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'A Remarkable Mother' recounts life of Lillian Carter

By Karen Algeo Krizman, Special to the Rocky

Published April 10, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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President Carter in February 1977 with his mother, "Miss Lillian" Carter, a nurse, farmer, activist and Peace Corps volunteer who didn't fit the mold of a Southern woman of her era.

Photo by Jimmy Carter Library

President Carter in February 1977 with his mother, "Miss Lillian" Carter, a nurse, farmer, activist and Peace Corps volunteer who didn't fit the mold of a Southern woman of her era.

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A Remarkable Mother

* Nonfiction. By Jimmy Carter. Simon & Schuster, $22.95. Grade: A

Book in a nutshell: Former President Carter has written a sweet and swift ode to his mother, Lillian, a Southern spitfire known for breaking down barriers and saying whatever was on her mind.

While other mothers of the day stayed home to tend to their families, Miss Lillian, as she was called, was a registered nurse who had a side business as a pecan grower while Carter was a boy. She also embraced people of all colors, despite living in the racially divided South in the '20s and '30s. As Carter writes, "She just ignored the pervasive restraints of racial segregation."

And, rather than take her place as the stereotypical Southern matriarch once her kids had grown and her husband had died, she went to India to volunteer with the Peace Corps - at 68 years old.

The anecdotes here are far from headline-making, but they do show Miss Lillian at her saucy best. Recalling her own mother, she once said, "My mother was not very modern - not liberated like me. She was a wonderful woman, but very old-fashioned. Until I was 21, I never even got into a car or a buggy by myself if there was a boy in it. I always had a chaperone. I learned everything I know from that chaperone."

Best tidbit: While governor of Georgia, Carter went home to Plains to tell his mother that he had decided to run for president. As he propped his feet up and informed her of his decision, her first words were, "Get your dirty feet off my table!" Followed by, "President of what?" She later told a reporter, "I was pleased. I figured if he was elected president, someone would open a good restaurant in Plains."

Pros: No matter your politics, Miss Lillian's antics transcend them all.

Cons: Miss Lillian died before she could write her own tell-all book, which surely would have been more scintillating than this one.

Final word: What's not to love about a mother who tells a reporter: "Sometimes when I look at my children, I wish I had remained a virgin"?

Comments

  • April 18, 2008

    8:25 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    thetravelmaven writes:

    Miss Lillian must not have had many nice thing to say about Jewish people while she was busy raising her brood. Jimmy has done just about everything BUT come out publicly and say that he is, in fact, a proud,card carrying anti-semite. The Jewish community knows it...Israel knows it(why do you think they had a "scheduling" problem last week while he was in town, and they weren't able to make time to see him?)and frankly, the only thing this man EVER did for our country was to wreck the economy in less than a year! I wish we had allowed him to remain...."Jimmy WHO?" Now how the heck did that man become the President of the United States?