Light of the Dove

Light of the Dove, One Man’s Journey Back Home, a Novel in Three Books: The Calling; Lessons of Home; and Death by Envy, which takes the reader from Atlanta, to Costa Rica, to Chicago, to Ohio, and back to Costa Rica and Surinam, chronicling the protagonist’s journey in search of his true self, the lost soul his mother knew, is about family and the quantum connections between mothers and sons, about the interconnectedness that makes us one people under God with deep roots in Mother Africa, about the values of compassion and community versus competition and individualism, about racism and its deep hidden roots, about envy and the dangers of narcissism, about the unique role women and mothers play in making the world a better place.

Miles Alexander, the protagonist, son of an Alabama sharecropper, is a successful lawyer and businessman, who, much to his Atlanta law partners’ dismay, has set out to acquire a restaurant chain from the notorious (and reportedly racially intolerant) Costa Rican coffee baron, Humberto Cabrera, one of the wealthiest and most mysterious dons of Central America. Miles’s success however has altered his belief system, hardened his political views and the values that shaped him, and distanced him from his roots and the inner-city community where he was born and raised.

Reid Lowell, the antagonist, scion of wealthy planters and former slaveowners in Georgia, finds that his financial and lifestyle interests in the continued success of Alexander, Seasongood & Lowell’s vibrant Atlanta-based entertainment law practice far outweigh Miles’s personal interests, leading to a conflict between the two men that is nothing short of a clash of cultures. The law firm’s representation of rappers and others antithetical to Reid’s antebellum roots has led Reid to stray from the path his forefathers would have chosen for him—with disastrous consequences he could never have imagined.

Miles’s mother, Mary Rose Alexander, the Dove, with a mother’s intuition, senses the conflict in her son’s life, which is all motion and distance and contest, and fears for his future because of a hidden health issue he faces. Through a series of transpersonal (quantum entanglement) exchanges in The Calling, she summons Miles to his hometown in Ohio where she intends to share a vision of his future she hopes will lead him to change his life. Answering his mother’s call—which comes to him through a series of dreams and anxious moments during his most recent stay in Costa Rica—Miles returns to Canton, Ohio, where upon his arrival, his mother suffers a major stroke that marks the beginning of his long and often painful journey of self-rediscovery, during which time, in the glow of his mother’s Light, he rediscovers what is truly pleasing to his soul. Back at home, Miles is forced to confront issues of race prejudice, xenophobia, child poverty and hopelessness that are chapters in his many Lessons of Home.

Quincy Valentine, the gadfly and quintessential Morehouse man, is caught in the middle of the partners’ conflict, his shifting loyalties leaving him vulnerable to their whim.

Will Reid continue his ways and suffer the same fate as the mythical Narcissus in a classic case of Death by Envy? Or will he change in time to avoid a painful death and the wrath of his ancestors? Will Mary Rose live to show Miles the right path by way of word and deed? Will Quincy Valentine finally have his own day in the sun, or will he continue to struggle with personal contradictions that could leave him angrily in the dark?

More importantly, will Miles rise above temptation and lust and unbridled materialism, and the jarring rift with his law partners, by following the lead of his soulmate, the brilliant anthropologist Jeenah Montgomery, and the other enlightened women he encounters in his journey, and come to appreciate and value compassion over competition and community above individualism? Or will he return to his old ways and suffer the fate his mother is all too well aware of?

Miles’s journey begins in a strip joint, in a black and green champagne suite, where women are marginalized, and ends in a room suffused with the Light of the Dove.

-- R.A. Sales