The Book of Lost Friends

As Lisa Wingate acknowledges in her Author’s Note, the Lost Friends ads that become a critical element of Hannie and Juneau Jane’s perilous journey through Texas and, a century later, are so influential in Benny’s English class project are, in fact, grounded in history. For nearly fifteen years during the height of Reconstruction in the South, the Methodist Church sponsored a small newspaper called the Southwestern Christian Advocate. In it, for a nominal fee, distraught, and often desperate, family members, mostly Black, could place ads detailing what they knew about the circumstances of their family’s separation before and during the war. In turn, Methodist pastors were directed to read the ads to their congregation in the hope that the circumstances might ring a bell and help reunite families. At the height of the newspaper’s circulation more than 5000 issues were distributed each week. The ads themselves were often then posted in churches, public buildings, libraries, post offices, even bars.

The archive of the New Orleans Historic Association today maintains the largest cache of these ads, a resource Wingate herself acknowledges as the source for the interchapters in the novel which feature facsimiles of the original ads with the original names and dates. Several websites are devoted to cataloguing these ads as well. The facsimile ads in the novel give it a sense of historic authenticity and verisimilitude. The ads describe with journalistic objectivity the sheer emotional heartache of these family separated by the cruelty, greed, and insensitivity of those who trafficked in human beings. They serve as sobering reminders to a nation that still struggles to understand the generational effects of slavery. Like Benny’s students, the reader learns through the ads they find in Hannie’s book that they discover in the local library the actual historic record, the human story of slavery and the toll it took on families.

Hannie considers this symbolic power of the ads even as she first struggles to understand what is posted on the walls in the church where she and the other two travelers find refuge. The little square ads, she says, are like those men, women, and children she remembers being kept in pens at the trader’s yard long ago: “Every ad, every square, a story, a person, sold from here to there” (188). 

When in conversation with the concerned aunt of one of her more promising students, Benny alludes to the “The Star Thrower,” a 1969 essay cum parable by American anthropologist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), an essay she studied in college, the novel introduces a powerful symbol for how to help in a world steeped in tragedy.

Given the sheer range of the human tragedies that the novel explores—whether the centuries of exploitation of Africans through the cruelties of slavery or the difficult circumstances facing public education in contemporary Augustine—despair would be an easy, even logical, option. The magnitude of the thousands of families searching for loved ones lost to the machinery of slavery and a century later the magnitude of the crisis in public education among minority students evidenced by Benny’s overcrowded class in her underfunded public school discourages compassion and makes ironic even the smallest gesture of help. Indeed, the student’s aunt initially accosts Benny because she is suspicious of Benny’s attempts to help her niece apply to colleges might give the girl dangerous hope.

The parable tells of a man walking along a hurricane-battered shoreline where hundreds of starfish, washed up during the storm, struggle, dying, in the sand. He sees another man engaged in what is evidently a hopeless rescue mission. Methodically this other man walks down the beach, bends to pick up a distressed starfish, and carefully, lovingly hurls it back into the surf. The narrator tells the man there are too many starfish, that he cannot possibly save them all. The man acknowledges as much, and then calmly picks up another struggling starfish and tosses it out into the surf. I cannot save them, he says, but that one I helped. The narrator, much disturbed, returns the next day and helps the man in his impossible endeavor.

The story provides a symbolic reading of the power of compassion, the urgency, the need to help even when the odds are against any success. More particularly the story argues that compassion is contagious, that the example of hope inspires others. That compassion drives the Lost Ads endeavor. The project refuses to accept that an entire generation of Black families is simply, irremovably destroyed. The ads help repair that damage, one family at a time. That compassion drives Benny. As a first-year teacher, a naïve optimist as she always calls herself, she refuses to accept the indifference and the hopelessness of her students as a given. She will help them, she determines, win them over to hope one at a time.

The novel widens the traditional definition of a teacher to suggest that a teacher is really anyone willing to involve themselves with the emotional, psychological, and intellectual evolution of another.

The first-person narrative of Benny Silva records the ups and considerable lows of her first three months as an English teacher in a poor rural school in the impoverished Deep South. She is initially frustrated. She feels apart, disconnected, uninvolved with the lives of her students. As part of her efforts to erase a huge student loan, she had agreed to work at least three years in a designated high-risk public school system. In Augustine, she struggles to understand the poverty of her students, the dysfunctionality of their families, and supremely the logic of a school district uninterested and unwilling to invest in their own students. Fresh out of college where teaching was entirely theoretical, Benny begins from her first class to understand that a teacher does much more than keep a class under control and impart information.

The fiasco over Orwell’s Animal Farm reveals that to her. Her students see no relevance to their lives in the book, and Benny falls back on cliché ideas about the value and worth of education. It is clearly time for the teacher to become the student. Indeed, over the course of her first weeks, Benny learns more from her students than they learn from her. They show her not only the impact of their socio-economic realities but how difficult it is for them to see a point to their own education. Jobs are all but gone, college is out of the question. In showing Benny their humanity and opening up to her about their dreams, Benny becomes student and, in turn, becomes the effective teacher she wants to be. Benny, in opening up her students to the difficult and complicated past they share, teaches them the complex nature of their moment in history and prepares them to engage the challenges of the world, their identity at last defined.

The dynamic between Benny and her students is far from the only teacher-student dynamic the novel interrogates. Benny teaches Nathan about the importance of embracing history and not running from the past; Nathan teaches Benny the importance of engaging the present and, as their friendship deepens, the need for risking love. A century earlier, Hannie teaches a reluctant Juneau Jane wisdom of patience and stoicism. For her part, Juneau Jane, a brassy, feisty 14-year-old spitfire, teaches the quiet, patient Hannie the importance of action and the need to move away from the comfortable and the routine if dreams were ever to be anything more than dreams.

The novel then is a complicated matrix of teachers and students, a mutual dynamic of instruction that, in turn, creates the very kind of community that both Benny and Hannie see as the most viable solution for a world scarred by divisions, hate, and cruelty.