The Book of Lost Friends: A Novel (34 page)

BENNY SILVA—1988 LOUISIANA STATE CAPITOL GROUNDS, BATON ROUGE

A single ladybug lands featherlight on my finger, clings like a living gemstone. A ruby with polka dots and legs. Before a slight breeze beckons my visitor away, an old children’s rhyme sifts through my mind.

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home,

Your house is on fire, and your children are gone.

The words leave a murky shadow inside me as I touch LaJuna’s shoulder. She’s breaking a sweat under the blue-and-gold calico dress. The open-air classroom we’ve set up today as part of a festival on the Louisiana State Capitol grounds is the biggest undertaking yet in our year-long living history project. The opening of the time capsule has provided us with opportunities we could never have dreamed of otherwise. While our pageants have not yet taken us to the cemetery in Augustine, Louisiana—and may never—we’ve told our
Tales from the Underground
at museums and on university campuses, at library festivals and in schools across three states.

The hand-stitched neckline of LaJuna’s costume hangs unevenly over her smooth amber-brown skin, the garment a little too large for the girl inside it. A single puffy scar protrudes from the loosely buttoned cuff. I wonder about the cause of it, but resist allowing my mind to speculate.

What would be the point?
I ask myself.

We all have scars.

It’s when you’re honest about them that you find the people who will love you in spite of your nicks and dents. Perhaps even because of them.

The people who don’t? Those people aren’t the ones for you.

I pause and look around our gathering place under the trees, take in the various Carnegie ladies, as well as my students’ little brothers and sisters, Aunt Sarge, and several parent volunteers, all dressed in period costumes to add authenticity to our project today, to stand in respect and solidarity with those long-ago survivors who are not here to speak their truth. While we’ve told our
Underground
stories many times, this is our first attempt at a recital of the Lost Friends ads. We’ve tried to reimagine how they may have been written over a century ago in churches, on front porches, at kitchen tables, in improvised classrooms where those who had been denied literacy came to learn. In towns and cities all over the country, letters were composed for publication in newspapers like the
Southwestern,
sent out with the hope that loved ones stolen away years, decades, a lifetime before, might be found.

We have the Century Chest and
The Book of Lost Friends
to thank for giving us rock-star status here at the state capitol. It’s enough of a story to have beckoned the TV cameras our way. They’re really here to cover a contentious special election, but they want to film us, too. The media attention has produced an audience of dignitaries and politicians who want to be
seen
supporting our project.

And that has pushed the kids into meltdown mode. They’re terrified—even LaJuna, who is normally a rock.

While the others fumble with nib pens and inkwells, pretending to compose letters to the “Lost Friends” column, or hunch over their papers, mouthing the words of the ads they’re about to recite out loud, LaJuna is just staring off into the trees.

“Fully prepared?” I ask, angling a glance at her work, because I have a feeling she’s not. “You’ve practiced reading it aloud?”

Beside us, Lil’ Ray bends over his desk, distracting himself with a pearl-handled nib pen from the collection I’ve amassed over the years at estate sales and flea markets. He’s given up on pretending to write the “Lost Friends” letter he’ll soon recite for the audience.

If LaJuna doesn’t come through, I have the sinking sense that we’re headed for a train wreck. She should be fully confident, as she knows the ad she’ll be reading very well. We discovered it, neatly cut out and pasted inside the cover of
The Book of Lost Friends,
along with the date it was printed in the
Southwestern.
On either side of the ad, in carefully written letters, are the names of Hannie’s eight lost siblings, her mother, her aunt and three cousins, and when they were found again.

It’s a story of the joy of reunion and the pain of absence, of perseverance and grit.

I see that same grit in LaJuna, passed down through the generations from her five times great-grandmother, Hannie, though at times LaJuna doubts that it’s there.

“I can’t do it.” She sags, defeated in her own mind. “Not…not with
these
people looking on.” Her young face casts miserably toward the bystanders, moneyed men in well-fitting suits and women in expensive dresses, petulantly waving off the afternoon heat with printed handbills and paper fans left over from the morning’s fiery political speeches. Just beyond them, a cameraman stands perched on a picnic table. Another crew member has stationed himself near the front of our classroom, poised with a microphone on a pole.

“You never know what you can do until you try.” I pat her arm, give it a squeeze, trying to brace her up. There’s so much I’d like to say:
Don’t sell yourself short. You’re fine. You’re good enough. You’re
more
than good enough. You’re amazing. Can’t you see it?

It might be a long journey for her, I know. I’ve been there. But it’s possible to come out the other end better, stronger. Eventually you have to stop letting people define you and start defining yourself.

It’s a lesson I’m both teaching and learning.
Name yourself. Claim yourself.
Classroom Constitution, Article Twelve.

“I
can’t,
” she moans, clutching her stomach.

I bundle my cumbersome load of skirts and petticoats to keep them from the dust, then lower myself to catch her gaze. “Where will they hear the story if not from you—the story of being stolen away from family? Of writing an advertisement seeking any word of loved ones, and hoping to save up the fifty cents to have it printed in the
Southwestern
paper, so that it might travel through all the nearby states and territories? How will they understand the desperate need to finally know,
Are my people out there, somewhere?
”

Her thin shoulders lift, then wilt under the pressure. “These folks ain’t here because they care what I’ve got to say. It won’t change anything.”

“Perhaps it will.” Sometimes I wonder if I’m promising more than the world will ever be willing to deliver—if my mother might have been right about all my rainbow and unicorn ideas. What if I’m setting these kids up for an eventual blindsiding punch, especially LaJuna? This girl and I have spent hours and hours sorting books, moving books, dealing in the sale of antique books that turned out to be valuable, plotting and planning what sort of materials will be purchased for the Augustine Carnegie Library with the money that’s coming in. Eventually, it will provide local kids with the sort of state-of-the-art advantages students at Lakeland Prep have. And when the library’s new freestanding sign is erected, its original patron saint will be returned to his proper pedestal to watch over the place into the coming century and beyond. That old library now has a long life ahead of it. It’s Nathan’s intention that Robin’s estate be moved into a foundation that will support not only the library but also the preservation of Goswood Grove and its conversion into a genealogy and history center.

But can all of that, can
any
of that, change the world these television cameras, these politicians, all these onlookers will go back to when they leave this space under the trees? Can a library and a history center really accomplish anything?

“The most important endeavors require a risk,” I tell her. It’s the hardest piece of reality to accept. Striking off into the unknown is terrifying, but if we don’t begin the journey, we’ll never know where it could lead.

The realization grips my throat momentarily, holds me silent, makes me wonder,
Will I ever have the courage to face
my
unknown, to take the risk?
I straighten upward and smooth my gathered skirts, look past the classroom, see Nathan on the fringes of the crowd with the library’s new video camera on his shoulder. He gives me a thumbs-up and adds the sort of smile that says,
I know you, Benny Silva. I know all that’s true about you, and I believe you’re capable of anything.

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 naïve 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.

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.

In their heyday, the Lost Friends ads, published in the
Southwestern Christian Advocate,
a Methodist newspaper, went out to nearly five hundred preachers, eight hundred post offices, and more than four thousand subscription holders. The column header requested that pastors read the contents from their pulpits to spread the word of those seeking the missing. It also implored those whose searches had ended in success to report back to the newspaper, that the news might be used to encourage others. The Lost Friends advertisements were the equivalent of an ingenious nineteenth-century social media platform, a means of reaching the hinterlands of a divided, troubled, and fractious country still struggling to find itself in the aftermath of war.

I knew that very day, as I took in dozens of the Lost Friends ads, meeting family after family, searcher after searcher, that I had to write the story of a family torn apart by greed, chaos, cruelty, despairing of ever again seeing one another. I knew that the Lost Friends ads would provide hope where hope had long ago been surrendered.

Hannie began speaking to me after I read this ad:

I knew that Hannie's situation would, in some ways, be directed by the life of Caroline Flowers, who wrote this ad, but that Hannie's search would lead her to strike off on a quest. Her journey would be life-altering, an odyssey, of sorts. It would change her forever, redirecting her future. For the purposes of Hannie's age and the particularly lawless, perilous postwar era in Texas, I reimagined history a bit, setting the story in 1875, ten years after the ending of the war. While separated families had been placing ads in various newspapers since the close of the war, distribution of the “Lost Friends” column actually sprang to life in 1877 and continued through the early part of the twentieth century.

I hope you felt the connection to Hannie's and Benny's stories as much as I felt the connection to them while writing about them. They are, in my view, the sort of remarkable women who built the legacies we enjoy today. Teachers, mothers, business owners, activists, pioneer farm wives, community leaders who believed, in some large or small way, that they could improve the world for present and future generations. Then they took the risks required to make it happen.

May we all do the same in whatever way we can, in all the places we find ourselves.

And may this book do its part, whatever that part might be.