blog entry

Quite a Story

If you worry that your chance to pursue something has passed, here’s a life to inspire you--or at least it inspires me.  Carrie Allen McCray Nickens began her professional writing career at 74.  She died last week, age 94. 

She was 85 when her best-known work, Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter, was published. 

In that book, she tells the true story of her mother’s parents, a freed black woman and a white general in the Confederate army, and how her mother helped shape the NAACP.

In this article, McCray Nickens describes her book as healing and tells how she was embraced (literally) by white Civil War re-enactors in Aiken.

She moved to Columbia in the mid-1980s.  She’ll be remembered at a service this morning at Second Calvary Baptist Church.  Read more about her here and here.