by Lamar Wadsworth » Wed Apr 10, 2013 6:13 pm
My new novel, Remembering Miss Addie, will be available around the end of May or early June in both print and e-book formats. Remembering Miss Addie, set in fictional Harrington and Mintz County, Georgia, is a sequel to my first novel, The Spirit of This Covenant. “Miss Addie” is retired teacher Addie Jane Peyton Aldridge, the most progressive-thinking person in Harrington Baptist Church, who lives by the adage, “If Moses had waited until everybody was ready, the children of Israel would still be in Egypt” (leading eight year old Deborah Estelle Westover to suggest that Moses should have had some adults like Miss Addie to help him with the children of Israel). Cassie McWhorter and Miss Addie have been best friends as far back as Cassie can remember, which would not be remarkable except for the 82 year difference in their ages. They are at once like two little girls and two little old ladies. In the first novel, on the Sunday that ten year old Cassie is baptized, 92 year old Miss Addie tells the story of her baptism in the creek at Bailey's Mill in 1908, and people remember it as the best sermon ever preached at Harrington Baptist Church. Miss Addie brought the people on the banks of Salyers Creek in 1908 and the people in church that morning together into one great cloud of witnesses for her young friend's baptism. When Cassie is fifteen, she tells her 97 year old best friend that God is calling her to preach. Miss Addie tells Cassie that she'd known that a long time. “I've prayed that you'd tell me before I die. That's why the Lord let me live this long,” she tells Cassie, “so I could tell you that you're not crazy for thinking that God is calling you to preach.” When Cassie is a senior in high school, Harrington Baptist Church licenses her to preach and promptly gets kicked out of the Mintz County Baptist Association.
Remembering Miss Addie begins with Miss Addie's death at the age of 101. Nineteen year old preacher Cassie McWhorter, a first semester religion major at Mercer University, honors her best friend's request that she have a part in her funeral. Miss Addie is buried in the cemetery at Peyton's Chapel Baptist Church, the oldest church in the Mintz County Association, where all of her family is buried. Through a turn of events quite possibly orchestrated by “Saint Addie,” this historic old church that has dwindled down to about twenty or so active members--most of them senior adults, many of them related one way or another to Miss Addie--calls Cassie McWhorter as pastor.
Although the central character, Cassie McWhorter, is a young female minister, the story is less about women in ministry than it is about an elderly person who finds meaning and joy as she invests her life and imparts her blessing to young people, and a struggling little country church that experiences renewal as it commits to helping a young minister get off to a good start. As Cassie's father tells her, “Peyton's Chapel didn't vote on women in ministry. They voted on Cassie McWhorter.”
Look for an upcoming publication announcement. It could sell into the dozens.