Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb by Augusta Trobaugh

First published: Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Evangelical fiction

Core issue(s): Acceptance; African Americans; forgiveness; friendship; memory; redemption

Principal characters

• Miss Cora, an elderly white woman who has spells of dementia
• Pet, the narrator and Cora’s African American servant
• Wynona, Cora’s niece, who lives with Pet and Cora
• Lauralee, Wynona’s younger sister, who also lives with Pet and Cora
• Mr. Adkins, Wynona’s deceased husband
• Hope, Lauralee’s deceased infant daughter
• Miss Delia, Cora’s friend
• Minnie Louise, a friend of Pet and servant to Miss Delia
• Miss Addie, Cora’s neighbor
• Lizzy, Pet’s daughter, given to Minnie Louise at birth
• Samantha, Lizzy’s daughter, whom Pet has never met
• Maggie Brown, an elderly woman who accompanies Cora on her search for a grave

Overview

In the beginning of Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb by Augusta Trobaugh, Pet addresses a person known only as “baby girl.” Pet, an older African American woman, wants to reveal to baby girl all the family secrets that she has kept hidden for most of her life. Unless she has the opportunity to pass them along to a younger generation, they will, she laments, melt away like an ice cube.

Pet’s narration gradually reveals the personal histories of four Georgia women—Miss Cora, her nieces Wynona and Lauralee, and Pet herself, who has been a lifelong servant and companion to the three white women. Her narrative moves back and forth between the present and the past, interspersed with interior monologues, italicized in the text.

On a cold November day, Pet remembers the circumstances of each of the women’s childhoods, how she and Wynona were born on the same day, how Lauralee came along six years later, and how Pet and Cora as girls would spend the summers together playing with Wynona and Lauralee. As Pet grew older, the intimacy of the relationships lessened because it was not proper for the white girls to play with her as an equal. Pet also remembers her mother telling her that in addition to Patricia (her given name), she also received her great-grandmother’s name, an African word that means “Sunrise.”

Across the street from the women lives Miss Addie, who is near death. Before she dies, she calls Pet to her bedside and asks her to promise to make Miss Cora remember about someone named Hope. Miss Cora is old enough that she has started to lapse into dementia; she often remembers a grave at Brushy Creek Baptist Cemetery that she wants to find. In one of her rambling stories about family history, Miss Cora says that this grave belongs to an ancestor who fought in the Civil War. Lauralee displays signs of mental or emotional distress. She never speaks and does not attend Miss Addie’s funeral.

Through flashbacks, Pet gradually unfolds a pivotal story about Wynona and Lauralee. When Wynona was young, a widower named Mr. Adkins courted her and eventually proposed. Wynona first girlishly laughed at the proposal but then went to Mr. Adkins to apologize and accept. Shortly after their engagement, Mr. Adkins became very religious and, simultaneously, “meaner and meaner for the rest of his life.” About two years after the marriage, Wynona’s parents both died, and Lauralee came to live with her sister. Mr. Adkins made surreptitious, unwanted sexual advances toward Lauralee and berated her as a harlot. Eventually she became pregnant, clearly raped by Adkins. He told her to get an abortion, but she and Wynona decided that she should keep the baby and that they would move in with Cora and Pet. As they were packing, Mr. Adkins entered the house carrying a shotgun. As the women fought for the gun, it fired, striking Adkins in the face and killing him instantly. Largely through the urging of Pet, the women cleaned up the house and dumped Adkins’s body and shotgun next to a creek. The sheriff ruled his death a hunting accident, and apart from Miss Addie, who deduced the truth, no one seemed to suspect the women of murder.

To cover up Lauralee’s pregnancy, both Lauralee and Wynona isolated themselves in their house and pretended that Wynona was the expectant mother. When the baby girl was born, they named her Hope and listed Wynona’s name as the mother on the birth certificate. Four months later, Hope died after catching scarlet fever from Pet. This death resulted in Lauralee’s emotional detachment from society, Pet’s guilt over causing Hope’s death, and Cora’s lifelong disappointment at not having family members to carry on her legacy and stories. A few years later Pet, through an unexplained relationship, gave birth to a baby girl. Fearing that she would kill her daughter just as she had Hope, she gave her baby, Lizzy, to her friend Minnie Louise to rear.

These flashbacks are interspersed into the main narrative, which involves the women’s yearly attendance at a camp meeting (a weeklong church revival). During this meeting, Cora, in a state of dementia, searches out the grave she perennially seeks. She takes with her a senile African American woman named Maggie Brown. Cora thinks Maggie is her dead aunt, and Maggie thinks Cora is her mother. The two women trek comically through the countryside and eventually are brought back by a deputy. Along the way Cora confusedly mentions memories of babies (white and black), cribs, and graves.

Toward the end of the book, Pet pieces together these memories for both herself and Cora. She forces Cora to see that Pet’s baby Lizzy looks like both Lauralee’s child Hope and like Cora’s father. This resemblance is due to the fact that Pet and Cora are, in fact, sisters.

The novel ends with Pet’s decision to make contact with her granddaughter Samantha, who is about to start college. She is the person addressed at the beginning of the story and will be the one to receive all the family tales and heritage that Cora has been so intent on passing on.

Christian Themes

Although this work was marketed as Christian fiction and published by an evangelical press, it differs greatly from most devotional novels. It has much more in common with regional southern novels such as Olive Ann Burns’s Cold Sassy Tree (1984). Religious elements certainly lie in the background of the narrative—many hymns are quoted, and the women attend religious gatherings—but the novel rarely engages Christianity directly.

Trobaugh’s title highlights a Christian view of love. The book uses John 1:29 (“Behold the lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”) as an epigram, but the title also echoes 2 Samuel 12:3 (an allegory in which a man holds a lamb in his bosom) and Isaiah 40:11 (“He shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom”). In these verses from the Old Testament, the lamb lies in the bosom of another. Trobaugh’s title reverses the relationship and has humans resting in the bosom of the lamb, who is Jesus. In a conversation that Pet has with one of Cora’s friends, they discuss how Jesus “is like a mama to us,” and humans “learn to love ourselves ’cause our mamas loved us.” The characters experience the love of God and of Jesus through their communion with one another and their shared maternal experiences. Furthermore, building on the quotation from John, the lamb image conveys a forgiving love, especially soothing to Pet’s troubled conscience.

Above all, the novel explores transitions in family relationships. The camp meeting the women attend used to attract a large crowd of families, but now most pews are empty. After Miss Addie dies, her house becomes a funeral parlor. The women, all of whom are approaching their deaths, wrestle with the question of their legacy. By closing with Samantha as the family heir, the novel alludes to the Christian concept of the communion of the saints. Although time will bring an earthly finality to the lives of these women, through God’s care, their family will endure, evidenced by the “Family Book” in which Cora adds Pet’s stories to those of her own family. Because all the characters will eventually rest in the bosom of the lamb, their communion with one another will be eternal.

Sources for Further Study

Byle, Ann. “For Four Southern Women, Memories Bring Salvation.” Review of Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb. The Grand Rapids Press, March 28, 1999, p. J6. Contains a summary of the work and places it in the Southern writing tradition.

Flanagan, Margaret. Review of Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb. Booklist 95, nos. 9/10 (January 1-15, 1999): 835. Provides a description of the work and the reviewer’s opinion.

Gray, G. William. Review of Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb. Tampa Tribune, March 28, 1999, p. 4. This review focuses on the Southern aspect of Trobaugh’s novel.

Hilard, Juli Cragg. “Augusta Trobaugh: Fulfilling Youthful Dreams.” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 24 (June 17, 2002): 523-524. This profile of Trobaugh discusses her late start in writing and her religious views.

Schliesser, Jill A. Review of Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb. Southern Living 34, no. 6 (June, 1999): 128. This review summarizes the plot and praises the author’s writing style.