Juneau Jane LaPlanche

Quick Facts

Fourteen-year-old mixed-race daughter of William Gossett and his Creole mistress; raised in New Orleans with education and relative privilege. First major scene: a clandestine visit to the Goswood Grove library at night (Chapter 3). Travels with her white half-sister, Lavinia Gossett, and a formerly enslaved girl, Hannie Gossett, after her father vanishes. Known for her literacy, resolve, and ultimately for assembling The Book of Lost Friends; later becomes a teacher and co-founds the Augustine Colored Carnegie Library.

Who They Are

Bold and bookish, yet precariously placed, Juneau Jane LaPlanche lives between worlds. As a free, educated girl of mixed heritage in 1875, she is both privileged and vulnerable—“fawn-pale,” with “silvery bright” eyes that others read as uncanny, a body marked by liminality as much as her social standing. When her father disappears, her personal pursuit of inheritance and belonging widens into a communal mission, embodying the Theme: The Search for Family and Identity. Traveling beside Lavinia Gossett and Hannie Gossett, she must navigate not only dangerous terrain but also the hard edges of caste and color in the Reconstruction South—a crucible that exposes the costs and contradictions of the Theme: Injustice, Race, and Social Hierarchy.

Personality & Traits

Juneau Jane blends hauteur with humility. She arrives certain of her father’s promises and her own right to inheritance, yet her travels strip away self-protective pride and awaken a durable moral imagination. Sheltered refinement turns into field-tested grit; erudition becomes a tool for repair. Her empathy is not innate so much as chosen—built from what she sees, records, and refuses to ignore.

• Determined and tenacious: She risks a covert return to Goswood Grove, scaling library shelves for evidence of her claim; later vows, “I’ll not be returning. Not until I’ve found Father, or the proof of my inheritance” (p. 278).
• Brave and resourceful: Despite her convent schooling, she navigates danger alone at night (p. 50) and improvises in peril, including the perilous climb through the library stacks (p. 57).
• Educated and articulate: Fluent in French phrases and keen logic, she cuts through Lavinia’s schemes with cool argumentation, using literacy as leverage when physical power is not available.
• Proud yet wary: She carries herself with practiced poise, but her suspicion of Lavinia’s motives proves justified—an armor that keeps her from being outmaneuvered.
• Empathetic and principled: Witnessing Hannie’s search transforms her ambitions; she channels her skills into recording names and notices, ultimately curating a lifeline of memory in The Book of Lost Friends, a move that aligns with the Theme: The Power of Stories and History.

Character Journey

Juneau Jane’s arc begins in a private key—secure the papers, protect the promise—and swells into a public vocation. Her nocturnal infiltration of the Goswood library signals both desperation and daring; she is willing to stake her safety on ink and ledgers. The turning point arrives in a hidden swamp church, where she discovers the “Lost Friends” advertisements, a revelation that reframes her struggle as part of a vast chorus of severed families (Chapter 15 Summary). She physically enacts this inward pivot by cutting her long hair (pp. 276–277), shedding the emblem of a sheltered girl to claim a plainer, more purposeful self. On the freight wagon in Texas, she begins systematically transcribing the ads and collecting new names, transforming from seeker to scribe. By story’s end, she has converted inheritance anxiety into cultural stewardship—teaching, building a library, and preserving the fragile bridges that stories create between the lost and the living.

Key Relationships

• William Gossett: Juneau Jane’s love for her father is the engine of her quest; his promises anchor her sense of legitimacy. His disappearance forces her to test whether a paper inheritance can hold against a region remade by war and hierarchy—and whether blood ties can survive the corrosions of secrecy and shame.

• Lavinia Gossett: Their bond is a tug-of-war over status and memory. Lavinia’s contempt (“whelp of my father’s…concubine,” p. 63) exposes the era’s racialized gatekeeping, while Juneau Jane’s guarded defiance reveals how intelligence and caution become survival strategies when law and custom are stacked against you.

• Hannie Gossett: What begins as wary alliance ripens into kinship—literally, when they learn they are cousins (p. 463). Hannie’s relentless family search becomes the moral compass for Juneau Jane’s work; in turn, Juneau Jane’s literacy gives Hannie a ledger and language to claim her history, fusing friendship with an ethics of record-keeping.

Defining Moments

Juneau Jane’s story is punctuated by acts of retrieval—of papers, of names, of a self remade by duty.

• Infiltrating the Goswood Library (Chapter 3): Her late-night climb through the shelves dramatizes her shift from dependent daughter to active agent. Significance: it establishes that knowledge—more than cash or guns—is her chosen weapon.
• Discovering the “Lost Friends” Ads (Chapter 15): In the swamp church archive of grief, she sees her private search mirrored by thousands. Significance: this scene widens her horizon from inheritance to restoration, moving her from claimant to custodian of collective memory.
• Creating The Book of Lost Friends (Chapter 19): On a Texas freight wagon, she compiles ads and adds new names to a ledger. Significance: the work literalizes her purpose; she becomes a conduit through which scattered families can speak, remember, and reconnect.

Essential Quotes

“Ff! As if you could be trusted! You would steal the portion that is to be mine as quickly as your mother would steal what is to be yours.”
— Juneau Jane to Lavinia (p. 64)

This outburst reveals a brittle mix of pride, fear, and legal precarity. Juneau Jane’s sharpness is defensive—she knows that in a world policed by race and legitimacy, silence equals erasure. The accusation also mirrors Lavinia’s own grasping, exposing inheritance as a battleground of identity.

“He would not fail to provide for me. Always it was his promise that he—”
— Juneau Jane, on her faith in her father (p. 64)

The broken sentence captures her wavering certainty. Faith in paternal promise functions like currency, but the ellipsis admits how tenuous that currency is without documents, witnesses, or recognition—underscoring the fragility of security for mixed-race children in the era.

“I have written all of them... These pages, by the beginning letter of the surname.”
— Juneau Jane, explaining the creation of The Book of Lost Friends (p. 339)

Her matter-of-fact description highlights method and order—an archivist’s mind at work. Alphabetizing sorrow into legibility is an ethical act: she turns chaotic loss into a searchable map, dignifying each seeker with a place in the record.

“I think we are friends, Hannie.”
— Juneau Jane to Hannie (p. 422)

The line is simple, but its stakes are profound. Friendship here bridges race, class, and legal status, crystallizing Juneau Jane’s transformation from claimant to companion, from “mine” to “ours”—the emotional foundation for her archival mission.