Cries Of Freedom

The Wandering Vine trilogy is based on three aspects of a spiritual journey through life.  Even My Family, book one, is about finding your own path and following it.  Cries of Freedom, book two, is about surrounding yourself with unconditional love.  Once Again, book three, is about releasing bad karma.

In Cries of Freedom, book two, the heroine, Elizabeth Randolph, must travel the path she stepped onto when she rejected her parents’ ideology and helped slaves escape from her father’s plantation.  Banished from her parents’ Virginia plantation on the eve of the Civil War, Elizabeth travels North to raise the daughter of a slave.  She wants to create the supportive, loving family her parents never gave her.  But how?  As a Southerner on Beacon Hill in Boston during the Civil War, anti-Southern abolitionists, narrow minds, and conflict surround her.  And yet she is the one trying to raise a child with African heritage.

George Parkman, an older, respected Bostonian, manages Elizabeth’s inheritance from her great aunt.  He has loved her since the first day they met but, because he feels inferior to the Randolph family, he has never made his feelings known.  Elizabeth wonders if he’ll consider her a burden when she arrives in Boston.

John Appleton, a freethinking architect, was engaged to marry Elizabeth, but after Boston Brahmins financed John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry her father broke the engagement.  John begged Elizabeth to run away with him, but she refused and couldn’t tell him that she was staying to help two slaves escape. She does not know if he will still be waiting for her.

Gabe Charles, her father’s slave, has been her best friend since they nursed together at his mother’s breasts.  If he survived his escape to Canada, there is no way to know when it will be safe for him to live in Boston.  The Fugitive Slave Act allows no safe haven in the United States.  Now a free man, she wonders if he will be able to pick up their relationship where it left off.

And there is Ruben Stone who hovered around her when she traveled alone to Baltimore after her banishment.  Fear rises from her gut whenever she sees him, as if long ago he endangered her and now he is back to do it again.

Will she create the family she longs for or end up caught in the past, alone and unhappy like her parents who defined themselves by community expectations rather than their hearts?