Benny settles uneasily into her new assignment. She is determined, however, to get the students to love stories as much as she does. She is not prepared for the poverty of her new school and the apathy of its students. She has taken the job as a way to pay down her considerable loan debt. Nearly a century later, Benedetta Silva, fresh out of college, arrives in the same town, Augustine, Louisiana, to begin her first year teaching English. Hannie figures out the women are in the trunks and hastily jumps on board the boat, headed for Texas. To uncomplicate the inheritance question, however, the family’s lawyer arranges to have the half-sisters kidnapped and shipped out of Louisiana on a steamer by hiding them in trunks.

Disguised as a boy, Hannie drives the carriage to the city concerned about the disposition of the farm. The two half-sisters decide to travel to New Orleans together and consult the family’s attorney.

However, that inheritance is contested by 14-year-old Juneau Jane, a half Creole who is Gossett’s illegitimate daughter by a New Orleans prostitute. Without the head of the family, the farm’s ownership devolves to his daughter, Miss Lavinia. The farm itself is currently in litigation as the head of the family, William Gossett, never returned from a trip to Texas to help his errant son out of a legal jam. At the end of ten years, she has been promised the standard buyout for a sharecropper: 40 acres of land and mule to farm it. Hannie has sharecropped the farm for almost ten years. She has never given up hope to return to Texas to find her family.

Synopsis of the little friend