Sylvia Gilfillian

The Road to Timnath Sylvia Gilfillian

When Audrie Matthews finally agrees to meet the adult son she left behind as an infant in Jamaica, she opens a Pandora's Box of trouble. She learns that her son, who is now a young Baptist minister, has left troubles of his own behind. She returns to Jamaica with him to shield him from the consequences of his actions and is taken back on a journey to the past that is as complex as it is revealing. In this novel, The Road to Timnath, which is told in the first and third person voice, Audrie Matthews meets her son, James John Whitehead, the third, and is forced to once again experience the horror of his father's murder. This young man, who is known as Jimmy, looks and sounds so much like his dead father that at first Audrie struggles with sexual attraction to him. When he introduces his fiancée to her and suggests that they get married in front of her, he is trying to make up for their years of separation. Audrie leaps at the opportunity, believing that her involvement in the wedding plans will wipe away her inappropriate responses to her son. She and her best friend Myrna pay for a small intimate ceremony and send the couple off for a week in the Bahamas. While they are gone, Audrie receives a call from Jimmy's great Uncle. He reveals that Jimmy's childhood best friend, who is the granddaughter of the family's housekeeper, has given birth to a baby girl and named Jimmy as the father. The journey home is a journey back to the turn of the twentieth century when the family patriarch, Rev. James John Whitehead, the first, was conceived as a result of the rape of a local teenager by the middle-aged Scottish pastor of the local Moravian church.