BOOK OF LOST FRIENDS: historical fiction

Lisa Wingate has followed her bestseller, Before We Were Yours with The Book of Lost Friends.

Lost Friends is written in two converging story lines;  staged first in a poverty riddled Louisiana school room in 1987 and alternates with an intensely emotional story set around a decaying  Louisiana plantation during the Reconstruction period in 1875. It is not a happy story, the Civil War is over and the southern states are in turmoil. But it is an easy read and makes you think about the plight of women and people of color during this lawless period of time in our history.

Louisiana, 1987
“Bennie” Silva, a new college graduate, has accepted a teaching position at a poor rural Louisiana school in exchange for clearing her student debt. She finds the kids mired in poverty and without purpose beyond survival. Most see no purpose to learn about a world that has no interest in them and a different future they can’t even image much less strive to reach.

Bennie discovers a book filled with crumbling newspaper articles written by emancipated slaves and published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate. Each article a desperate plea for help in locating family members ripped apart by the auction block. This discovery becomes the catalyst to encourage Bennie’s students to learn of their own legacy and take pride in the part they play in passing that legacy on to the next generation.

Louisiana, 1875
Hannie Gossett was born a slave. In the years leading up to the Civil War, her Master, hoping to avoid the prospect of losing control of his “slave property” through emancipation,  sent all of Hannie’s extended family west to Texas where he hoped to establish a new plantation. The man overseeing the movement of the slaves sold them off one by one between Louisiana and Texas and absconded with the money. Hannie, at six years old, was the only slave from her family recovered and returned to Louisiana by the Master. She remembers that terrible time and dutifully wears her three blue beads Mama gave each family member so they might recognize each other in a chance meeting in the future.

Every chance there is, Mama says . . .[remember] who’s been carried away from us, and what’s the names of the buyers that took them from the auction block and where’re they gone to. ‘Hardy at Big Creek, to a man name LeBas from Woodville, Het at Jatt carried off by a man name Palmer from Big Woods….’

It’s now 1875. The war is over. Master Gossett is now called Mister Gossett. Missus Gossett remains a feared  cruel tyrant. The Gossett’s son, a chip off his mother’s slimy block, is in serious legal trouble out west and his father has left Louisiana for Texas to rescue him. Their daughter, Lavinia, now a young teenager, is a spoiled hate-filled brat, and much to everyone’s relief, has been shipped off to a boarding school. And Mister Gossett has a not-so-secret on-going relationship with a Creole woman that has produced his much loved mixed-race daughter, Juneau Jane. Talk about an dysfunctional family!

It’s 1875. The slaves have been “liberated” and have become sharecroppers with signed land contracts set to mature in the near future. Hannie is now eighteen-years-old and concerned for her future; distrustful of the Gossetts’ honoring the land contracts.

Mister Gossett, as stated, was en-route to Texas to rescue his son and has not been heard from for over four months. Ol’ Tati, caretaker to all the “stray children”, sends Hannie in the dark of night, disguised as a yard-boy to the big house to find their land contracts before the Missus can destroy them in the Mister’s absence.

Hannie is shocked by what she discovers when she arrives at the big house. Lavinia is home from boarding school and working with her mortal enemy, Juneau Jane, to find their father’s will and business papers! Failing to find them, Lavinia furiously orders a carriage driver to take her and Juneau Jane to see her father’s business partner. Hannie spotting a chance to find out what these two are planning, taking a chance she won’t be recognized in her disguise, drives the two half-sisters for what she believes will be a short drive to the partner’s office.

That’s it! All you are going to get from me. I’ll leave you with a clue to the book’s title.  Hannie, Juneau Jane and Lavinia travel on  a long dangerous and complicated journey. They seek refuge one night in an old building. They find the walls wallpapered with newspapers articles from the Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper. Hannie is shocked to learn the articles were written by former slaves looking for lost kin.

NOTE:
The Southwestern Christian Advocate newspaper actually published a Lost Friends column beginning in 1877 and continued for over twenty years. The author based Hannie, Lavinia, and Juneau Jane on an article written by a former slave named Caroline Flowers.

NEVER CAUGHT : the Washingtons’ relentless pursuit of their runaway slave Ona Judge

In January of 2018, a review of a new book featuring George Washington and his runaway slave named Ona “Oney” Judge caught my attention. I picked up a copy to review for Black History Month in 2019.

NEVER CAUGHT – The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge is a narrative non-fiction. The book is heavily footnoted and supplemented with a lengthy bibliography and index. In a twist from most historical works on Washington that focus on his evolving beliefs about the concept of slavery, Never Caught flips the script. Erica Armstrong Dunbar examines what it means to be born a free person into a world where you are trapped in slavery.  A world where every effort is taken to strip you of your humanity and rights as a human being. In narrating the unearthed facts of Ona Judge Staines life, Dunbar exposes the raw facts of slavery -man’s inhumanity against man.

I met Ona Judge Staines in the archives. . . I was conducting research. . . about nineteenth-century black women in Philadelphia and I came across an advertisement about a runaway slave. . . called “Oney Judge”. She had escaped from the President’s House. . . How could it be that I never heard of this woman. (Erica Armstrong Dunbar)

Quick. Tell me the first ten things that come to mind about the first president of the United States of America. Bet they include: He was married to Martha. Lived in Mount Vernon, Virginia.  Had false teeth (ivory not wood). Was trained as a surveyor. Fought in the American Revolution.  Became our first President. Never lived in Washington D.C. because it didn’t exist in his lifetime.  Never told a lie (that is a lie).  Served two terms in office. We celebrate a national holiday on his birthday.

What? No mention that George at the tender age of eleven, following his father’s untimely death, inherited a 280-acre farm with ten slaves? By the time he married Martha, he personally owned over 100 slaves. Martha Parke Custis, widow of Daniel Park Custis, brought 84 dower slaves from the Custis estate to Mount Vernon upon her marriage. Dower slaves are part of an estate and can only be inherited by members of that estate. George and Martha controlled them but did not own them and could not set them free. Upon Martha’s death, the dower slaves would be passed along like fine china or an heirloom chair to living members of the Custis estate.

George Washington was reputed to be a “kinder” slave owner which meant he fed and provided for his slaves somewhat better than others. His hot-temper has been sanitized in history and ask the slaves that were housed in the smoke house in the new capital if they had five-star accommodations.

A favorite dower slave of Martha’s, known only as Mulatto Betty, gave birth in 1773 to a daughter named Ona Marie and fathered by Andrew Judge, a white indentured servant. Ona’s “carefree” childhood ended when she was nine years old. She was sent to work full-time in the mansion to become Martha Washington’s personal servant and to receive training as a seamstress from her mother. She excelled at both tasks earning her a “most favored slave” status.

As our first President-elect headed north to New York and the nation’s new capital, he knew slavery laws in the northern states were unraveling; the early smells of manumission and freedom floating in the air. He hand-picked slaves he thought he could trust not to run away if they learned that freedom was a possibility – Ona Judge, now in her teens, was high on that list.

Ona played her part carefully. She yearned for freedom. Yearned for a life where her safety and well being wasn’t subjected to the whims of a trigger tempered slave owner. For safeties sake she outwardly projected submission and affection for the Washington family; a family riddled with grief, misery, and poor health. Perhaps in some way she believed the Washington’s had special feelings for her; they did allow her more liberties to travel within the northern city unaccompanied. It is more likely allowing her to dress nicely was meant to reflect more on their social status than on her well-being.

She learned the truth about her place in their lives when the national capital moved to Philadelphia. Pennsylvania law “required emancipation of all adult slaves who were brought into the commonwealth for more than a period of six months.”  The President, financially strapped back on the plantation feared the lost property value of freed slaves.  To protect his investments, Washington devised a shifty system of uprooting his Philadelphia slaves and rotating back to Mount Vernon before the six months deadline.

What the others thought about their repeatedly uprooted lives we do not know. We do know that Ona knew of the progress toward freedom around her. She guardedly watched for that one split second in time where she could chance leaving. When Ona learned that she would be given as a wedding present to Washington’s volatile granddaughter during the next rotation back to Virginia, she knew it was now or never. Taking her life in her hands, she reached out to the free blacks in Philadelphia for help and fled. Ona, now twenty-two-years old and illiterate, headed out into the scary world alone as a fugitive willing to face death or capture.

Her harrowing journey took her to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She found menial labor and despite the back breaking work, enjoyed her veiled freedom. One can only imagine the horror she felt the day she was recognized on the street by a friend of Washington. Once notified she had been located, Washington put on a full court press, illegally using the power of his office, to have a local government official convince her to return of her own volition. After failing at that attempt, Washington repeatedly sought to locate and physically return her. His tiny slave outwitted him at every turn.

Ona fled to Greenland, New Hampshire and stayed out of the grasp of capture for over fifty years. She married, had children, kept a low profile and missed her biological family still back at Mount Vernon.

Shortly before her death February 25, 1848, Ona, nearly 80 years old and still a fugitive slave of the Custis estate, gave interviews with two abolitionists newspapers. Both interviews appear in the appendix. They are believed to be a unique opportunity to view life as a slave in the Washington presidency.

“When asked if she is not sorry she left Washington, as she has labored so much harder since, than before, her reply is ‘No, I am free, and I have, I trust, been made a child of God by the means‘”.

Highly recommend reading for young adults and those interested in history. A chance to look behind the curtains of the first First Family. A chance to learn about a young black woman determined to be remembered – a human being and a child of God.

Second Mrs. Hockaday

The Second Mrs. Hockaday

Author | Susan Rivers
Algonquin | January 2017
Hardcover: 272 pages
ISBN: 978-1-61620-581-2
Genre: Historical Fiction/Civil War

★★★☆☆

August 19, 1865

Dearest Mildred, Of all the misgivings to which we women are prone, none is more pernicious than the suspicion that we were too easily won.

Much like Fair and Tender Ladies (Lee Smith) or the Color Purple (Alice Walker), The Second Mrs. Hockaday is told in letters, diaries and correspondence. The book is loosely based on fact.

The book opens with a letter written by Placidia Fincher Hockaday from the Holland County, South Carolina jail dated July 20, 1865. The letter is addressed to her cousin, Mildred. The details of her incarceration are left out of the letter.

She reminisces in that letter about the memorable April day she first met her husband, Major Gryffth Hockaday, when she was 17. “On my deathbed I shall remember that April day if I remember anything at all…”

She had spent most of the memorable day riding a spirited horse and arrived back at her father’s farm, sweaty, dirty and wild-haired. She discovers her father talking to a mysterious Confederate officer, taller and thinner [than father] with a wind-burned face as craggy as a shagbark stump.

The Major stays with the Fincher family overnight to attend Placidia’s step-sister’s wedding. We learn that Major Hockaday’s first wife, Janet, died recently leaving a child, Charles. The morning after the wedding, Placidia’s surprised father tells her the Major has made an offer of marriage. Placidia’s relationship with her step-mother and step-siblings is strained and her father is dying. Believing a better future lies with the Major she accepts the offer of marriage despite only meeting him hours before.

The newlyweds arrive at the Major’s farm and it is not the vision Placidia expected.  The farm is failing, rundown, and too few slaves to work it properly.  Two days after they arrive, the Major is called back to war service leaving the 17 year old bride alone in this new strange world to tend an infant and manage the affairs of a failing Southern farm.

Two years pass before the Hockadays reunite. The Major, headstrong and trigger-tempered arrives to discover that his wife has born a child in his absence. The child died. His immediate reaction was fury and he accuses Placidia of murder. He presses charges and she is arrested.

Placidia’s life and that of the Major’s over those two years of separation are told in correspondence that flips back and forth in time between wartime and their lives after the war, producing a somewhat disjointed story line. The truth behind Placidia’s accused crime isn’t revealed until near the end and is as heartbreaking and ruthless as you imagine it must have been.

As a reflection of the times, the story poignantly describes the plight of the slaves, the horrors of war and the struggles of all Southern families to survive during and after the war. Their stories are heartbreaking. There are secondary characters that will turn your stomach. There are moments that will leave you filled with hope for the future. I found the final chapters had the most meat and were worth the long tease to what really happened to Placidia. The “crime” would prove to be a dark personally held secret that percolated behind the ether of daily life through three generations.  In the end, the reader is left to wonder if Placidia’s final decision was wise.

My overall opinion was very positive. The violent scenes were handled carefully; accurate enough to be honest but not extreme enough to be overly graphic. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in historical fiction.

I would like to thank Netgalley.com and the publisher, Algonquin Books/Algonquin Young Readers, for the ARC e-reader in exchange for my unbiased review.