Publisher's Synopsis
SYNOPSIS A SEED FROM THE SERPENT Meet Jubilee Summers, a precocious wide-eyed with wonder thirteen year old who is a remarkable singer and brilliant musician. Bright with promise the young lad fills the pews overflowing in his father's Pentecostal Holiness Church in Dew Valley, Alabama. Through a child's vision and at a tender age, Jubilee begins to question his faith and his father's church. Jubilee's narration takes you into a powerful chronicle of mesmerizing, and magnificent tales of scandal and violence in the name of religion. At the onset of Jubilee's teenage years, he wages a private war regarding the verbal, physical and sexual abuse he suffers at the hands of a morally reprehensible family member. When he can no longer endure the molestations, he and his young black friend Mud Dauber take dire steps to insure that the abuse will never recur. At the same time Jubilee experiences an unrelenting torment meted out by his minister father who rejects him insensitively and without reason. Jubilee, in a convincing portrayal recounts his encounters with the devil and his relentless adversaries. With an indomitable will to endure, he prevails and survives a myriad of unenviable circumstance. A Seed from the Serpent warms the human heart as Jubilee and a cast of compelling characters transcend a life of racism, deception, rape and greed. Jubilee's mistreatment he cannot erase as everything about his life unravels. He sets out to unearth a hidden family treasure whose value would exempt him from his life of thievery and panhandling. His excessive obsession and attachment to possessions forces Jubilee to steal and secrete his pilferage in a secret cave. At the young age of thirteen, Jubilee finds himself in an out-of-the-ordinary relationship with Kelton Farley, a new student and accomplished athlete at his school. It is a bond that is alien to him. His happiness in having his first male friend is short-lived as rumors of an immoral liaison reaches the community that ends in a surreptitious journey by him traveling alone to gain absolution for his theft and sins, and healing for his aching and impaired leg by the renowned revered Bishop at the church headquarters, the Temple of Grace in Tennessee. The precarious journey brings Jubilee to an encounter with a young, dying drifter turned away by the Temple. The visit to the Holy place proves disastrous for Jubilee as he comes face to face with the charlatans he had, for all of his life held in the highest regard. Jubilee's past is never completely hidden. His youth comes crashing back full force when he returns home as an adult upon the death of Purlie his beloved friend and the family housekeeper in his youth. At her beside he is forced to relive the past that he had long disowned. He seeks from Purlie, an absolution for his sins. A Seed from the Serpent is an extraordinary novel suffused with nostalgia and unimaginable truths that draws its readers inside. Jubilee's story will long be remembered. It is ultimately a novel of an invincible spirit and the power of survival of a troubled and disparaged lad living in the impoverished South during the nineteen thirties and forties.
