The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (33 page)

A traveler’s hotel and restaurant down Austin way, just along Waller Creek. Three blue beads on a string. Tied round the neck of a little white girl…

Never even true, I’ll bet.

I walk away, but only far enough to see that a stream is near. Looking down into its waters, I think,
Well, here’s this.
I ask a old man passing by with a child in hand, “This Waller Creek?”

“Reckon,” he answers and shuffles on.

I take myself back to the café again, walk round the big lime-plastered building that’s shaped like a tall, narrow house, with rooms for travelers to stay by the night. Standing on my toes, I peek through the open windows, look at more colored people working. Nobody I know, far as I can tell.

It’s then I see the little white girl at the well out back. She’s skinny and small, wiry. Eight years old, maybe ten, more hair than anything else to her. It falls from a yellow headscarf, tumbles down her back in red-brown waves. She’s strong, though, hauling a heavy bucket in both hands, water splashing down her leg, wetting the apron over her gray dress.

I’ll ask her, at least:
There anybody here that goes by the name of Gossett? Or did back before the freedom, even? You ever see anybody with three blue beads like these? A colored woman? A girl? A boy?

I finger the string at my neck, move to come into the girl’s path and think to be careful how I say the words, so it won’t scare her off. But when she stops, looks up at me, her gray eyes surprised in a face that’s sweet like a china doll’s, I can’t even speak. There at her neck, tied on a red ribbon, hang three blue beads.

The Irishman,
I think to myself.
He told it true.

I sink down to the dirt. Fall hard, for my legs go weak, but I barely feel the ground. I feel nothing, hear nothing. I hold up my beads, try to speak, but my tongue has clamped itself still. I can’t make the words.
Child, where’d you come by them beads?

Seems forever, we’re froze that way, the girl and me, just looking and trying to reason it out.

A sparrow flies down from the tree. Only one little brown sparrow. It lands on the ground to drink of the water dripping from the bucket. The girl drops her burden, and water flows in rivers, quenching the dry soil. The sparrow dunks its head under and shakes the water over its feathers.

The girl turns and runs, scampers fast up the stone walk and through the open back door of the building. “Mama!” I hear her yell. “Maaa-ma!”

I climb to my feet, try to decide,
Should I run?
The girl is white, after all, and I gave her a fright, just now. Should I try explaining?
I didn’t mean her any harm. I just wondered, where’d she come by the three blue beads?

It’s then I see her in the door, a tall copper-colored woman standing with a wood kitchen spoon still in her hand. At first I think it’s Aunt Jenny Angel, but she’s too young to be. She’s only Juneau Jane’s age, not a girl, not quite a woman. She sends the white child inside, squints through the sun at me as she starts down the steps. Round her neck hangs a cord and three blue beads.

I remember how she looked the day them beads were first tied there, the last day I knew her, when she was only three years old at the trader’s yard. I see her face before the man picked her up and carried her away.

“Mary…” I whisper and then cry out across a space that of a sudden seems both too long and too short. My body goes weak. “Mary Angel?”

A shadow stands in the door then, and the shadow takes on sun as it comes out. There is the face I’ve kept in my mind all these years. I know it, even though the hair is gray round it, and the body stooped over a bit.

The little red-haired girl holds to her skirt, and I see how they look alike. This is my
mama’s
child. My mama’s child by a white man, born sometime after we were lost to each other all them years ago. It shows in her eyes, turned up on the corners like Juneau Jane’s.

Like
mine.

“I’m Hannie!” I shout across the courtyard, and I hold out Grandmama’s three blue beads. “I’m Hannie! I’m Hannie! I’m Hannie!”

I don’t even know at first, but I’m running. I’m running on legs I can’t feel, across ground I don’t see. I run, or I fly like the sparrow.

I don’t stop until I come into the arms of my people.

BENNY SILVA—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1987

I take the stairs in giant leaps, grab the turn in the bannister at the end, and run frantically down the corridor.

“Benny, wha…” Nathan thunders after me. We collide at the library door. “What’s going on?” he wants to know.

“The billiard table, Nathan,” I gasp. “The table. It had a dust cover on it the first time I came here, and there were paperbacks stacked on top. We’ve been piling books for the city library and school there ever since. I never looked underneath. What if Robin didn’t want anyone to have a
reason
to uncover the table, so she hid the balls and cues, and stacked old paperbacks on top? What if that’s where she was keeping her work? She knew nobody could sneak in here and walk off with a billiard table. You’d have to bring an entire moving crew to relocate that thing.”

We hurry to the old Brunswick table, grab stacks of legal thrillers and gunslinger Westerns, and pile them around the ornate, maple inlay legs with an uncharacteristic lack of care.

Papers rattle as we lift the stiff vinyl cover. We toss it aside, wafting up dust that flies in tornadic swirls, then settles on the foam and vinyl inserts that have been carefully fitted within the well of the table, leveling up the surface.

It’s beneath them, meticulously laid out on a length of clean, white linen, that we find Robin’s work, a quilt of sorts, an enormous live oak tree created in a mixed media of silk fabrics, embroidery floss, felt leaves, paints or dyes, and photographs slipped into padded fabric frames with clear plastic covers. At first it looks like a work of art, but it’s also a careful documentation of history. The story of Goswood Grove and many of the people who have inhabited this land since the early 1800s. Deaths and births, including those that took place within the bonds of marriage and beyond them. A nine-generation Gossett family tree. A story both black and white.

A beige felt cutout of a house denotes how the property ownership has passed down through the generations. The people are represented by leaves, each labeled with a name, year of birth, and year of death, followed by a letter that is explained through a map key in the bottom right corner of the canvas.

I know the last two terms from our
Underground
research.
Affranchi,
a French word for those emancipated from slavery by their owners, and
libre,
those born as free persons of color—tradesmen and landowners, many highly prosperous, some slave owners themselves. My students have struggled to understand how people who suffered the effects of injustice could themselves perpetrate it on others and profit from it, yet it happened. It’s part of our historical reality.

Reproductions of newspaper articles, old photos, and documents remain pinned to the fabric here and there, awaiting the addition of more pockets, I suppose. Robin was thorough in her research.

“My sister…” Nathan mutters. “This is…”

“Your family’s story. All of it. The truth.” I recognize so many connections from my students’ work. Tracing the lines upward, I move past branches that dwindle and disappear, fading like estuaries into the ocean of time. Death. Disease. War. Infertility. The end of this family line and that one.

Other branches continue, twisting through the decades. I see Granny T and Aunt Dicey. Their lineage travels back to both the black and the white Gossetts. To the grandmother they have in common, Hannie, born 1857, enslaved.

“The New Century ladies,” I say, and point to Hannie’s leaf. “This is the grandmother that Granny T told my class about, the one who started the restaurant. Hannie was born here at Goswood Grove, enslaved. She’s also the grandmother of the woman who used to live in the graveyard house, Miss Retta.”

I’m fascinated, astounded. I let my hand travel outward, onto blank sections of Robin’s canvas. “A few of my kids would be right around here somewhere, LaJuna, Tobias—and Sarge, too. They’d all be farther along on this branch.”

I feel the tingle of history coming to life as I trace backward through the generations again. “Hannie’s mother is biracial, a half sister to the Gossetts living in the Grand House at the time. This generation, Lyle, Lavinia, Juneau Jane, and Hannie, are brother, sister, half sister, and a cousin in some form or fashion. Lyle and Lavinia die fairly young, and…that leaves the daughter of the second wife to…whoa…”

Nathan looks up from his study of the family tree, meets my eye curiously, then steps in beside me to take a closer look.

I tap a finger to one leaf, then another. “This woman, the mother of Juneau Jane, is
not
William Gossett’s second wife; she’s a mistress, a free woman of color. Her daughter, Juneau Jane LaPlanche, is born
while
William Gossett is married to Maude Loach-Gossett. He’s living here in this house as the owner of the plantation. He already has a son with Maude, and then he fathers two daughters less than two years apart, one with his wife and one with his mistress. Lavinia and Juneau Jane.”

I know such things went on, that an entire social system existed in parts of New Orleans and other places, through which wealthy men kept mistresses, raised what were casually referred to as
left-hand families,
sent mixed-race sons and daughters off for education abroad or kept them in convent boarding schools, or provided tradesmen’s education for them. Still, I can imagine the human drama that must have simmered below the surface of such arrangements. Jealousy. Resentment. Bitterness. Competition.

Nathan glances over but doesn’t answer. He’s tracing something up from the roots of the tree, toward the branches, the path of his fingertip connecting the tiny house-shaped symbols that track ownership of Goswood Grove.

“Here’s the thing,” he says, and stops on the leaf that represents William Gossett’s younger daughter, the one born to the mistress. “I can’t figure out how it is that Gossetts still own this house today. Because here, the last Gossett son, Lyle, dies. The Grand House and land pass to Juneau Jane LaPlanche, who, according to Robin’s tree, never has children. Even if she did, their name wouldn’t have been Gossett.”

“Unless this is just where the research stopped. Maybe Robin never got any further. She was obviously still working on the project. It seems almost like…an obsession.” I imagine Nathan’s sister poring over these documents, this quilt of the family history she was creating. What did she plan to do with it?

Nathan seems equally perplexed. “That there are two strains of the family is sort of a secret that everyone knows about, to be honest.” He straightens away from the table, frowning. “I’m sure it’s something the rest of the family, and probably a lot of the people in town, would prefer not be brought up again, but no one would be shocked…except for, maybe, this part.” He taps the tiny white felt house that indicates the property’s passage into the hands of Juneau Jane. Stretching over me, he unpins an envelope nearby.
Hannie
is written on it in Robin’s neat, even script.

A tiny felt representation of Goswood Grove House drops from underneath the pin and lands beside Hannie’s felt leaf. The xeroxed 1887 newspaper article inside Hannie’s envelope tells us why it was there.

The story goes on to describe twelve years of legal attempts to strip Juneau Jane of her inheritance, first by William Gossett’s widow, Maude Loach-Gossett, who refused to accept the small settlement left to her in William’s will, and then by more distant relatives bearing the Gossett name. Various former slaves and sharecroppers came forth to testify on Juneau Jane’s behalf and to validate her parentage. A lawyer from New Orleans tirelessly argued her case, but in the end it was of little use. Cousins of William Gossett stole her inheritance, and Juneau Jane ended up with forty acres of bottomland bordering the Augustine cemetery.

The land I’m living on now.

Her eventual dispensation of that land is given in her own words, in a copy of a will handwritten in 1912. Robin stapled it to the back of the article. Juneau’s house and deeded land are left to Hannie,
“who has been as close as a sister to me and is the person who has shown me, always, how to be brave.”
Any further inheritance that might eventually be recovered in her name is left to benefit children of the community,
“whom I hope I have served faithfully as a teacher and a friend.”

The final sheet of Robin’s attached research is a newspaper article about the 1901 opening of the Augustine Colored Carnegie Library. I recognize the photo of the library’s New Century Club women. Decked out in their finest hats and dresses—Sunday clothes around the turn of the century when the photo was taken—they’re posed on the steps of the beautiful new building for the ribbon cutting. Granny T brought the original print of that photo to my class the first day she told us the story. She’d unearthed it from the storage boxes where the library’s history was tucked away at the end of segregation, when libraries were no longer restricted by race.

In this newspaper copy, Robin has identified two of the club members, noting
Hannie
and
Juneau Jane,
above their images. When I trail down to a smaller photo positioned among the text, I recognize the two women standing alongside the bronze statue of a saint, as it awaits placement on its nearby pedestal.

I also recognize the saint.

The library’s first book,
the bold print says on the caption.

I rest my chin on Nathan’s shoulder and read on,