Junie

by Erin Crosby Eckstine

“I don’t think you get a choice in how grief finds you,” Caleb says. He turns to face her. “See, at my last master’s house, there was this old woman who worked in the house, even older than Muh. She caught me one day, thinking about my momma. And I remember, she took me over into the cookhouse and showed me this cup of tea where there was only a little water left in it but the tea bag still there, so it was real strong. I’ll never forget what she said. She told me that when you first lose somebody, the grief feels like the strongest tea you’ve ever tasted, so bitter and sharp you don’t think you’ll ever be able to swallow. But that every day, another drop of water falls into that cup, and it gets a little easier to taste. That bitterness, that pain, it don’t ever go away or get smaller. But it does fade.”

liked to pretend my momma had died when I was young,” Caleb says, his voice wavering. “It was easier than thinking of her alive, all the way across the ocean.” “Why’d you think that?” “Well, there’s something final about death, like there ain’t nothing you can do to turn it around or fix it. Thinking about her being alive just made me feel like I wasn’t good enough to go back to her. Like I wasn’t strong enough to fight off the white folks and swim back to her. Like I was a coward.”

I believed that if I just walled myself off, I could never lose anything. But, living that way just leaves your soul half-empty. There ain’t no other way to fill your heart than to do the things that scare you.

The realization hits her. Wordsworth never spent days preparing food. Keats never cleaned a chamber pot. Coleridge didn’t have to sneak around to read a book. Those who sought the sublime were white men with lives of leisure. They sought an unattainable beauty because they’d already attained everything else.

Even in the half-light of the candle scones, Junie can tell it isn’t made of down feathers like the McQueens’ other pillows. She grabs a handful and holds it toward the light. Wiry, black coils of human hair. The same as Muh’s and Auntie’s short locks, hidden under scarves. The same as Minnie’s and her mother’s. The same as her own. She rips each pillow open, spilling entrails of curls until the room is covered in a fine layer of three generations of her family’s hair. Just somethin’ that happens when you get older, Granddaddy had said. The McQueens have stolen their hair and used it to make pillows. She rushes toward the open window and vomits.