Opening into Light

Headed for an ivory-tower career in academia, Patricia Ellis Kendall instead finds herself launched into a half-century of unsought adventures, relentlessly orchestrated by her yearning for the Something Bigger she intuits but cannot see. In the course of Pat's zigzagging path from darkness into Light, she must protect her family from the Klan in the deeply segregated South; discover what it means to live on the wrong side of a color bar; narrowly escape death by both fire and disease on a former slave plantation; learn through sad experience to see through the beautiful surface of a cult to its dark underbelly; survive apparent betrayal by an old friend and the schemes of a hidden enemy... and finally find the courage to solve the mystery of the Black Cloud that had haunted her from childhood. Only then can she begin to open into the Light and Love she has sought everywhere but where they really are.