Lesley Pendleton Barker

Safe in the Arms of Jesus Lesley Pendleton Barker

It was 1897 in Saint Louis, Missouri, when Isabel Woods Edwards died of the White Plague just weeks after she had nursed and buried first, her mother-in-law, Mary Ewing Edwards, and next her own mother. Safe In The Arms of Jesus portrays the last week of Isabel's life after she had isolated herself in her bedroom. Only her servant, Lizzie, who came as a contraband refugee from Helena, Arkansas, and had been indentured to the Woods family starting in 1865 when she was just fifteen years-old, and Dr. William Barker entered her bedroom. Isabel's husband, Ben Edwards, the first son in A. G. Edwards & Sons, her sister, Flora, and her brother, Matt, each take turns visiting daily from outside the doorway. Isabel frets for the future of her son, three year-old Albert, whom she feels, should she die, may grow up in a world without stories. This novella is fully fictional but the characters all lived, the newspaper accounts are historic, and the letters Ben wrote, during his 1886 railroad journey from Saint Louis to San Francisco and back, and that Isabel so cherished and preserved, tied with a thin brown ribbon, exist in the author's possession today. Only Lizzie's character is invented because, as is not unusual, we know very few specific details about the African-American woman who served Isabel so well, which such love, in spite of the strong likelihood that she would succumb to the disease, herself, after so much intimate contact.