Junie
By Erin Crosby Eckstine
(Ballantine Books)

Interview by Diane Slocum

Teenage Junie is a maid in an antebellum Alabama plantation. She is haunted by guilt believing that she was responsible for her sister’s death – but then she is literally haunted by her sister’s ghost. Minnie demands that Junie perform tasks for her so she can move on from the ghostly  existence. The tasks put Junie at risk, but her guilt compels her to attempt them. As this takes place, all is not well at the plantation either. Junie and the master’s  daughter have always been friends, sharing their love of books. But Violet is now of marriageable age and a wealthy suitor would solve the plantation’s monetary woes. The status quo shifts in so many ways, threatening
their friendship, Junie’s family and the relationship she is developing with a young, male slave brought to the plantation. Along with it all, Minnie is urging Junie to run, which would rip her apart from the only life she knows.

AUTHORLINK: What was your initial impetus to write this story?

ECKSTINE: I intended Junie to be a realistic and complex teenager. I wanted a flawed, yet hopeful, human character. Literature frequently reduces enslaved people to two stereotypes: the docile slave who accepts the white worldview, and the suffering slave devoid of personal growth. This story reflects my time thinking about the harsh realities of slavery. American slavery lasted for over a quarter-millennia; it weighed on me that enslaved people lived the full spectrum of the human experience, good and bad, under this horrific system.

AUTHORLINK: How is Junie’s story related to your own family history?

ECKSTINE: I adapted Junie from a family story my grandmother, Callie Crosby, told me. My ancestor Jane Cotton escaped slavery in Alabama before the Civil War, settling in a rural community where many family members remain. I got the idea for the book on a visit to my grandparents’ house in 2018. I wanted to write a multigenerational family novel about our town. I expected this project would die in my Google Drive, but I couldn’t resist writing about Junie, the original ancestor in the story. I decided to fulfill my grandmother's lifelong dream of writing a family book.

AUTHORLINK: How did the supernatural aspect enter your thoughts?

ECKSTINE: I’ve always enjoyed magical realism and ghosts in literature. I like the way ghosts represent liminality and can express intangible emotions, so I wanted to incorporate one into the story.

AUTHORLINK: What were some of the ways you researched the historical aspects of your story?

ECKSTINE: I focused most of my research on antebellum Montgomery to find little details I could add about the exact time and place. Since I did most of the drafting during COVID lockdown, I mostly read my sources.

AUTHORLINK: This seems like a trivial question, but I’m curious about Violet and her father’s use of “ain’t.” Was that acceptable then? And the more general question – What did you do to make your characters’ way of speaking appropriate to their time and station?

ECKSTINE: It’s only been relatively recently that “ain’t” has been associated with informal speech. Through about the 19th century, Anglophone literature used “ain’t” and all social classes considered it acceptable.

AUTHORLINK: Did you plan most of your plot before you wrote or did much of it develop as you wrote?

ECKSTINE: I am definitely a plotter, but I learned how to plot through writing Junie. I started off the book with little structure when I had the initial idea, but over time I learned about various plotting structures and ended up using them to create the story.

AUTHORLINK: Did your story change much as you made revisions?

ECKSTINE: I don’t think any major plot points changed, but I did often reorder events or change how characters got to particular points. I rewrote the ending several times!

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

ECKSTINE: Stay tuned! It’ll be historical fiction, but something different.

About the Author: Erin Crosby Eckstine is from Montgomery, Alabama, and grew up in the south and Los Angeles. She attended Barnard College in New York City and worked in digital media before earning a master’s in secondary English education from Stanford University. She taught high school English in Brooklyn, NY, before becoming a full-time writer. She writes historical fiction, personal essays and more. Junie is her debut novel. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and cats.