CHARACTER
The Book of Lost Friendsby Lisa Wingate

Mittie Gossett

Mittie Gossett Character Analysis

Quick Facts

  • Role: Enslaved mother; the emotional center of the 1875 storyline through her daughter’s memories
  • First appearance: Chapter 1 (Hannie’s dream and “Lost Friends” advertisement)
  • Key relationships: Daughter Hannie Gossett; her nine children (Hardy, Het, Pratt, Epheme, Addie, Easter, Ike, Rose, and Hannie); sister-in-law Jenny Angel; captor Jeptha “Jep” Loach
  • Symbols: Grandmama Caroline’s blue beads; the chant of names; the poke sacks

Who They Are

At once absent and omnipresent, Mittie Gossett lives in the novel as memory, ritual, and promise. She is the heart torn from a family and the force that keeps it beating anyway. Through the blue beads and the chant, she turns private grief into a portable archive, embodying the novel’s belief in The Power of Stories and History. Mittie is not simply remembered; she is reenacted every time Hannie names her people, carries the beads, and refuses to let their story die.

Personality & Traits

Mittie blends protective ferocity with deliberate, ritualized hope. Even when stripped of legal personhood and family, she engineers continuity—teaching, crafting, and promising a future reunion. Her endurance is not passive; it is a practiced discipline that keeps her children’s identities intact, a testament to Resilience and Hope Amidst Adversity.

  • Resilient and strong: Forced across the South by Jep Loach, Mittie endures the systematic theft of her nine children without surrendering the project of keeping them spiritually together. Her strength is measured less by silence than by relentless action—stitching sacks, saving beads, insisting on memory.
  • Fiercely protective: When Baby Rose is torn from her arms, Mittie fights; in Powelltown, she clings to Hannie until she’s kicked and knocked unconscious. Her body becomes the last barrier between child and market, dramatizing motherhood as resistance.
  • Hopeful and determined: The chant—names and sale locations—begins with Mittie. She drills it into Hannie not as fantasy but as a practical map for reunion, the seed that later grows into a “Lost Friends” search.
  • Keeper of heritage: By passing down Grandmama Caroline’s blue beads and crafting poke sacks for each separated loved one, she transforms household craft into lineage—an improvised family tree that refuses erasure.

Character Journey

Mittie does not develop on the page; she arrives fully formed in flashback as a mother already scarred by dispossession. What changes is Hannie’s perception. Childhood memories cast Mittie as invincible—beads in hand, voice steady, always promising. By eighteen, Hannie’s remembrance is edged with grief and the raw question, “Why didn’t you come?” That shift exposes the psychological afterlife of separation: memory becomes both shelter and wound, and the pain of waiting almost distorts the truth of Mittie’s love. Out of that ache, Hannie acts—turning remembrance into pursuit, dream into a newspaper notice, and longing into motion against the machinery that profited from broken families.

Key Relationships

  • Hannie Gossett: Mittie entrusts Hannie with the chant and the beads, effectively deputizing her as the family’s living archive. Hannie’s later search—especially through the “Lost Friends” column—translates Mittie’s private rituals into public action and anchors the theme of The Search for Family and Identity.
  • Her Children: Mittie’s motherhood extends equally to Hardy, Het, Pratt, Epheme, Addie, Easter, Ike, Rose, and Hannie. Each name in the chant is a lifeline; to speak them is to refuse the slave market’s logic that turns people into fungible property.
  • Jeptha “Jep” Loach: Loach is the agent of theft who shatters Mittie’s family and monetizes their pain—an intimate face of Injustice, Race, and Social Hierarchy. His violence clarifies Mittie’s courage: her resistance is not against abstraction but against a man who profits from her children’s disappearance.
  • Jenny Angel: Sister-in-law and co-conspirator in hope. Together, they stitch bead pouches—quiet work that becomes insurgent record-keeping, transforming scraps and glass into a covenant of remembrance.

Defining Moments

Mittie’s presence is distilled into actions that plant a future beyond bondage. Each moment turns care into strategy.

  • Creating the bead pouches: On the forced march with Jep Loach, Mittie and Jenny craft fifteen tiny poke sacks, each with three blue beads from Grandmama Caroline. Why it matters: Domestic handiwork becomes political defiance, a tactile promise that each lost child still belongs.
  • Teaching the chant: Mittie drills Hannie on every name and sale location. Why it matters: The chant preserves identity and geography; it’s both a mnemonic device and a map for reassembly—the oral blueprint for Hannie’s later search.
  • The separation in Powelltown, Texas: In Hannie’s dream-memory, Mittie clings to her until a man’s kick knocks her senseless and the last blue beads spill into the dust. Why it matters: This is the primal wound of the novel, the scene that fixes Mittie as a “lost friend” and propels Hannie toward the newspaper ad and the long road of reunion.

Essential Quotes

Dear Editor—I wish to inquire for my people. My mother was named Mittie. I am the middle of nine children and named Hannie Gossett.
— Hannie’s "Lost Friends" ad, Chapter 1

This notice converts Mittie’s absence into text—private remembrance becomes public record. The ad’s economy of names and kinship ties mirrors the chant’s structure, proving that Mittie’s training equips Hannie to speak into a system designed to silence her.

"Marse Gossett gonna come for us soon’s he learns of bein’ crossed by Jep Loach... And that’s why we chant the names, so’s we know where to gather the lost when Old Marse comes. You put it deep in your rememberings, so’s you can tell it if you’re the one gets found first.”
— Hannie recalling Mittie’s words, Chapter 1

Mittie reframes hope as preparation. Even as she leans on a familiar plantation myth to steady a child, she simultaneously arms Hannie with a concrete plan—the chant—as if anticipating that rescue will have to come from within the family’s own persistence.

"This a promise... This the sign of your people. We lay our eyes on each other again in this life, no matter how long it be from now, this how we, each of us, knows the other one... We put this string back together someday, all us. In this world, God willing, or in the next."
— Mittie to Mary Angel, Chapter 1

Here the beads are sacraments. Mittie consecrates a string of glass as a family covenant, uniting faith, craft, and memory. The vow stretches across time and geography, ensuring that recognition—“this the sign of your people”—survives the market’s attempt to erase it.