Time to reconcile

by Grace Bryan Holmes

"Grace Bryan Holmes was born in rural Georgia in 1919. During a troubled childhood, she frequently found solace in the black servants who cared for her family part-time. After the death of one of these servants, she resolved to help the woman's surviving children and grandchildren. Over the course of her life, this commitment altered her perspective on the racial prejudice so prevalent in her community. She shouldered the burden of her growing awareness through many years of service as the wife of a rising Baptist minister, until the gradual assertion of the convictions she had formed in silence brought her into direct conflict with prevailing social attitudes, her strong-willed mother, and her husband's congregation. Time to Reconcile is a redemptive account of a southern woman's struggle to free herself from the legacies of prejudice, parental domination, paternalism, and class consciousness that had defined her life and constricted her thinking. Holmes's detailed and honest recollec