Junie

"They Can't Take Your Words": Reimagining the Slave Narrative in Erin Crosby Eckstine's Junie.

I recently graduated with a Master’s in modern and contemporary English literature. For my dissertation, I asked the question, How can descendants of the enslaved engage with archives of slavery in a manner that is not harmful to them? The harm that I’m speaking of is the reaction that can come with reading about violence, brutality, and death. Textbooks and online databases often fail to address human responses and frequently normalize such brutality. I believed there could be another way to learn about this history and feel empowered rather than fatigued.

I spent four months writing, researching, and trying to find it. Much of my work was focused on the brilliant Saidiya Hartman and her theory of critical fabulation. In her research, Hartman located and dissected various legal records, ship manifests, and captain’s logs from the transatlantic slave trade. Unsurprisingly, the documentation of enslaved people is fragmented and unclear. Hartman also described the research process and having to engage with such dehumanizing material as a form of suffering.

However, rather than sit with that suffering, Hartman proposed a new method to engage with the archives of history. Critical fabulation means ‘fill[ing] in the gaps and provid[ing] closure where there is none’ (Hartman 8). It is a process of imagining what might have happened in order to give voice and some justice to the estimated 1.5 million Africans who did not survive the Middle Passage.

In my dissertation, I proposed that the contemporary novella The Deep by Rivers Solomon aligns with Hartman’s work and can be considered a form of critical fabulation. After reading Junie, I believe that Erin Crosby Eckstine is doing the same.

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Set in 1860 on a plantation in Alabama, Junie is a historical fiction novel that follows sixteen-year-old Junie as she navigates life as an enslaved handmaid. Junie’s character is immediately lovable: she is curious, kind, impulsive, and, my favorite, a true lover of language. Junie’s literacy is exceptional given the time, but also comes at a cost. Both in the novel and historically, reading and writing were forbidden to the enslaved and punishable by whips and beatings. And yet, Junie states, “reading and writing are pleasures worth any punishment, something they can never understand” (Eckstine 26).

Junie’s secret is kept and supported by Violet, the white master’s daughter, to whom Junie caters. Despite their girly banter and sister-like bond, as a reader, I was dreading the moment when it all blows up and Junie realizes that she and Violet will never be equals. However, that realization did not unfold as I expected. Eckstine does an excellent job of reimagining this part of history. Her novel does not regurgitate the same archival stories of violence and brutality against the enslaved; she shares a different journey that simultaneously acknowledges this history and inspires hope.

One of the most heartfelt aspects of the story is the revival of Junie’s dead sister, Minnie. We are initially told that Minnie passed from a fever she supposedly caught while rescuing Junie from a riverbank. Because of this, Junie carries an immense amount of guilt. Her guilt and sadness are so powerful that they awaken Minnie’s spirit, and her ghost confronts Junie in the woods. Minnie’s reappearance (page 57) is one of my favorite scenes in the story and is a heartwarming ode to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Minnie explains that she is one of many “haunts” who live in the land of the “In-Between”. The In-Between is a metaphysical space where deceased enslaved people are trapped if their soul’s mission isn’t complete (185). In other words, Minnie cannot pass into the afterlife until Junie completes three tasks.

The structuring of Junie resonates deeply with Hartman’s research and theory of critical fabulation. On one level, Junie is about a young girl who is guided by her sister’s spirit to uncover the secrets of the plantation they live on and continue their fight for freedom. But on another level, Junie is a story that imagines a world in which the deceased enslaved, the majority of whom died unjustly, have the opportunity to speak again and guide their living loved ones. Eckstine’s imagining is significant not just for its intention to provide “individual humanity of a group of people many have grown to perceive monolithically” but for its efficiency as a counter-narrative that can provide closure where there is none (355).

There is much to unpack in this story. In under 400 pages, Eckstine masterfully presents and unpacks elements of the slave trade that are less talked about, such as suicide amonst the enslaved, queer romances, and the overloooked power of white master’s wives. Junie is historically accurate, but in a way that does not glamorize suffering or spotlight brutality. The novel brings attention to aspects of slavery that were more psychologically damaging than physically harmful. For example, in one passage, Junie discovers that the hair of her mother and female ancestors was cut to fill pillow cases for the master’s bedrooms (329). These plotlines are essential because they interrupt the narrative that slavery only looked one way.

One of my favorite plotlines is Junie’s infatuation with English literature and white authors. Junie praises the work of Keats, Thoreau, Wordsworth, and even the Brontës. You can argue that Junie’s fascination with their work is because she doesn’t have access to much else, but I was particularly stunned by Junie’s love of the Sublime. The Sublime is a literary and philosophical concept, explored by many but especially by the poets Wordsworth and Keats, that describes a feeling of awe or wonder typically in response to nature. It’s considered a revolutionary shift in human thought during the 18th and 19th centuries. I will never forget having to study it in high school and undergrad, but we must consider which humans this movement affected.

In a charming scene between Junie and Caleb, Junie tries to explain the Sublime to Caleb and how she desperately wants to find it. Rather than agree with her, Caleb challenges Junie’s desire and argues that she deserves more. Caleb asks, “What happens after you see it? You supposed to just go back to your old life, sneaking around and cleaning up after white folks?” (148). Without hesitation, Caleb questions why Junie has subjected herself to a white man’s definition of the divine.

Without spoiling too much, Junie’s awakening does come. In the novel’s final pages, Junie finally questions how she can live up to the words of Wordsworth and Keats when their lives looked nothing like hers. She says,

“Those who sought the sublime were white men with lives of leisure. They sought an unattainable beauty because they’d already attained everything else” (328)

In this scene, Eckstine underscores the undeniable gap between white authorship and black readership. Junie’s realization that she has to write her own story and define her own Sublime coincides with Eckstine as an author reimagining her family’s history. Eckstine has said that Junie was based on her great-great-great-grandmother Jane Cotton. Rather than leave Jane Cotton’s story unwritten, Eckstine imagined what it might have been like. As Hartman argues, we cannot let slave masters speak for the enslaved; their testaments are biased, limited, and harmful. Although we cannot go back in time to record first-person testimonies from the enslaved, we can use what is available to imagine what might have happened or been said. In the words of Junie’s Grandaddy:

“Nothing about this life is fair, Baby. There ain’t hardly nothing we got control over. But one thing they can’t take from you is your words” (319)

I’m going to end with a quote from my dissertation: “freedom, justice, and closure can be found in creative expressions unbound to the limits of nonfiction and historical accuracy” (Smith 39). Junie is a form of those “creative expressions,” and its tangibility is essential to contemporary teachings and understandings of history.

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