A Higher Place in Heaven "Prequel" to Second Samuel

At the New Hope plantation just outside the city limits of Second Samuel, there wasn’t much to do in 1925. Miss Madison and Miss Simpson liked to spend their days sitting on the front porch watching and waving as the neighbors drove down the road. But this is a special weekend, tomorrow is Confederate Memorial Day and Miss Madison oldest son is visiting to give a speech in hopes of a political career. That evening “Son” finds out that Miss Madison, a middle-aged white lady, has rewritten her will and left the family plantation to her lifelong housekeeper and friend Miss Simpson, a black woman. Miss Simpson is a child of Madison slaves; she has always lived at New Hope, she helped raise him and his younger brother “Frisky” with her son, “Ulysses”. But “Son” sees black ownership as a dangerous threat to the Madison legacy and Southern society, which was still clinging to confederate ideals. Also debated on the porch are teenagers Frisky and Ulysses’ futures. Lifelong best friends, they would like to go to college together -- but can they in 1920’s America? Miss Madison’s daughter-in-law Billie Augusta works to bring her strong-willed husband and equally stubborn mother-in-law together. It’s a story about people of good will who are trying their best to do the right thing, although they may be misguided in what they assume is right They will have to undergo a change in thinking, but the desire to do what they believe their fathers and mothers and grandfathers desired, makes that change possible. A Higher Place in Heaven is a compassionate story about race dynamics, family and it explores how a past informs the present and affects the future. Family feuding reveals a long-buried secret in this graceful comedy about friendship, change, and doing the right thing.