|creators of n.c.
A shared life JUDY GOLDMAN LOOKS BACK ON THE JIM CROW SOUTH. by Wiley Cash photographs by Mallory Cash
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first met author Judy Kurtz Goldman in summer 2013 when we were seated beside one another at a dinner sponsored by a local bookstore in Spartanburg, S.C. Of that evening, I can remember Judy’s elegant Southern accent, her self-deprecating humor and her teasing me that my calling her “ma’am” made her feel old. But Southerners like Judy know that the conventions you are raised under are hard to buck, regardless of whether they are based on something as benign as manners or as oppressive as prejudice. According to the late Pat Conroy, Judy Goldman is a writer of “great luminous beauty,” and I happen to agree with him. She’s published two previous memoirs, two novels, two collections of poetry, and she has won the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for fiction and the Hobson Award for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters. In her new memoir, Child, Judy confronts the horrible legacy of the Jim Crow South while coming to terms with the fact that the customs and laws born from Jim Crow delivered one of the most meaningful and long-lasting relationships of Judy’s life. The memoir explores the life she shared with her family’s live-in domestic worker, a Black woman named Mattie Culp, who came to live with and work for the Kurtz family in Rock Hill, S.C., when she was 26 and Judy was three. From the moment Mattie arrived, she and Judy were close, physically and emotionally. They shared a bedroom and a bed. (Mattie shared the single bathroom with Judy’s parents and two older siblings.) Judy and Mattie also shared one another’s love, and that love would cement their indescribably close bond up until Mattie’s death in 2007 at age 89. “Our love was unwavering,” Judy writes in the book’s prologue. “But it was, by definition, uneven.” There is an old saying that writers write because we have questions, and while Judy has no questions about the depth of her love for Mattie or the depth of Mattie’s love for her, she has spent much of her adult life pondering questions about the era and place in which she was raised. Judy came of age in the 1940s and ’50s, and although she has spent decades living and raising a family in Charlotte, Rock Hill is the defining landscape of her literature. “Rock Hill is in every book I’ve ever written,” she tells me one morning in early March. “It’s a love affair.” But love, as Judy makes clear in writing about her relationship with Mattie, is a complicated emotion. While Judy’s childhood was blissful on the surface, as an adult she looks back on her life with a discerning eye that is able to appraise the dichotomy of her Southern upbringing. This act of remembering and then re-seeing brings a whiplash of honest realizations to the memoir’s pages. For example, as a child, Judy was proud of the beautiful school with the new playground that she and other white children attended. She did
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