CARRIE'S CHILDREN

A son pays tribute to his mother, whose daily acts of service helped sustain the Black community of mid-20th-century Selma, Alabama.

Jones grew up as one of nine children raised by Carrie Louise Lundy Jones Hunter, a nurse and midwife who spent decades delivering babies and providing medical care to families locked out of mainstream health care by Jim Crow laws. The book moves chronologically, from stories of the author’s grandmother Hettie—the matriarch of St. Ann Street who dispensed whiskey by the shot as neighborhood medicine and sent young Carrie off to school each morning with the reminder, “you’re a Lundy wherever you go”—through accounts of Carrie’s training at Good Samaritan Hospital. Jones’ vivid rendering of these two women provides an immersive and satisfying experience. Carrie’s more than 20-year partnership with Dr. Isabelle Dumont, a German Catholic missionary physician, serves as another narrative anchor. This partnership functioned as a Catholic mission operation that provided medicine, education, and financial support to Selma’s Black families, with Carrie as its essential bridge to the community she served. The family home became a hub for mutual aid, informal medical care, and civil rights organizing. Jones and his siblings marched on Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965; their uncle DeeDee, the family jokester who turned up at pea-shelling parties with a cigar stub in his mouth, turned out to be the man photographed next to John Lewis on the Time magazine cover of March 19, 1965. The text is hampered by repetition—the same lessons about service and collective responsibility circle back across chapters with diminishing force, and the prose occasionally settles into tribute when scene-setting would serve better. The inclusion of historic photographs elevates the narrative, providing faces to the names Jones has carefully assembled. Ultimately, the book offers a heartfelt and historically grounded account of the unrecognized labor that held a community together during a difficult time.

A richly detailed portrait of Black community life, grounded in lived experience.