Imagine your life being so hard and so bleak that all you had to look forward to was dying. This was the case for a little girl named Allis, who lived in the slave quarters of a Louisiana plantation in the old south. The only thing that made life bearable for the child was listening to her mama talk at night about a glorious place called Heaven that they would go to someday after all of Master’s cotton fields had been picked. As she listened, Allis was filled with an intense longing for a life where there was no pain or sorrow…no back-breaking work from sunup to sundown or the sting of a whip. While the little girl knew she would never be free in this life, Mama had instilled in her a belief that a better world was coming. Clinging to that hope, Allis toiled under a scorching summer sun alongside her mama, daydreaming about the day when she would leave the plantation for good. In the child’s mind, it couldn’t come soon enough.