The Book of Lost Friends(120)

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.





CHAPTER 28


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.


C = citizen

E = enslaved

I = indentured

L = libre

A = affranchi



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…”