Child

"In Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1949, Judy Kurtz and Mattie Culp shared a bed, but when Judy needed stitches after a playground accident, the white child and Black woman were sent to separate, segregated, hospital waiting rooms. In 1956, Judy and Mattie discovered Elvis together--a white man dancing Black on the Ed Sullivan Show--but only Judy would attend his live concert. After Mattie's daughter, Minnie, rode in the local Christmas parade as her university's beauty queen, Mattie rode home with the Kurtzes. In Child, Judy (Kurtz) Goldman tells the story of her relationship with Mattie Culp, who worked for her family and helped raise her, reflecting on the deep love that grew up around the unconscionable scaffolding of segregation and racism. Judy, now eighty, cross-examines what it meant to be a white child in the Jim Crow south; what it meant for Mattie to entrust her own young daughter to family so that she could "live in" with a white family and earn an income that would put Minnie through college; what it means for a relationship to evolve in and out of step with a changing world; and what it means to remember. This tender memoir is a book of small moments, both heart-warming and heartbreaking, that form a more than sixty-year-long love story. Child is a story half told that asks whether we can ever tell the whole truth, even to ourselves"--