The Book of Lost Friends

“If they are in your classroom, you are responsible for keeping them there.” 

In her crash-course introduction to the reality of a classroom, Benny tries to rely on these cliches from her education classes. Even as her class descends into anarchy her first day, she will come to understand the implications of this teaching cliché and will take to heart her responsibility to do more than move information in a classroom. She taps into a compassion that sees her job as motivating indifferent students to stay with their education. 

“Augustine reprises that crippling feeling of rejection. I smile at people here, I get stares in return. I crack a joke, no one laughs. I say, Good Morning!, I get grunts and curt nods, and, if I’m lucky, one-word answers.” 

The emotional journey that Benny undertakes from isolation into a community begins with her confessions here of the damage of her own past, her own vulnerabilities, her abiding loneliness. The conditions of Augustine and the realities of her first job, so alien to her, exacerbate her feelings of isolation and apartness. 

“It’s time I quit looking after what belongs to white people and start looking after what belongs to me.” 

Hannie’s bold declaration of her own emotional independence marks the beginnings of her long and difficult journey back to the family taken from her by the very white family she still serves more than a dozen years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In escorting the whiney and rude Missy Gossett, Hannie begins here to see her future belongs to her, not with the white family that destroyed her family.

“There must be other people around here with stories no one’s listening to. Real stories that might teach the same lessons I was hoping to bring out in literature. What if I could make them part of my curriculum, somehow?” 

Benny, quickly realizing the dead-end of traditional literature instruction in her class’s wholesale rejection of studying George Orwell’s Animal Farm, here first sees the possibilities of the stories of the students’ own ancestors, black and white, their stores of pain and triumph, greed and sacrifice, loneliness and reunion as valuable resources, stories that, unlike the canonical works of literature in the school district’s outdated curriculum, would touch the students deeply. 

“I need magic. I need a miracle, a superpower. In almost two weeks, I have taught these kids nothing but how to bum cheap snack cakes and sleep in class.” 

The novel that taps the power of storytelling even in the digital age to move people emotionally and psychologically. Here Benny draws on essays she read in college about the magic of language, written by celebrated anthropologist Loren Eiseley. She advocates the possibility that hearing the stories of the students’ ancestors will inspire the classroom. In turn, stories might give her a greater role than providing free snacks and a place for students to catch up on their sleep. 

“Books built my identity.” 

This confession helps understand both the virtue and the flaws of Benny. She is an inveterate reader, book-fed and word-fat. Books are everything to her. She has spent her life, which she confesses has been difficult and emotional trying, seeking the solace and comfort of escaping into books. Now she realizes that stories are more than made-up people doing made-up things. That history, engaging in the written record of real people, offers stories that do not protect, do not imprison, do not provide refuge, but rather offer the complicated gift of awareness and community.

“My mama wept and cried out, Take off the chains from the children. Please, take off the chains. I feel her close to me now. I want her to make me strong.” 

In the haunting memories and the tormented dreams of Hannie Gossett, the novel offers heart-wrenching scenes that recreate the human toll of slavery. In this scene, Hannie recalls, at the tender age of six, being rudely shoved into the open slave yards of Austin and there being separated from her family. More than a decade later, she remembers the voice of her mother begging the slave auctioneers to at least take the heavy chains from the children she is about to be parted from. It is history that has not, cannot, fade into the past. Hannie feels her mother close even now. 

“Hope flutters up in the hollow of my throat, clumsy like something just born and trying to find its feet. I push it down hard. Best not to let it grow too much, right off.” 

In asking the heroic white boy Gus to help in her all-but-impossible journey into Texas to find her family, Hannie struggles not to put too much faith in the network of communication represented by the Methodist ads or in the long-shot possibility that Gus might run into any members of her family. Yet Hannie, like Benny, the self-described optimist, refuses to abandon hope entirely. 

“‘You’re stubborn, you know that?’” “‘I’m an optimist.’”

In trying to help her promising student LaJuna, Benny refuses to give up the endeavor despite the girl’s suspicion that, like all the other teachers she has known, Benny will vanish after a year, worn out by the impossible conditions in the Augustine public schools. Benny here promises she will not, cannot abandon LaJuna. In short order, she offers the girl the opportunity to help her organize the vast resources of the Gossett library. 

“’Need help. Need food. Got money to give. You carryin’ mercy in your soul today, sister? We travelers, come in need a’ mercy.” 

For all her heroic endurance, her sense of privacy and maintaining a moat around her heart, and her stoic self-sacrificing, Hannie here declares her need for the help of others. This moment begins her journey to her reunion. The novel argues an individual apart and alone is too vulnerable. A person cannot, in the end, thrive apart. Each principal character finds their way to becoming a part of a greater community. Here the three refugees from Louisiana throw themselves on the mercy of the congregation of the Black church where they take refuge. 

“‘I know that story about the starfish. I get what you think you’re trying to do. But around here, the tide’s pretty strong.’”

At every turn, the novel affirms how easy giving up would be, how despair is only logical, whether facing the enormity of Hannie’s mission into the wilds of frontier Texas or Benny’s controversial classroom project. It is easier to give up. Using the Loren Eiseley’s essay, here LaJuna’s aunt, who cannot bring herself to hope that Benny will help her niece, warns Benny, much like the stranger warns the man on the beach in the Eiseley essay, that compassion, that is the will to try to help others, is most often a difficult and overwhelming job. Benny, like the starfish thrower, refuses to surrender. 

“Juneau reads me another. Then another, but I don’t hear her Frenchy voice. I hear the rasp of an old woman, looking for the mama she ain’t seen since she was a little child, like Mary Angel.’” 

Here Hannie first feels the spell of storytelling. As she listens to Juneau Jane read from the ads posted in the Methodist newspaper, she is transported away from her own sorrows, her own sad story, and identifies with the sad stories she hears. Stories are able to generate that level of humanity, that level of sympathy. The ads suggest the power of stories, then, to create a community. Hannie finds in the stories of complete strangers the emotional essence of her own story of displacement.

“The idea ignites something I’d only dreamed might be possible. Suddenly, fresh tinder is everywhere. My classroom is on fire.” 

The story of Benny is the narrative of a first-year teacher struggling to find avenues to connect with her students. In tapping into the power of history, in allowing the students themselves to respond to the idea of excavating into the stories of the town’s ancestors, Benny ignites the kind of engaged, interactive classroom any teacher aspires to create. Her students take over. Their energy, their passion, not due dates and grades, will drive the project. 

“I go right from laughing to being heavy in my heart. Feel a lonesome burden all of a sudden. Lonesome for people I love. Lonesome for home.” 

This is a novel about going home. For all her courage in leaving the security of the Gossett farm, for all the adventures Hannie faces in her long and difficult sojourn across east Texas, for all the friendships she develops along the way, she is never far from her heartache. She never forgets that, more than ten years earlier, she had lost her family, taken from her by mercenary slave traders. That hunger for her family, for her home, compels her story.

“But how would [Nathan] feel about coming face-to-face with the human realities, even through the faraway lens of yellowed paper and faded ink?” 

The narrative of Nathan Gossett is a narrative of confrontation with history. A life spent running from history, hiding from the implications of his family’s own dark past, Nathan needs to be led to history. Here Benny offers the difficult gift of awareness. She has unearthed documents that detail the Gossett family century-old transgressions. Benny is not sure at this point how Nathan, easy going and living forever in the uncomplicated present, will react to stark evidence of his own family’s duplicity. 

“I go back and rest on my knees beside the woman. ‘Tell me about your people. I’ll remember it, and soon’s there comes a chance, I’ll get it in our Book of Lost Friends.’” 

Hannie reveals how she is taken up into the energy of community represented by the book she and Juneau are compiling, the ads she records as part of the generation ripped apart by slavery and its efforts to find a way back to each other. The journey through Texas reflects Hannie’s growing commitment to the book project and the hope it represents as she meets dozens of itinerants longing for a home they lost to slavery.

“Stories are in danger of fading into the maelstrom of the modern age.” 

As teacher, Benny tirelessly encourages her students addicted to the easy, passive entertainments of video games, digital platforms, cable television, and the Internet to rediscover the joy of storytelling, how words that share the made-up stories of made-up people can generate intense emotional identification and encourage sympathy. Unlike the heroes and villains of video games or the faux-realities of social media, these stories can redefine the parameters of their own lives. In promoting the pageant, Benny encourages her students to give in to the coaxing lure of storytelling. History is for Benny stories finally heard. 

“I wonder, sometimes, as we wander that graveyard, what will remain of me someday. Am I creating a legacy that matters, that will last? Will someone stand at my grave one day, wondering who I was?”

Stories create legacy. Without recording the heartaches, the joys, the tribulations, the experiences of people, those people hiss away into silence, into irrelevancy. As she scouts the Gossett graveyard in anticipation of the pageant, Benny takes the big picture perspective here. She wonders who will remember her recognizing that only in telling her story, recording it, will she access posterity. Without storytelling, there is not history, no memories, no existence beyond the crushing cycle of dust and lust.

“It’s a lesson I’m trying to learn from [Nathan], this living squarely in the present. I am a planner and a worrier. I torment myself by mentally replaying my past mistakes, wishing I’d been smarter, wishing I’d been stronger, wishing I’d made different choices. I live too often in the what if.” 

At this point, the reader does not know about Benny’s lost daughter. Benny’s story is a story of how she comes to balance the past and the present in a healthy dynamic using her friendship with Nathan. She begins the story destroyed emotionally by her past, unable to forgive herself for the decisions she made years earlier. She learns from the carefree Nathan the importance of discovering the urgency of the moment and stepping free of the prison of the past. Nathan, for his part, learns from Benny that the past is not something a person can hide from.

“By the time he’s finished, I can’t help it, I’m in tears.”

Listening to her student in the pageant recreating through storytelling the lives of their ancestors and allowing their history to live again, Benny is overcome with emotion. It is a scene that parallels Hannie’s moment during her journey in Texas when she is caught up emotionally in the stories shared with her by total strangers, stories she and Juneau Jane record in the ever-growing Book of Lost Friends.

“‘They are not your kids.’”

At the center of Benny’s professional crisis over the pageant and the objections of the town’s entrenched white families is her growing empathy for her students. Despite their considerable differences, which Benny feels so strongly when she first arrives in Augustine, now she feels a maternal instinct, which likely reflects displaced feelings for her child given up for adoption, a secret she has yet to reveal at this point in the novel. 

“I float off on it. Float off on it like the big water. Grandmama used to tell of. I go all the way to Africa where the grass grows red and brown and gold by the acre and all the blue beads are back together on a string, and they hang on the neck of a queen”

Hannie’s journey gives her the chance to reclaim not only her family but her identity as well as a proud African. In this moment when the stoic Hannie allows herself to feel, she taps into her cultural identity, an identity that has nothing to do with Texas or the Gossett family. She has never been to Africa, but the power of the blue beads her grandmother gave her allows her to feel her way into powerful empathy. She feels part of Africa, an identity the Gossett family cannot touch.

“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, but I run, or I fly like the sparrow. I don’t stop until I come into the arms of my people.” 

The reunion scene between Hannie and her mother marks the emotional high point of Hannie’s narrative. Importantly, she says that she comes into the arms of her people, not just her family, indicating the reunion marks the affirmation of her identity as an African American, an identity that the treachery and amorality of the whites had worked to destroy. In the end Hannie reclaims her family and reclaims her identity.