The Book of Lost Friends - Lisa Wingate Page 0,173

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.

In this newspaper copy, Robin has identified two of the club members, noting Hannie and Juneau Jane, above their images. When I trail down to a smaller photo positioned among the text, I recognize the two women standing alongside the bronze statue of a saint, as it awaits placement on its nearby pedestal.

I also recognize the saint.

The library’s first book, the bold print says on the caption.

I rest my chin on Nathan’s shoulder and read on,

Within this fine marble pedestal, the members of the library’s formation committee have placed a Century Chest that was moved from the original Colored Library behind the church, to the library’s fine new Carnegie building. The items within the chest, contributed by library founders in 1888, were not to be seen for one hundred years from that time. Mrs. Hannie Gossett Salter, recently moved from Texas, here sees to the placement of a statue donated in memory of her late husband, the much-revered Deputy U.S. Marshal Elam Salter, with whom she traveled the country as he spoke of the life of a frontier lawman after an injury forced his retirement from field duty. Donation of the statue is courtesy of Texas and Louisiana cattleman Augustus McKlatchy, a lifelong friend of the Salter family and patron supporter of this new library building and many others.

Within the Century Chest, Mrs. Salter places The Book of Lost Friends, which was used to inform distant congregations of the “Lost Friends” column of