The Book of Lost Friends

“Sad thing,” Granny T. tells Benny Silva, “when stories die for the lack of listenin’ ears” (58). If that is the case, then no other principal character is as sad as Benny. Her story, alone of the characters, is never fully shared, never fully heard. The character of Benny Silva reveals the emotional toll of secrets and the cost of refusing to engage history. As with all first-person narrators, Benny encourages sympathy, shares her ups and downs as a first-year teacher. She comes across as an accessible figure, open and honest. However, she reveals only in the last page the chasm that exists between her and everyone, including the reader, in her revelation of the daughter she gave up for adoption. 

Unlike Hannie Gossett, Benny Silva cannot transcend her history. In the end, she reveals that she falls victim to her past and, in turn, denies herself the opportunity for a future. For all her fascination with history and her curiosity about the stories all around her and her faith that every story needs a sympathetic ear to keep it alive, Benny, as the first-person narrator, cannot bear to share even with her reader her darkest secret, that more than ten years earlier, she gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock and immediately put the baby up for adoption. It is only after she reveals that (literally in the last four paragraphs of the novel) that so much of her character becomes not only clear but unsettlingly ironic: her obsession with unearthing the stories of the ancestors of Augustine; her campaign to bring those stories to life in the Halloween pageant; her passion for the students that she comes to call “her kids”; her resilience and determination to help Nathan get to the bottom of his own family’s secret. These are all strategies for handling, and perhaps avoiding, her own tragic story. Her insistence then that Nathan come to the Gossett library and read for himself the history of his family’s racism is ironic given her own resistance to confronting her past. 

Juneau Jane emerges as the novel’s tragic center. Because of her feisty spirit, her pluckiness, and her fiery energy, Juneau Jane seems even to Hannie to be strong and capable. Juneau Jane bursts into the novel’s opening pages as a resilient and confident 14-year-old who arrives alone at great risk at the Gossett farm when William is feared dead to demand that the family recognize that claim. However, she is destroyed by the past, a past she had nothing to do with creating.

She is both product of and victim of history. In her efforts to stake her rightful claim to the Gossett family fortune, she risks everything and, in the end, is not successful. She is after all, William Gossett’s biological daughter and, with his death and the death of his only son and heir, she has a legal claim to an inheritance. Juneau Jane is the product of Gossett’s long-term involvement with a Creole woman in New Orleans. In the eyes of Louisiana law and in the haughty disdainful treatment by Gossett’s “real” family, the girl is nothing more than a “sham,” the sorry evidence of Gossett’s moral weakness, his regrettable but entirely understandable dalliance. In court after twelve years of litigation Juneau Jane is dismissed as “a pretend Heiress, a colored Creole woman of dubious and unsubstantiated lineage” (366). Able to stand up to all the dangerous men she meets on the long road through Texas, a plucky and determined survivor, Juneau is in the end destroyed by the racist legal maneuverings of the Gossett family and by the network of insidious gossip among the white Christian hypocrites of Augustine who dismiss her and her mother.

As part of the settlement, Juneau is given only forty acres of unpromising bottomland adjacent to the farm. The dimension of that tragedy is not brought to light until near the end of the novel when Benny’s investigation into the Gossett family archives reveals the 1887 newspaper article that records, how after more than a dozen years in court, Juneau is stripped of her inheritance. In a novel about the emotional and psychological need for family, Juneau Jane is in the end denied her family and refused her identity.