researching, interviewing relatives and looking through ancestry records, he learned that Mama Ceal had a difficult time getting pregnant, and he realized he had discovered another layer to the gravity of Mama Ceal’s decision.

“However difficult it would be to send a child away, it was exponentially more difficult for her because she had waited so long to have this child...” he said. “Imagine coming to the realization that ‘I really can’t keep her here with me and do right by her because we live in such a rural area with poor educational opportunities?’”

Since the book was released, it has received many positive reviews, with one person saying that renowned Black playwright August Wilson would be proud. Mr. Pryor thinks Mama Ceal would have found it odd, and almost humorous, that he wrote about her, but she would’ve been elated that her grandson’s debut has been successful.

The whole process of writing the book and sharing it with the world has been a surreal experience for Mr. Pryor. He said he didn’t realize the impact of his book until he was interviewed by politician and author Stacey Abrams at the Clinton Center in Arkansas. When the two walked onto the stage, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Hearing Mama Ceal’s name floating around the room, coming from the lips of strangers in a space she could never have dreamed of, brought a deep sense of fulfillment to Mr. Pryor.

“There’s something so moving and poignant about [it],” Mr. Pryor said. “I’m really thrilled I could do that.”