CREATORS
shared LIVES Judy Goldman looks back on the Jim Crow South by WILEY CASH photography by MALLORY CASH
I
met author Judy Kurtz Goldman the summer of 2013 while seated next to her at a dinner sponsored by a local bookstore in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I can remember her elegant Southern accent, her self-deprecating humor, and her teasing me that calling her “ma’am” made her feel old. But Southerners like Judy know that the conventions you were 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 memoirs, novels, and collections of poetry, and she has won both the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction and the Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters. Her new memoir, Child, confronts the horrible legacy of the Jim Crow South while coming to terms with the fact that the customs and laws born from that era delivered one of the most meaningful and long-lasting relationships of her life. It explores the years 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, South Carolina, when
she was 26 and Judy was 3. From the moment of Mattie’s arrival, she and Judy were close physically and emotionally. They shared a bedroom and a bed. Judy and Mattie also shared one another’s love, and that love would cement their bond up until Mattie’s death in 2007 at age 89. There is an old saying that writers write because we have questions. Judy has spent much of her adult life pondering the era and place in which she was raised. She 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.
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