The Lies They Told

Ellen Marie Wiseman

65 pages 2-hour read

Ellen Marie Wiseman

The Lies They Told

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2025

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Chapters 29-33Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of forced sterilization, child abuse, religious discrimination, gender discrimination, ableism, and racism.

Chapter 29 Summary

At the Tobacco Festival Grand Ball, Lena Conti stands near the back wall of the crowded arena, scanning the crowd for Camille Baker. She avoids moving through the partygoers because she has already run into Howard Branscum twice and does not want to refuse another invitation to dance. Teensy and Judd return from the dance floor laughing, and when Judd goes to fetch more beers, Lena tells Teensy she wants to go home. Teensy urges her to stay a little longer for the announcement of the new Tobacco Queen.


Onstage, Eddy Arnold and His Tennessee Plowboys perform and bring the Tobacco Queen contestants out. Arnold then introduces last year’s reigning Tobacco Queen from South Boston, Camille Baker. Realizing Camille has been backstage, Lena pushes through the crowd toward the stage, hoping to speak with her, but a man guarding a floor-level door blocks Lena when she tries to reach the backstage area.


Arnold introduces a young singer, Bobbi Jo Gately. When Bobbi Jo begins singing “Cindy” (353), Lena freezes, recognizing the tune and the distinctive Blue Ridge Mountain twang she associates with Bonnie Wolfe. Lena moves closer to the stage and, when she sees the faint outline of a daisy-shaped scar on Bobbi Jo’s cheek, she recognizes her as Bonnie. Lena calls out to her, but Bonnie continues into an original song that longs for their mountain home and names “the betrayed and lost children of Shenandoah” (355). After the performance, Bonnie starts to leave the stage. Lena climbs over the orchestra railing and jumps into the orchestra pit, knocking over a chair, and a guard grabs her before she can reach Bonnie. Lena shouts Bonnie Wolfe’s name and says she is Lena. Bonnie stops, tells the men to let Lena go, and speaks with her at the edge of the stage, offering to give her an autograph after the show. Bonnie says Lena looks familiar but cannot place her, then tells the guard to bring Lena to her dressing room.

Chapter 30 Summary

Backstage, Bonnie leads Lena to her dressing room and asks how Lena knows her real name. Lena tells her she cared for her and Jack Henry in Wolfe Hollow and reminds her of the fall from the haymow that left the scar on her cheek. Bonnie recognizes Lena and recalls how she sang to her while Granny Creed stitched the wound.


Lena apologizes for not protecting her from the sheriff and his men. Bonnie insists they were not taken and says she was told their father was a drunk who gave them up so he could sell the land. Lena contradicts this, explaining that officials declared their father unfit and removed the children so the state could seize the land for a park. Bonnie says she heard the other version from the sheriff, the orphanage, and the people who adopted her. Lena tells her that her father never stopped loving them and reveals that he later shot himself after losing his children and his home. Bonnie breaks down in shock and grief.


Bonnie explains that she, Jack Henry, and Ella were sent to the Virginia State Colony, where she stayed three months and nine days. She says she was told she had her appendix removed, though she had not been sick, and that many girls on her ward had similar surgeries. Jack Henry was sent away to work on a peanut farm, and Ella was placed in the baby ward. Lena, who was also confined at the Colony and sterilized there under threat of lifelong imprisonment, tells Bonnie she believes the doctors lied about the appendectomy and sterilized her. Bonnie reacts with anger and despair, realizing she may never have been unable to bear children by chance.


Bonnie says her adoptive parents later died in a car accident. She explains that Jack Henry was drafted into the war, received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and was killed, leaving no remains to bury. She then tells Lena that she and Ella were adopted by the same couple and that she knows where Ella is now.

Chapter 31 Summary

The morning after the ball, Bonnie takes Lena to Charlie’s Flowers, a shop in a small town outside Richmond. Inside, they meet Charlie, who is arranging roses behind the counter. Bonnie says they came to see Ella, and Charlie congratulates Bonnie on her performance and says he and Ella were not ready to go out the night before.


A young woman in a white tea gown comes downstairs from the apartment above the shop. Lena immediately recognizes her as Ella. Ella greets Bonnie warmly, then looks at Lena and says she seems familiar but cannot place her.


Bonnie asks if they can go upstairs to talk. As they climb the stairs, Lena sees two cradles in the hallway with sleeping babies inside. In the kitchen, Ella explains the twins, Rory and Rosie, are hers and Charlie’s. Lena struggles to contain her emotion as she realizes her daughter has children.


Bonnie tells Ella that she and Jack Henry were lied to about their father and that the sheriff and his deputy took them so the state could seize their land. She says Ella was taken as well because officials falsely labeled Lena “feebleminded” and confined her. Bonnie reminds Ella of the woman who sang to her when her scar was stitched, and Ella turns to Lena and asks if she is her mother.


Lena confirms she has been searching for Ella since the day she was taken. Mother and daughter embrace. Ella then asks if Lena would like to meet her grandchildren, and Lena says she would.

Chapter 32 Summary

On a sunny fall day, Judd drives Lena, Teensy, Bonnie, and Ella up the mountain to visit the former site of Wolfe Hollow Farm. During the drive, they pass the remains of other homesteads, including the Cray place, whose family was also forced off their land. Lena reflects on finally feeling at home living above the flower shop with Ella, her husband, and the twins.


They arrive at the overgrown property, where only the chimney and collapsed foundation remain. Bonnie says she remembers everything and chooses to stay despite Teensy’s offer to leave if it is too painful. She finds her mother’s black-eyed Susans still blooming and gathers a small bouquet. Ella uncovers a tarnished wind chime made of spoons, and Bonnie says her mother made it and that Ella once loved it.


Teensy guides them through the woods along an overgrown path to the family cemetery. Lena remembers walking the same trail behind Silas’s casket. In a small clearing enclosed by a crude stone fence, they find the gravestones of Silas Alexander Wolfe and Celia Iris Wolfe, along with four smaller stones beside Silas’s, three engraved with children’s names and one unmarked. Bonnie kneels at her father’s grave. Teensy tells her that Silas would have given up his land to keep his children and that losing them is what killed him.

Chapter 33 Summary

On Christmas Day 1950, Lena anxiously watches for Ella, Charlie, and the twins during a snowstorm at Teensy and Judd’s farmhouse. The house is filled with Bonnie and her husband, Miles, along with Teensy and Judd’s daughters, their husbands, and grandchildren. Lena reflects on their visits to maintain the Wolfe family cemetery and on the headstone they added for Jack Henry.


Ella, Charlie, and the twins arrive safely just before supper. Lena notices Ella seems unsettled but accepts her explanation about the difficult drive. As Judd prepares to give his yearly Christmas speech, Ella asks to speak first. She signals to Charlie, who leaves the room and returns with a man, a woman, and two children.


The man is Lena’s brother, Enzo. They embrace in an emotional reunion. Enzo explains that Ella invited them and that Bonnie paid for their trip from Germany; they are staying for two weeks. He introduces his wife, Suzanne and their children, Gisele and Otto. The family welcomes them, and additional tables and chairs are set up so everyone can eat together.


During dinner, Lena and Enzo talk about his life and farm in Germany. After the meal, Ella reveals another surprise by placing a pair of white knitted baby booties on the table. Lena realizes Ella is pregnant and announces that she will be a grandmother again. The family celebrates together as Lena looks around at her children, grandchildren, brother, and friends gathered in the farmhouse.

Chapters 29-33 Analysis

The novel’s concluding chapters employ a sequence of concentrated reunions that compress time and restructure loss. Lena encounters Bonnie, then Ella, and finally Enzo within a short narrative span, reversing decades of separation through structural proximity. This rapid succession does not erase the intervening years but reorders them, placing reunion in immediate relation to trauma. The Tobacco Festival Grand Ball provides a public setting for this turning point. A celebration of regional culture becomes the site where concealed histories surface. Lena’s decision to climb over the orchestra railing interrupts the formal choreography of the event and inserts private memory into a staged spectacle. This moment revisits The Perilous Promise of the American Dream by locating restoration outside institutional validation. Family continuity emerges through recognition and testimony, not through endorsement by the systems that once sanctioned removal.


The reunion between Lena and Bonnie foregrounds the enduring effects of The Dehumanizing Pseudoscience of Eugenics. Bonnie’s belief that her father surrendered his children reflects the durability of the state’s narrative. The correction of this account exposes how authority reshaped memory as well as bodies. Bonnie’s appendectomy, later revealed to be sterilization, situates reproductive control within concealment and misdiagnosis. Her inability to bear children materializes the policy that sought to limit particular lineages. Her performance of an original song about “[the] betrayed and lost children of Shenandoah” (355) extends this reckoning into public space. The lyrics name displacement and loss directly, positioning art as testimony. Through performance, what had been confined to institutional records enters communal awareness.


Set against prior institutional control, the concluding chapters deepen Maternal Love as a Force of Resistance through duration and continuity. Lena’s search for Ella extends across two decades, structured through letters, inquiries, and sustained vigilance. The reunion does not undo the years of separation; it confirms that maternal attachment persists beyond legal erasure. Ella’s life as a mother of twins, with another child expected, introduces generational continuation into a narrative marked by sterilization and confinement. Reproduction, once regulated by the state, reappears within domestic space. The flower shop setting situates this reunion among cultivated growth and daily labor, in contrast to the regulated environment of the Virginia State Colony. The presence of grandchildren extends the family line that institutional policy attempted to interrupt. The narrative locates endurance in lineage and care.


The novel also reinforces memory as an alternative record to official documentation. Recognition occurs through material and sensory continuity. The daisy-shaped scar on Bonnie’s cheek operates as embodied history, linking present identity to a past moment of care. The song “Cindy” functions similarly, carrying memory across years of separation and triggering recognition in a public setting. These elements position lived experience as a counter archive to institutional narrative. The return to the Wolfe homestead extends this pattern. The tarnished wind chime and the blooming black-eyed Susans reintroduce objects and natural growth as carriers of memory. Through recurring material details, the narrative affirms continuity even where property and records have been destroyed.


The visit to the remains of Wolfe Hollow situates private loss within broader displacement. The chimney standing amid collapsed foundations marks absence while indicating prior habitation. Bonnie’s observation that her “mother’s black-eyed Susans are still blooming” (381) introduces seasonal persistence into a site of removal. The reference to the creation of Shenandoah National Park frames the family’s eviction within a state-directed reshaping of land use. The closing Christmas gathering reorganizes earlier motifs of separation into assembly. The immigration hall’s anonymity is replaced by a shared table of extended family and neighbors. Enzo’s arrival restores transatlantic connection, and Ella’s pregnancy introduces anticipated continuation. Lena’s reflection that “[the] love and legacy of her family would continue on” (394) concludes the narrative with emphasis on endurance through relationship and generational renewal.

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