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51 pages 1 hour read

Lisa Wingate

The Book of Lost Friends

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Prologue-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 5 Summary

The novel begins with a brief prologue. A teacher encourages a reluctant student, dressed in costume, who is apparently about to participate in some kind of theater performance. The author leaves the details intentionally vague. The teacher, however, notices a ladybug light on her finger and takes it as a good sign. The student has stage fright. The teacher assures her the important thing is to share the story. The student sheepishly agrees and goes in front of the audience. She begins her recitation, “I am Hannie Gossett” (5).

The novel moves back to early spring 1875 on the Gossett family farm outside Augustine, Louisiana. The farm is in a tumult. The longtime head of the family, William, left at Christmastime to bail out his profligate son from yet another legal jam in the Texas town where the family maintains its other farm. It has been four months, and the farm swirls with rumors that William may be dead. 18-year-old Hannie Gossett, formerly enslaved and now a sharecropper on the farm, is alarmed. She fears that now, within a few months of completing her ten years of contracted time as a sharecropper, William’s shrewish wife will renege on the contract and refuse Hannie her promised forty acres of land.

Hannie is haunted by the memory of when she was six, in the last year of the war, and she was separated from her family by the farm’s mercenary overseer. William, fearing the end of the war would mean the loss of his slaves, had begun to move them to a property he owned in the neighboring Texas frontier, well out of the reach of the Federal government. On his own initiative, however, Gossett’s overseer sold off members of Hannie’s large family, including her mother, in Texas and pocketed the money. Hannie was the only one brought back to Louisiana. All she has now is a necklace with three deep blue stones her grandmother brought with her from Africa. Hannie’s mother gave the necklace to her when they were separated and said, “You hold it close by, li’l pea. This is the sign of your people” (11).

Fearing the contract will be torn up, Hannie, disguising herself as a boy, slips into the main house to see if she can find the papers that promise her land. As she moves about the dark hallways toward the library, she sees the unmistakable figure of Juneau Jane, the striking half-Creole girl that William fathered with a New Orleans prostitute. Hannie fears Juneau’s presence in the house indicates only bad news. She watches as Juneau heads into the library and starts searching the shelves until she finds a ledger. Juneau steals it, hiding it in her dress, and hastily departs.

Hannie follows Juneau. She overhears a confrontation between Juneau and Miss Lavinia, William’s legitimate daughter. Hannie dislikes Missy. She is haughty and flighty and treats the sharecroppers as if they are still enslaved. Missy contemptuously dismisses Juneau and tells her to return to her prostitute mother. She adds she will make sure Juneau leaves as she will accompany her to New Orleans. She says, “Once Papa’s papers are found, and should it be, indeed be confirmed that the worst has befallen him in Texas, you will abide by his decrees without causing further trouble or embarrassment to my family” (67).

Now that William is apparently dead, Missy will visit the family’s attorney and make sure the papers are in order for her to inherit the farm, not Juneau Jane. Hannie, determined to find out what is going on, decides to go along. “It’s time I quit looking after what belongs to white people and start looking after what belongs to me,” she says (68). Still disguised as a boy, she masquerades as the carriage driver, and the three head off toward New Orleans. They arrive at a port near the city at the offices of William’s attorney. Neither trusting the other, Missy and Juneau both head into the lawyer’s offices, leaving Hannie outside with the carriage.

In alternating chapters, the novel moves to the first-person narration of Benedetta (Benny) Silva and her first days as the new 9th grade English teacher at the public school in Augustine. Newly graduated from the University of California Berkeley, she is nervous and feels like an outsider. Just before leaving Berkeley, she broke up with her longtime live-in boyfriend, Christopher, who was on the verge of proposing. Benny hints darkly at a secret she shared with him that drove him away.

The Augustine public school is rundown, the classrooms minimally furnished, and the classroom supplies thin. Her class of almost 40 kids has little interest in her or in her opening day presentation. They seem flippant and disrespectful and distant. She quickly loses control of the class as they start to toss the ragged copies of Animal Farm she assigns for their first unit. One kid admits he is hungry, that he has had not eaten in more than a day.

Feeling overwhelmed after her first day, Benny retreats to her rental home adjacent to the town’s cemetery and close to the grounds of the abandoned Gossett family mansion. She begins to unpack. She thinks back on her peripatetic childhood. Her parents divorced when she was 4. She remembers visits with her father in New York City. Her mother was a flight attendant, and the two had moved many times. Benny was raised largely by babysitters and day care helpers. She is searching now for stability, for roots. Over the next days, she struggles to adjust to the swampy heat of rural Louisiana. As a gesture of friendship, she begins to bring M & Ms and snack cakes to give to her students in the hopes they might be better engaged if they were not hungry.

One afternoon, a sudden cloudburst reveals that her roof leaks. She heads to the Cluck and Oink, a barbeque diner that serves as the town’s gathering place, to find a contractor. She meets the formidable Granny T., and 80-year-old who works at the diner’s counter and knows everyone in town. She shares stories of some of the town’s history with Benny, who is fascinated by the tales, particularly about Nathan Gossett. He is the last of the family who is her landlord, although he spends most of his time on a shrimp boat down in the Gulf.

“Lots of stories,” in this town, the old woman says, “Sad thing when stories die for lack of listenin’ ears” (58). Inspired, Benny asks Granny T. whether she would talk to her class about the town and its people. On her way out of the diner, LaJuna, a girl Benny recognizes from her class, stops her and gives her the name of her aunt, Sarge, who could help with the roof. She also tells Benny that should she might investigate the library at the Gossett mansion for books for her classroom. 

Prologue-Chapter 5 Analysis

The brief prologue performs two vital functions. The image of the ladybug alighting on the teacher’s hand introduces an image drawn from Southern folklore; the ladybug is regarded as a sign of good luck. The novel thus starts with an omen for optimism, a promise of things getting better. The novel reassures early on that despair will not be the last word. In addition, without providing the particulars of the story that is that this is the Halloween class performance of the stories of Augustine’s antebellum ancestors, the prologue moves to the single dramatic statement by the student/actor: “I am Hannie Gossett,” which figuratively brings the character to life. As the novel moves immediately back to the historic Hannie Gossett, the juxtaposition suggests what will become one of the novel’s dominant arguments: the intertwining of past and present and the vitality and immediacy of history.

Here, the introduction of the historic (albeit fictional) Hannie Gossett focuses on three elements of her character and her story: 1) the impact of her painful separation from her family during the heyday of slave markets; 2) her resourcefulness, how still in her teens she is working to become an independent farmer with her own 40 acres; and 3) her maturity in acting boldly and decisively when she recognizes that her sharecropping contract may be jeopardized given the absence of the farm’s paterfamilias and the general untrustworthiness of white people.

These elements emphasize the strength and daring of Hannie Gossett. Against the other two young women, both under twenty, who will quickly become her traveling partners, Hannie emerges as strong and independent. By contrast Juneau Jane seems given to knee-jerk and highly emotional confrontations, typical of the immaturity and impulsiveness of some girls her age. Miss Lavinia, the heiress to the Gossett farm, is haughty and full of herself. She is secure in her sense of white privilege and dismisses Juneau Jane, her own half-sister, out of hand as a social outcast. She is mean-spirited in her bigoted and racist remarks toward both Hannie and the half-Creole Juneau Jane.

It is Hannie who directs the novel’s action at this point. Unlike Juneau Jane, she sees the long-term implications of the disappearance and possible death of the farm’s owner. She sees the need to act to protect her rights. She is determined that she will not be a passive victim (as Juneau Jane will be, much later). She is within months of fulfilling the sharecropper contract. She will not lose that promise. The lesson she learned when she was enslaved and separated from her family is clear: she will not be taken advantage of again by whites. In this she asserts courage and a level of proactive empowerment that belies the stereotypes of her gender and age. Indeed, Hannie will go through much of the novel disguised as a boy and being mistaken for an older man. Her name, Hannibal, recalls the figure from Roman military history known for aggressive determination and the will and the drive to win against all odds. 

In these opening sections, the novel draws parallels between the Louisiana of the Reconstruction and of the present day by moving from the story of Hannie and her quest to secure her independence and her financial security through getting her 40 acres of farm to the story of Benny Silva and her quest to be successful in her job as a public-school teacher. The contract she signs to agree to work in public schools in financially-depressed areas as a way to pay down her enormous student loan debt represents, like Hannie’s contract to secure her 40 acres after ten years of servitude, the best way for her to a future, to security. They are then both characters in search of hope.

These opening chapters also draw important differences between the two principal characters. Unlike Hannie who shows her strength of character, Benny reveals her emotional weaknesses. Benny is initially unable to find the same sense of resourcefulness has Hannie. She is hypersensitive to her failures in the first days in the classroom and cannot find a way to bond with her students except for giving them with candy and cakes. She is awkward in her conversations with the residents in the town and overwhelmed by her  sense of apartness. She has much to learn. From the moment she arrives in Augustine, Benny feels out of place, blames her shattered family for her emotional vulnerabilities and her social awkwardness. She does not share at this point the secret of her daughter. Only in second reading does the impact of that shattered family become evident in how Benny resists others and collapses within her own space. She resists understanding the nature of the lives of her students, the depth of their economic problems, their own sense of helplessness. Blithely she believes reading novels is just what they need. If Hannie teaches Juneau Jane the wisdom of quiet endurance and perseverance, Benny will find similar lessons in quiet strength and compassionate generosity from her student LaJuna, introduced here as the only one of her students willing to give her even minimal cooperation and respect.

It is the formidable figure of Granny T., introduced when Benny, helpless with a leaky roof, must head to town to find help, who brings to the novel the first indication of a solution to both Hannie’s and Benny’s dilemmas, how both are anchored to a past they cannot escape. Granny T. hints to Benny that sharing stories is therapeutic because they position individuals willing to listen within a context larger than themselves. Nothing sadder, she tells Benny, than stories that never find their way to open ears. Both Hannie and Benny will come to learn this wisdom. 

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