This is a book with at least two stories, all that intersect around family, and history. We start meeting Benedetta Silva, known as Benny as she starts her first job teaching at a poor rural school in Louisiana to help pay off her student debt. Although she is white, she is living in poverty until her first paycheck arrives. She is intimidated by the unruly teens that await her, fighting with each other, and never listening. She tries everything to get them engaged, even buying treats for those that are hungry from her low salary.
Next we meet Hannie and her slave family were being moved from Louisiana to Texas by a relative to keep them from being set free. Out of sight of the owners, the relative starts to sell off the family in ones or twos the whole way there. The last to be sold, Hannie finally gets the buyer to understand that she was stolen and sold away from her rightful owner. Along the way, she had kept track of who was sold where, in the hopes to reunite with them in the future.
As we follow Hannie, who is returned to the original plantation alone but strikes out as a sharecropper with a few other slaves that had remained, we see that she is smart and resourceful. Lavinia, the plantation owner’s pampered daughter, meets with Juneau Jane, the plantation owner’s mulatto daughter by his mistress. Afraid that Lavinia’s arrival meant that the head of the Gossett plantation was dead, Hannie listens in to find out what is happening because there was only one year left on the lease before the sharecropping land was to be free and clear for her and those working it. The three end up in an odyssey to find the father, to determine who was entitled to what property. At one point the three end up in a church, where the walls were covered in posters of letters to friends, where people were looking to reconnect with those that had been sold away.
Benny, who is renting out a home near the plantation because it was the cheapest she could find, needs help when the roof starts to leak. Through this challenge, Benny meets marvelous women that have kept the community together and give Benny hope for surviving. Through the stories that Benny hears from Mrs T, she decides that this is the story that would resonate with her students, and asks her to come and tell it to the kids. The kids are hooked and come up with a way to bring the stories to life. While not approved by the school board, made up of rich white folks, the stories are coming from the Carnegie Library, a source of pride of the community at one time. Facing a threatening police force, and the school board that sends their own kids to a private school instead, Benny is told to just let the kids get a vocational education as they were not better than that.
Throughout the chapters flipping between the two, actual letters written and sent are included. These had been published in the Southern Methodist newspaper and was shared via pulpits across the country. The heartwrenching stories behind each of these hit home for me. I did not know that these adverts had been created for people to finds each other in the late 1800 – early 1900s. I did, however, understand these completely. As a Jew, I am fully aware that after WWII, the same was happening in the displacement camps throughout Europe with people searching for any connections that may be left. It is the guilt at being alive, combined by the fear of being alone, that makes these so sad. While the longing is always there, sometimes it is easier not to ask the question for fear of the answer.
That also is true when it comes to a hard past. In the Louisiana is the reality that slavery did happen. Ancestors we part. But in order to remain in power, the stories and intimidation continued. It is this need to keep the power structure as it is, and the fear of what will happen if it is not, that keeps the true history of the plantation and those that lived on it. Until you face the choices that you made, good or bad, and acknowledge them, you are doomed to spend your life covering up for them.
The Source 4 Books 