51 pages • 1 hour read
The Book of Lost Friends
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Chapters 6-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 6-11 Summary
LaJuna’s Aunt Sarge cautions Benny that the roof needs to be replaced. She suggests Benny contact Nathan Gossett, the owner of the property. She warns Benny that he is difficult to track down. He spends most of his time fishing shrimp in the Gulf.
The old cemetery adjacent to her rental home intrigues Benny. She imagines each of the dead and the stories they could tell: “I want to understand this reedy, marshy corner of the world that scratches its existence equally from land, and river, and swamp, and sea…I close my eyes and I hear voices. Thousands whispering, all at once. I can’t make out a single one, but I know they’re here. What do they have to say?” (80). She investigates the crumbling, neglected Gossett mansion itself with its unkempt gardens and wild-growth trees. She even peers through the dusty windows of the ground floor library and sees the shelves and shelves of books. She is enchanted. In her difficult and lonely childhood, shuffling home to home between her parents, books had been her refuge, her escape. When other kids picked on her for her social awkwardness, she found consolation in books, feeling that they built her identity (100). She wants to get into the mansion’s library and bring those books into her classroom. On impulse, she borrows a pair of binoculars from a colleague and heads back to Goswood Grove to get a better look at the titles.
Determined to ask Nathan Gossett to replace her roof and for his permission to go into the library, she heads to the local farmer’s market where, every Thursday, Nathan comes to town to sell his shrimp. The meeting goes well. He is not at all what Benny expected, hardly a cliche Southern aristocrat. He wears cowboy boots, a faded t-shirt, and a dirty baseball cap. He has little interest in the library’s holdings and even gives a stunned Benny a key to the house and his permission to take what she wants for the school. That afternoon, she goes to the mansion. She heads directly to the library. It stuns her: “The room is glorious…so many books. They’ve spread like the crazy growths of ivy outside the house. The floors, the space under the massive desk, the billiard table, and every inch of every shelf is laden” (134). She feels “drenched in leather and paper and gold edges and ink and words” (134).
Back in 1875, Hannie, left alone while Missy and Juneau head into the lawyer’s office, hides in a barn along the Mississippi River for safety. She overhears bits of a vaguely menacing conversation between the lawyer’s henchman, Moses, and another man about transporting crates down to the docks to load onto the Genesee Star, a boat heading up river bound for Texas. She sees that Missy’s horse has already been loaded onto the boat. Momentarily, Hannie considers running. She is sure the women are dead and even if they are not why should she care? She asks, “Why’s it my trouble what young Missy’s got herself into? Her and that girl, that Juneau Jane, who’s been fetched up like a queen all these years” (92). She worries, however, that her claim to 40 acres might be in jeopardy. She wants to find out where the two girls are.
At first light, Hannie prowls about the huge crates waiting to be loaded and finds Missy’s necklace, which has fallen through the slats of one of the crates. She fears the girls have been killed and their bodies stuffed in the crates. Hannie watches from a hiding spot as the crates are loaded onto the Genesee Star. Then she follows, hiding herself on the boat with the help of a white boy, Gus McKlatchey, himself on the run to Texas. Gus befriends Hannie (still in disguise), who he assumes is a boy. Hannie tells him her suspicions about Missy and Juneau, and Gus tells her that he has heard moans and thumps coming from the two crates. Hannie has little time to do anything. She is caught on deck from behind by Moses. In the struggle, she loses her necklace before the man tosses her into the river.
Dazed and wobbly, Hannie pulls herself out of the river and walks along the banks for a day until she comes to a landing. She hides in a barn where she finds Missy’s horse, Missy, and Juneau, half-naked sleeping in the barn’s scattered hay. They “ain’t dead,” Hannie decides, “but they ain’t alive ” (141). Determined to get them out, Hannie carefully carries each to the horse and leads them horse out of the barn and heads out into the night, uncertain how she will explain to anyone how a “a colored boy, toting two white girls, half-dressed and tied belly-down on horses” (143) came to be wandering the Louisiana backcountry.
Chapters 6-11 Analysis
As the novel shuttles between 1875 and 1987, these sections introduce three ideas critical to the emotional evolution of Benny and Hannie: 1) the past cannot be ignored; 2) the heart needs to open up to the generosity of compassion and caring; and 3) the heart responds to the abiding, tonic spell of storytelling.
These sections engage two genres of fiction: the mystery thriller and the road adventure. Benny’s hesitant exploration of the Gossett family estate (itself collapsing into significant neglect) evokes a foreboding sense of mystery. The abandoned estate echoes scores of mystery stories about the forbidding impact of long buried family secrets. As Benny picks her way gingerly through the tangled gardens and then through the graveyard with its broken tombstones, the mood of neglect creates a clear response from Benny, who believes there must be a secret in this family’s forgotten past to account for why such a “magnificent” (84) home was allowed to collapse into disrepair.
As Benny peers into the thick, wavy glass of the dusty windows of the mansion, she feels the magnetic pull of mystery. She is, after all, an English major. She is drawn by the feeling that here are the ghosts of what most certainly must be lots of stories. “Books are tools. But the stories that aren’t in books, the ones no one has written down…those are tools too,” she notes (80). As she walks through the family cemetery, as she looks at the inscriptions on the tilting, mossy tombstones, she feels the nearness of those untold stories: “Maybe [these stories] could help me understand this place and my students. Maybe they could help my students understand each other” (80). Benny decides in these chapters the transformative power of history may be a way to reach her students. Reaching her students through the vehicle of sharing stories appears to her in the graveyard as an epiphany.
Benny’s narrative sets up a traditional mystery story and asserts the viability of storytelling and the need to connect with others; Hannie’s travels draw on the elements of an adventure story, a road trip involving the most unlikely of traveling companions. If the chapters with Benny explore her psychology and reveal her emotional responses in scenes of limited action, the chapters with Hannie are more focused on exteriors, and the adrenaline rush of face-paced events. The account of the strange disappearance of her two traveling companions, Hannie’s stealing through the shadows along the dangerous docks teeming with roughnecks and scalawags before she stows away on the Genesee Star, and her dramatic and unsettling discovery of Missy’s necklace are scenes rich with cinematic flair, scenes driven not by interiors but by the rich energy of suspense and twists. No scene here more dramatically reveals that cinematic flair than the moment when Hannie is unceremoniously tossed off the slow moving boat by Moses, a foreboding man she believes at this point to be a threat, though she will learn much later that Moses tosses her off the boat to protect her from the thugs hired to protect the Gossett properties, a plot twist worthy of the grand tradition of nineteenth-century storytelling.
The Hannie chapters, in short, are the very stories that a century later Benny will feel all around her in the graveyard. Hannie’s riveting story of stowing away on a boat bound for Texas with her two friends, maybe alive, maybe dead, stuffed in shipping crates brings to life history itself. The reader discovers what Benny intuits in the graveyard and what Benny’s students will shortly discover: the pull of history as storytelling.
The emerging character of Nathan Gossett especially embodies this sense of embracing history as story. In a novel so completely immersed in the past, Nathan represents a striking contrast. With his casual and flippant attitude toward his own family’s troubling history, Nathan initially embodies a life deliberately cut off from the past. He seems carefree, laissez-faire, and even unengaged. He has thinned his life to the simple urgencies of the present. He spends little time in Augustine. He prefers the escape of shrimping out in the gentle openness of the Gulf. As he will later explain, the death of his sister at a young age (a sister who neglected her own health in order excavate their family’s history) convinces him that the past is toxic and best left alone.
Like Benny’s students, however, Nathan will be given a crash course the need to listen to the stories of the past. As Benny wonders as she wanders through the neglected graveyard, these stories can help those in the present live fuller, richer, deeper lives by connecting them to others, as the slow-motion revelation of the Gossett family secret will ultimately bring together Nathan and Benny.
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