The Book of Lost Friends(124)

I have to try to be for these kids what Nathan has been for me. Someone who has more faith in me than I sometimes have in myself. Today is about my students. And about the Lost Friends.

“At the very least, we must tell our stories, mustn’t we? Speak the names?” I slip into my 1800s teacher voice, because suddenly there’s a microphone on a pole hovering dangerously near. “You know, there is an old proverb that says, ‘We die once when the last breath leaves our bodies. We die a second time when the last person speaks our name.’ The first death is beyond our control, but the second one we can strive to prevent.”

“If you say so,” LaJuna acquiesces, and I cringe, hoping the microphone didn’t pick that up. “But I best do it right off, so I don’t lose my nerve. Can I go on and give my reading before the rest?”

I am beyond relieved. “If you start, I’m certain the others will know to follow.” I hope.

I grit my teeth and cross my fingers in the pockets of my plain dotted Swiss schoolmarm dress and hope this comes off the way we planned it, and that these stories make a difference in the minds and hearts of the people who hear them. Nearby, The Book of Lost Friends sits in the display case along with notes and needlework and other mementos from the Century Chest. I think of the Lost Friends, all those people who had the courage to search, to hope, to seek after their lost loves. To take the risk of writing letters, knowing their worst fears might come to pass. The letter might never be answered.

I’ll take that risk as well, one day when the time is right. I’ll look for the baby girl I held for less than a half-hour before a nurse whisked her from my arms, replacing her with a cold, hard-edged square of plastic. A clipboard, bearing papers I was expected to sign.

Everything in me wanted to set the documents aside, tear them up, make them go away. I yearned to call after the squeaky echo of the nurse’s clean white shoes, Bring her back! I want to see her more, longer, again, memorize her face, her smell, her eyes.

I want to keep her.

But I did what was expected. The only thing that was allowed. The only option I was given. I signed the papers and set them on the nightstand, and cried into my pillow, alone.

It’s for the best, I told myself, repeating my mother’s words, the counselor’s words, the nurses’ words. Even my father’s words when I tried going to him for help.

They are the same words I still recite to myself, wrapping them around my body as a comfort on each birthday, each Christmas, every special occasion of every passing year. Twelve of them now. She’d be twelve.

I like to believe that I spared her the guilt and public condemnation that fell crushingly on a fifteen-year-old girl, pregnant by an older man, a neighbor who already had a family of his own. The kind of man who’d take advantage of a fatherless child’s na?ve need to feel worthy and wanted. I like to think I spared that tiny baby girl the shame I carried with me, the disdainful looks other people cast my way, the horrible names my mother called me.

I hope I gave my daughter to wonderful parents who never for a moment let her feel unloved. If I ever see her again, I’ll tell her that she was never unloved, not for a moment. Someone else loved her from her first breath, wanted her, thought of her, hoped for her.

I remember you. I’ve always remembered you.

On that day of reunion, whenever it comes, those are the first words I will say to my own Lost Friend.





Author’s Note


Each time a new book enters the world, it seems as though the most oft-asked question is, How did this story come to be? What inspired it? I’m not sure what this process is like for other writers, but for me there is always a spark, and it is always random. If I went looking for the spark, I’d probably fail to find it.

I never know when it will come my way or what it will be, but I feel it instantly when it happens. Something consuming takes over, and a day that was ordinary…suddenly isn’t anymore. I’m being swept along on a journey, like it or not. I know the journey will be long and I don’t know where it will lead, but I know I have to surrender to it.

The spark that became Hannie’s and Benny’s story came to me in the most modern of ways—via an email from a book lover who’d just spent time with the Foss family while reading Before We Were Yours. She thought there was another, similar, piece of history I should know about. As a volunteer with the Historic New Orleans Collection, she’d been entering database information gleaned from advertisements well over a century old. The goal of the project was to preserve the history of the “Lost Friends” column, and to make it accessible to genealogical and historical researchers via the Internet. But the data entry volunteer saw more than just research material. “There is a story in each one of these ads,” she wrote in her note to me. “Their constant love of family and their continued search for loved ones, some they had not seen in over 40+ years.” She quoted a line that had struck her as she’d closed the cover of Before We Were Yours:

    In your last pages: “For the hundreds who vanished and the thousands who didn’t. May your stories not be forgotten.”



She directed me to the Lost Friends database, where I tumbled down a rabbit hole of lives long gone, stories and emotions and yearning encapsulated in the faded, smudged type of old-time printing presses. Names that survived perhaps nowhere beyond these desperate pleas of formerly enslaved people, once written in makeshift classrooms, at kitchen tables, and in church halls…then sent forth on steam trains and mail wagons, on riverboats and in the saddlebags of rural mail carriers destined for the remote outposts of a growing country. Far and wide, the missives journeyed, carried on wings of hope.