Lisa’s New Year’s Eve morning started quite differently than her daughter’s. A gentle tap on the door signaled their morning coffee was setting outside the door of their honeymoon suite. Ben grabbed his robe, cracked the door open just wide enough to lift the silver tray that held a carafe of freshly brewed coffee and two china cups. He poured two cups of coffee, walked around the bed, set Lisa’s coffee within her reach, bent down and kissed his bride and said, “Coffee is here, Lisa, time to rise and shine.”
Not yet comfortable letting Ben see her in all her morning glory, Lisa slid into the bathroom, brushed her teeth and hair, then slipped into her new silk robe that Gladys had given her as a honeymoon gift. Never one for wearing much makeup, Lisa was used to being seen without it so just a quick touch of lipstick was all she needed to feel quite dressed up.
Lisa picked up her coffee cup and joined her husband on the balcony. Although quite chilly this early in the morning, the view was well worth the discomfort. Ben patted the empty seat next to him on the two-seater lounge and tucked the woolen throw around his bride. “What a beautiful morning this is.”
Lisa snuggled in close to Ben, sipped her coffee and said, “Ben, it scares me to think about how close we came to never meeting. Do you know how much I love you?”
“Lisa, not nearly as much as I love you. You and I were meant for each other. I don’t know how, but I know God would have used something to bring us together and that is enough for me.”
“What is on the agenda for today, Ben? I know we have that huge dinner party and concert this evening, but what will we do to occupy our day?”
Ben waited a second before answering, then smiled, “Lisa, I know we said these four days were just for us, but I know you are dying to talk to Hope and I wouldn’t mind checking in on Benny, so how about we take a walk down to the dining room, have a bite of breakfast and then find a private phone in the lobby and make a few phone calls?”
Beaming with delight, Lisa responded, “That’s a great idea, Ben. I know Scott and Susan have Benny’s New Year’s all mapped out but he will still be home until at least eleven this morning. I’m not sure what Hope’s plans are, but I can at least leave her a message to let her know we are thinking of her.”
During breakfast Ben decided to bring up a topic that had been bothering him ever since the first day he knew he was going to ask Lisa to marry him. “Lisa, have you thought about what we should do about Gladys? I hate the idea of her living all alone now that you will be moving in with Benny and me.”
“Ben, Gladys, Ruth and I talked about this way before you actually asked me to marry you. As soon as I suspected our friendship was moving in that direction, I told Gladys I was determined to remain single if it meant that I would have to abandon her at this time in her life.”
A puzzled look crossed Ben’s face, then that familiar chuckle Lisa had come to love, “So, obviously you settled this issue without me, right?”
“Actually, Ruth Bascom came up with the answer,” Lisa chuckled. “She isn’t getting any younger either and her neighborhood is getting a little seedy. Now that her eyes are causing her trouble, she fears she might not be able to drive much longer and her house is too far away from the bakery to walk. Ruth offered to sell her house and move in with Gladys. That way she will be close to the bakery and neither she, nor Gladys, will be alone. They both knew it would have to be this way before I would feel free to accept your proposal.”
Ben leaned back against his chair and said, “You mean I have been worrying about something you women have already taken care of?”
“Ben, there was no way Gladys was going to allow me to use her as my excuse for walking away from you. She knew my loyalty to her would have been a deal breaker for me. Ruth is putting her house on the market soon after the holidays and will move in after we get my things cleared out.”
Ben took hold of his bride’s hand and said, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
Lisa smiled and quoted Jeremiah 29:11 “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope.” Ben, Gladys quoted that verse to me every day during my recovery. At first I resented it. Eventually I came to believe in it. Now I am living it. God does keep His promises—if we will simply trust Him.”
After breakfast they touched base with Benny. “Dad, I’m having a great time. Scott and Harry are taking me to a professional wrestling match at the big arena this afternoon. Then tonight they are getting a babysitter and Scott, Susan, Harry, Carol Anne and I are going to the midnight showing of the new “Rocky” movie. You don’t mind, do you, Dad? I know you and I were going to go see it together, but I can watch it twice.”
“I don’t mind, Benny,” Ben reassured him. “We watched all three of the other “Rocky” movies two or three times, remember? It never gets old, right?”
“Right, Dad. Are you and Lisa…Mom coming back tomorrow?”
Ben practically moaned at the thought of ending this wonderful time alone with his new bride. “Yes, Benny, we are. We should be back around one o’clock so you need to be packed and ready. Gladys and Ruth went back to Jefferson yesterday, right?”
“Yes, they left yesterday morning. I’ll be ready well before you get here, Dad. Have a great New Year’s Eve and I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
Glad that Benny was having such a great time, Ben handed the phone over to Lisa so she could call Hope. “I’m almost afraid to call her, Ben. I never know which side of the rollercoaster I will experience with her. One day she is madly in love with Michael and the next she is ready to call off the wedding. One day I am riding high, feeling like she has made a good decision and with the next conversation I am plummeting down the other side, despairing over Hope’s indecision. Is this what every parent experiences, or is this just the consequence of not having been in her life for the first twenty-two years?”
Ben smiled and suggested, “Lisa, it might be a little bit of both. You’re not comfortable speaking out because you don’t think you have the right. I’ve heard lots of parents talk about how hard it was watching their grown kids make bad decisions. Parents with good kids, parents with rebellious kids. Kids are kids and they have wills of their own and sometimes they just won’t listen and the parents have to love their kids either way. No one ever said being a parent is easy.”
“I’m learning that,” Lisa agreed. “I guess I used to daydream about how my little girl’s life was playing out and it was always perfect and wonderful. It was obviously much better than it would have been living with me and for that I will be forever grateful. I know I made the right decision. I gave her life and then I gave her a chance at happiness. She is an adult and has the right to blaze her own trail in life. I just wish she knew that God loves her and that she can turn to Him for guidance.”
“Lisa, I don’t believe in coincidences. Your daughter came back here just in time to save your life, right? She knows there is family here that loves her and wants the best for her. She heard the gospel several times. She heard it and she witnessed it in your life, Gladys’s life and even in Ruth’s life. There is no way that girl could miss the truth that God is in the business of making people whole again; that He loves us, forgives us and wants to bring wholeness and healing to people who will simply respond to His love. She heard that loud and clear so we just need to continue praying for her and be there for her.”
Lisa pondered this for a moment before saying, “Ben, I’m just not sure it is a good idea for me to call her right now. I do not want to risk spoiling our last day here and I don’t think I could help it if the phone call goes badly.”
“Lisa,” Ben counseled gently as he handed over the phone, “do you really think not calling her will avoid that? You are worried about her so just call and we will handle whatever comes. Avoiding it will not make it go away.”
As Lisa dialed the operator to place the long distance call and charge it to their room, she smiled at Ben and said, “That is another reason I love you, Ben. You always encourage me to do the right thing, even when it is hard.”
Lisa was surprised to hear her daughter’s voice on the other end of the line. “Hello, Hope. Ben and I are just checking in. We wanted to make sure you got home safe and sound and to tell you how much it meant to both of us having you at our wedding.”
Ben sat there proud as could be listening to Lisa maneuver through the conversation, avoiding pointed questions but showing real interest in what her daughter was sharing. “Your mother means well, Sweetie. She must really believe that Michael is the right man for you.”
Ben watched as Lisa’s face took on a look of real concern as she said, “But, Hope, you are the one who will have to live with this decision, not her. I don’t know Michael at all so I don’t feel comfortable giving you advice, except to say, if you have doubts, then it is best that you call off the wedding until your doubts have been cleared up.”
Lisa listened patiently as Hope went through all the reasons she did not feel right calling off the wedding. “Sweetie, I think you must have misunderstood what Ruth was saying about forgiveness. As a matter of fact I am quite certain she would not have meant that. Forgiveness does not mean you do not have the right to set boundaries in your life. You can forgive him for what he has done to you without allowing him to continue to mistreat you. You do not have to marry him to prove you have forgiven him. I know this for a fact because both Ruth and Gladys have been talking to me about this very subject for months now. You see, I am someone who has been forgiven so much, as you well know. For the past eleven years God has worked in my life, first restoring me back to health, then teaching me how to love and be loved. He forgave my past and has given me a future.
“But I just could not accept the idea of ever forgiving my mother for what she did to me. For years I refused to even discuss this topic because it was too painful a thought. How could God ask this of me? So God did what He always does—He just kept loving me and growing me into the person who would, one day, allow Him to take me to the very place I feared the most—to my most painful hurts—the ones I needed to hand over to Him so my healing could become complete.
“You see, Sweetie, forgiveness is not having to accept the same old behavior from someone who is hurting you or mistreating you. Forgiveness is not having to say that what they did wasn’t really awful. Forgiveness is not saying that they are free from God’s discipline for having done what they did.”
“Then what is forgiveness, Mom?”
“Hope, forgiveness is telling God that He is God and I am not. Forgiveness is finally letting go of the right to seek revenge or demand retribution for the wrongs you hold against that person. Forgiveness is actually an action you take before God, rather than before that person.
“Judging is different from assessing that someone has done something wrong. Judging does include that but it goes much further. Judging includes demanding or petitioning God to take punitive action against this person, as if we have the right to order God to punish someone upon our request. Doing this is man’s way of playing God. Thinking we have the wisdom to decide another person’s punishment, desiring to withhold any chance of offering God’s mercy is something only a perfect and wise God can do. Every time we stand in judgment of another we are playing God.”
“So I can forgive Michael but stand my ground and refuse to marry him? He thinks that if I refuse to marry him I have not really forgiven him.”
“He would like you to believe that, Hope, but that is not true. Forgiving him is simply releasing any claim you have against him. It does not require that he accept it or understand it, you just have to extend it, first to God and then to him. What he does with that forgiveness is up to him, but you are then free of the burden.”
Lisa hesitated for just a moment then decided to share her own struggle with this subject. “You know, Sweetie, I’m saying this as much for me as for you. I have held onto my mother’s offenses my whole life, thinking I could never forgive her. I thought forgiving her would mean she would never be held accountable for what she did. I also thought forgiving her meant I was saying what she did wasn’t really all that bad, and I could never do that. To be honest, for years I have not let Gladys or Ruth even get close to this topic because my hatred of my mother was so strong. I wanted to hold onto my right to demand justice for all I went through.”
“Mom, I can certainly understand that. Your mother was horrid,” Hope affirmed.
“Yes, she was, Hope, but as long as I hold onto my rights, I also hold onto my hurts. My not forgiving my mother does not hurt her, it hurts me. But, Hope, even if I forgive her, it does not mean I have to prove it to the world by letting her back into my inner circle and continue to mistreat me and that is the point. Forgiveness is simply letting go of your right to demand justice. It appears that we both need to do a little forgiving now that we understand what it really means.”
“I guess so, Mom,” Hope replied without much conviction.
“Hope, the right thing is not always going to be the easy thing, right? But, Sweetie, doing the right thing is easier to live with in the long haul than doing the easy thing and living with a wrong for the rest of your life. Believe me, I have done both. I have to get going but just know that Ben and I are praying for you as you decide what you will do.”
Lisa joked as she hung up the phone, “I’m glad God has a plan here because I sure don’t. I know what I want for her but I don’t get to make the decisions in Hope’s life. But I do know one thing—there are no coincidences in this world and I can see God is working in my girl’s life and I can trust Him.”
Ben stood up and took Lisa by the hand and suggested, “Why don’t we take a few minutes to look around this beautiful old plantation. Scott and Susan have been coming here for years and love it. I think that pretty private dining room over there is where Scott told me he asked Susan to marry him. Every anniversary since, they have had their special dinner in that room, so let’s go take a peek at it.”
Ben slid the ten-foot-tall hand-carved mahogany pocket doors wide open and allowed Lisa to walk into the old plantation study first. Bookcases lined the walls, filled with period appropriate books gathered over the years and donated to the plantation. Sprinkled among these books were black and white photos of the painstaking labor to restore this old plantation house back to what it once was. A plaque on the wall told about the team of investors who purchased the house from the original family back in the early nineteen twenties, after over sixty years of it setting there boarded up after being ransacked and left as ruins by the raid on Atlanta toward the end of the War Between the States.
As Lisa read the plaque her eyes rested on an all too familiar name and she cried out, “Oh, Ben, do you know what this place is? Look!”
Ben leaned down and looked at the name Lisa was pointing to and read out loud, “This plantation was owned and operated by the Stewart Family from 1795 to 1865 when the Civil War broke the back of slavery and the family could no longer maintain the property. Returning home from being wounded at Savannah, Mr. Charles Stewart, the second master of the plantation, simply had the windows boarded up and lived out the rest of his life at the home of his only daughter, Elizabeth, some five miles away. It is said that he never returned to the old place but could not part with it. For years after his death the investors pleaded with Miss Elizabeth to sell the place so it could be restored before it was too late, but knowing her father’s wishes, she refused as well. On her death bed she gave her son permission to sell the property but only if it was to these investors who had promised to bring it back to all of its original glory.”
The Stewart Plantation, Atlanta, Georgia
“Ben, do you know what this means? This is the Stewart Plantation.”
“So?” Ben studied his wife’s eyes as she kept repeating this over and over. “Obviously this means something special to you. Are you going to keep me in suspense or are you going to tell me what is making you so very excited?”
“Ben, Tobias’s grandfather, Samuel, and his whole family, were slaves on this very plantation. Ruth’s husband, Tobias, wrote a book about his grandfather and the sisters who were all born here. Ruth told me that back in 1959 Tobias had a terrible stroke and was in a coma for weeks, but even though he could not talk or respond, his mind was intact and he worried that all of his family history was going to die with him. She said that as soon as Tobias was able to talk, she helped him record everything he had been told as a young boy about his family’s life on this plantation and the years of struggle after the war. She said they worked on the story for the last two years of Tobias’s life and finished it just before he was finally taken home.
“Ruth’s Tobias was born up in Harlem, New York, but, because Harlem was a dangerous place for young black boys, at the age of seven, he was sent back to Atlanta to be raised by The Sisters, as they were affectionately called. Ms. Pearl and Ms. Ruby called him Toby-Boy. He grew up hearing all about their lives as slaves on this very plantation. These stories were so much a part of his young life, he had a really good picture of life on this plantation.
A few years back Ruth allowed me to read the Bascom family story and it was wonderful. In it, he talked about all the different kinds of shackles, chains, handcuffs, and fetters we all experience. Some are actual shackles, like the ones his relatives experienced during slavery. Then he went on to talk about the invisible shackles and chains we all carry around, chains of shame, shackles of bitterness, handcuffs of revenge, and the worst ones, according to Tobias are the fetters we willingly hold onto because we will not let go of the offenses of the past, which bind our feet to our past so we cannot walk forward in life in full freedom. He said, breaking free with God’s help is the only way our past will not define our future. Ben, when I read that book, everything Gladys and Ruth had told me about forgiveness finally made sense to me—but I still could not let go of my anger. I knew that my holding onto my hatred of my mother was actually keeping me bound to her and stopping me from breaking free, living a life free of the shackles of my childhood. At the time, I am ashamed to say, I did not follow every step Tobias said are necessary because I wanted to hold onto my anger. It wasn’t until I saw the same need in my daughter, that the truth of what I needed to do became crystal clear to me. I think you and I need to read that book together and follow the steps without any excuses.”
“Lisa, after we learn to take these steps, you and I should try to help her get it published someday. After hearing Gladys tell her life story the other day, knowing how important Tobias is to our lives, I think we owe it to him to get his family story out there so others can read it. After all, if Tobias had not loved Gladys through her anger, she might have lived her whole life in that stew of anger. If that had happened, there would have been no wonderful Aunt Gladys and Ruth Bascom to come alongside of you when you needed the help. I don’t even want to imagine my life without you. So, you see, we both owe Tobias a huge debt of gratitude.”
Perusing the shelves of the library, Lisa’s eyes lit on a leather bound ledger high on one of the shelves. “Ben, can you reach that ledger on the top shelf?”
Ben spotted a folded library ladder leaning against the side panel of the bookcase, pulled it out and climbed up to the top shelf and lifted down the dusty leather-bound ledger. Afraid she would not be allowed to open it if she asked permission, Lisa quickly undid the leather ties that held it closed and laid it open on the closest available tabletop. As she suspected, this ledger was Master Stewart’s slave log showing purchases, trades, births and deaths of all his property. Lisa scanned the names, hoping to find what she was looking for.
Turning the brittle yellow pages with care, both Ben and Lisa searched for the name Tobias Samuel, and Ms. Pearl and Ms. Ruby. Halfway down the sixth page was entered: Boy Tobias Samuel, born to Esther Bascom, the house cook, June 25, 1847 – healthy. Then out at the margin was a later notation. Purchased, this October 7, 1849, one adult slave, named Tobias—henceforth, boy, Tobias Samuel will be known as, Samuel.
Five pages later was the entry: Twins born to Esther the house cook – two girls – named Pearl and Ruby, October 10, 1852—both healthy.
“Ben, we found them. That was Tobias’s grandfather, and these are ‘The Sisters.’ Do you think the management would allow us to get a copy of these pages? I would love to take them back to Ruth as a gift.”
Ben lifted up the ledger in his huge gentle hands, smiled down at Lisa and said, “Let’s give it a try, Lisa. If they won’t then we can get your camera and try to take a photo. Actually, I think you should run back to our room and get your camera before we talk to anyone in management. I will wait here and protect the ledger. Here is our room key, but hurry up. One way or the other we are not leaving here without proof that we found the Bascom family history.”