The Book of Lost Friends(121)
“Your family’s story. All of it. The truth.” I recognize so many connections from my students’ work. Tracing the lines upward, I move past branches that dwindle and disappear, fading like estuaries into the ocean of time. Death. Disease. War. Infertility. The end of this family line and that one.
Other branches continue, twisting through the decades. I see Granny T and Aunt Dicey. Their lineage travels back to both the black and the white Gossetts. To the grandmother they have in common, Hannie, born 1857, enslaved.
“The New Century ladies,” I say, and point to Hannie’s leaf. “This is the grandmother that Granny T told my class about, the one who started the restaurant. Hannie was born here at Goswood Grove, enslaved. She’s also the grandmother of the woman who used to live in the graveyard house, Miss Retta.”
I’m fascinated, astounded. I let my hand travel outward, onto blank sections of Robin’s canvas. “A few of my kids would be right around here somewhere, LaJuna, Tobias—and Sarge, too. They’d all be farther along on this branch.”
I feel the tingle of history coming to life as I trace backward through the generations again. “Hannie’s mother is biracial, a half sister to the Gossetts living in the Grand House at the time. This generation, Lyle, Lavinia, Juneau Jane, and Hannie, are brother, sister, half sister, and a cousin in some form or fashion. Lyle and Lavinia die fairly young, and…that leaves the daughter of the second wife to…whoa…”
Nathan looks up from his study of the family tree, meets my eye curiously, then steps in beside me to take a closer look.
I tap a finger to one leaf, then another. “This woman, the mother of Juneau Jane, is not William Gossett’s second wife; she’s a mistress, a free woman of color. Her daughter, Juneau Jane LaPlanche, is born while William Gossett is married to Maude Loach-Gossett. He’s living here in this house as the owner of the plantation. He already has a son with Maude, and then he fathers two daughters less than two years apart, one with his wife and one with his mistress. Lavinia and Juneau Jane.”
I know such things went on, that an entire social system existed in parts of New Orleans and other places, through which wealthy men kept mistresses, raised what were casually referred to as left-hand families, sent mixed-race sons and daughters off for education abroad or kept them in convent boarding schools, or provided tradesmen’s education for them. Still, I can imagine the human drama that must have simmered below the surface of such arrangements. Jealousy. Resentment. Bitterness. Competition.
Nathan glances over but doesn’t answer. He’s tracing something up from the roots of the tree, toward the branches, the path of his fingertip connecting the tiny house-shaped symbols that track ownership of Goswood Grove.
“Here’s the thing,” he says, and stops on the leaf that represents William Gossett’s younger daughter, the one born to the mistress. “I can’t figure out how it is that Gossetts still own this house today. Because here, the last Gossett son, Lyle, dies. The Grand House and land pass to Juneau Jane LaPlanche, who, according to Robin’s tree, never has children. Even if she did, their name wouldn’t have been Gossett.”
“Unless this is just where the research stopped. Maybe Robin never got any further. She was obviously still working on the project. It seems almost like…an obsession.” I imagine Nathan’s sister poring over these documents, this quilt of the family history she was creating. What did she plan to do with it?
Nathan seems equally perplexed. “That there are two strains of the family is sort of a secret that everyone knows about, to be honest.” He straightens away from the table, frowning. “I’m sure it’s something the rest of the family, and probably a lot of the people in town, would prefer not be brought up again, but no one would be shocked…except for, maybe, this part.” He taps the tiny white felt house that indicates the property’s passage into the hands of Juneau Jane. Stretching over me, he unpins an envelope nearby. Hannie is written on it in Robin’s neat, even script.
A tiny felt representation of Goswood Grove House drops from underneath the pin and lands beside Hannie’s felt leaf. The xeroxed 1887 newspaper article inside Hannie’s envelope tells us why it was there.
The story goes on to describe twelve years of legal attempts to strip Juneau Jane of her inheritance, first by William Gossett’s widow, Maude Loach-Gossett, who refused to accept the small settlement left to her in William’s will, and then by more distant relatives bearing the Gossett name. Various former slaves and sharecroppers came forth to testify on Juneau Jane’s behalf and to validate her parentage. A lawyer from New Orleans tirelessly argued her case, but in the end it was of little use. Cousins of William Gossett stole her inheritance, and Juneau Jane ended up with forty acres of bottomland bordering the Augustine cemetery.
The land I’m living on now.
Her eventual dispensation of that land is given in her own words, in a copy of a will handwritten in 1912. Robin stapled it to the back of the article. Juneau’s house and deeded land are left to Hannie, “who has been as close as a sister to me and is the person who has shown me, always, how to be brave.” Any further inheritance that might eventually be recovered in her name is left to benefit children of the community, “whom I hope I have served faithfully as a teacher and a friend.”
The final sheet of Robin’s attached research is a newspaper article about the 1901 opening of the Augustine Colored Carnegie Library. I recognize the photo of the library’s New Century Club women. Decked out in their finest hats and dresses—Sunday clothes around the turn of the century when the photo was taken—they’re posed on the steps of the beautiful new building for the ribbon cutting. Granny T brought the original print of that photo to my class the first day she told us the story. She’d unearthed it from the storage boxes where the library’s history was tucked away at the end of segregation, when libraries were no longer restricted by race.