Negotiating With the Living and the Dead: Justina Ireland’s Ophie’s Ghosts

When young Ophelia “Ophie” Harrison woke in the middle of the night to her father’s warnings about danger coming to her home, she did not realize her mother could not see or hear him. It wasn’t until later, when she learned that he’d been killed earlier in the evening by the very men who then burned their house to the ground, that Ophie realized she could see and hear and talk with ghosts.

Ophie and her mother fled from Georgia and moved in with relatives near Pittsburgh. There, the young girl discovers their new city and workplace are filled with restless spirits. They are not frightening things, mostly lonely and yearning to communicate with the living or address unresolved business. In time, Ophie will learn that select members of her family have shared her same gift and used it to help lay ghosts to rest over the years. Although her mother is not one of these, her Aunt Rose is, and she imparts some much-needed advice, not the least of which is: never trust ghosts. They may seem kindly, she explains, and they may have been good in life, but ghosts are all hungry. When their color changes to a violet shade, those nice spectral beings can become violent and horrifying.

While the advice and experience her aunt offers is welcome, it does not seem to connect quite so clearly with Ophie’s own experiences. Particularly for some of the specters occupying Daffodil Manor, the house where she and her mother work.

Young Ophie makes her living tending the needs of Mrs. Caruthers, the house’s ancient, spiteful, and constantly angry matriarch. In the course of these duties, she comes to know a kindly woman named Clara, who is actually the ghost of a woman believed to have run off some years before. If she is a spirit, then there must be a reason she is lingering around the house. Could it be that she was murdered? And if so, then by whom?

Clara herself seems not to recall the circumstances of her death, only that it involved a distant branch of the family’s visit. And that family is scheduled for a return trip … Soon enough, Ophie is searching for clues, trying to help her ghostly friend come to rest and perhaps to prevent another tragedy.

Justina Ireland weaves historical detail, social critique, and dark fantasy into a moody but never dour tale of ghosts and the girl who might best be able to help them find peace in her middle-grade novel, Ophie’s Ghosts.

Ireland tells Ophie’s story in twenty-six chapters as well as some additional interludes taking their names from either a location in Daffodil Manor, the trolley Ophie and her mother use in the Pitt, or the railroad they used to go north in the opening section of the book. The interludes are some of the more intriguing elements for me, taking unusual points of view for their brief intrusions into the plot with often lyrical approaches to their topics.

Consider, for example, the view of Pittsburgh expressed in the opening of that interlude:

PITTSBURGH WAS A RESILIENT, ROUGH-AND-TUMBLE city. His arms were forged of steel, his backbone was the railroad, and in his veins was the coal that powered them both. The people who made their homes within his limits came from some of the hardest, meanest places on earth. Throughout the years, Pittsburgh had welcomed all—anyone who wanted to work hard could come to the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. And come they did. Scottish, Irish, Hungarians, and Polish all made their way to the city to build new lives. Now colored folks like Ophie and her mother, historically in bondage, exercised the freedom they did have to make their way to the city, escaping the chokehold of Jim Crow.

Yes, people came to Pittsburgh not to relax but to work. This was not Philadelphia, with its Brotherly Love and polite political history. Pittsburgh was a city that had once sparked a rebellion, a place where one had to scrabble and scrape and fight for a chance at prosperity. And fight they did. After the Revolutionary War, Pittsburghers built their opportunities from whiskey and farming, then they broke their backs on coal and the railroad. Now the residents of the city forged an American dream of steel girders, fashioning opportunity with fire and iron.

And if the living of the city were hardy and tough, the dead were even more so.

Ophie’s Ghosts (79)

Right there, we not only get a lovely view of the city and its differences with the other big Pennsylvania city, but we also get a sense of it in this period as well as in the context of Ophie’s expanding consciousness. The opening paragraphs to this interlude gives us a strong sense of place, and while it does not necessarily contribute to Ophie’s unfolding adventures, it nevertheless gives context for her developing character.

Likewise, consider this later interlude, which takes place in Daffodil Manor’s uppermost level, The Attic:

EVERYONE HAD FORGOTTEN ABOUT HER.

That’s how it felt more days than not to the attic. Here she was, unloved and neglected, dusty from disuse and filled with memories everyone would rather avoid. Didn’t she provide an excellent hiding spot for games of hide-and-seek? Weren’t her rafters strong and straight, holding aloft the roof and keeping everyone below safe and dry?

No one cared.

So the attic was delighted when the little girl from down below, the one who made the house sigh and the dead stir, began to spend her afternoons sitting in the sunshine that came in through the dormer windows.

The attic stretched contentedly as her windows were scrubbed and cobwebs were dusted away. She creaked and settled under the girl’s footfalls, and felt a little less lonely. It was nice to have company once more. This was not the first girl to spend her time reading and dreaming in the attic, after all.

The attic just hoped the new girl’s story would end differently than that of the last one.

Ophie’s Ghosts (182-183)

Just as that earlier interlude gives us a sense of the city as a character, this piece gives us a specific sense of the attic as a sentient and aware character. In time, it will become a place of refuge and childhood games for Ophie during her few moments of autonomy (usually when Mrs. Carruthers is napping). That is foreshadowed by this passage just as strongly as the sense of impending doom which comes about in the final line.

These interludes showcase Justina Ireland’s knack for encapsulating a mood or moment into a piece of short fiction. Through them, she can offer commentary that might seem tangential, but which nevertheless adds context, perspective, and/or foreshadowing about what is happening as well as what is to come.

This is not to say that Ophie’s journey is uninteresting. Quite the contrary, it is a moving story of a young woman’s coming of age, and this is perhaps highlighted by her growing relationship with her Aunt Rose. Consider this passage, where she sneaks out of her room at night to ask a question and winds up having a crucial conversation:

It felt especially strange to intrude on her great-aunt in such a vulnerable moment, just a smallish lump under a mountain of blankets, only an old kerosene lantern to keep her company. Even with her cane, Aunt Rose always seemed fierce and unbowed, and seeing her like this, small and frail, reminded Ophie that her aunt was a very old woman, maybe even older than Mrs. Caruthers.

“Ophelia! You should be asleep, girl. What’s got you lurking about this time of night? Did you have a nightmare?”

Ophie took a deep breath. “No, ma’am. I wanted to ask you a question. About haints. But I haven’t been able to talk to you because of the cousins.” Ophie snapped her mouth shut before she could say anything else. Mama always said if a body couldn’t say anything nice it was best just to keep quiet.

“Ahh, yes, those girls have been very interested in spending time with me of late.” Aunt’s Rose’s lips twisted in a smile, and she tapped the space on the bed beside her. “Come jump under the quilt, child, before you catch cold.”

Ophie hustled across the threadbare rug that did nothing to keep the chill out of the wood and climbed in next to Aunt Rose. Once she was tucked into the warm bed, Aunt Rose patted her on the leg. “So, what seems to be vexing you?”

“Why do some places have lots of ghosts, and others don’t have any?” Ophie began. She’d thought long and hard about the best way to bring up the matter of Clara, because it wasn’t like she could just come out and tell Aunt Rose she wanted to learn more about her, even help her. The old woman would probably just tell her to ignore and avoid all the ghosts she had seen. Her great-aunt had already warned her away from interacting with the spirits, after all, and the incident on the trolley had been a harsh lesson besides. Ghosts were dangerous, Ophie understood that. But like it or not, there were many ghosts in Daffodil Manor, and she couldn’t just avoid them forever. And there was so much that Ophie didn’t know that any information would be valuable.

“Well,” Aunt Rose said, taking a deep breath and letting it out on a sigh, “some places, it’s because that’s where folks died, and most ghosts, especially if they died in a bad kind of way, can’t seem to get themselves unstuck. People are like that, you know, living or dead. A bad thing happens, and they get bogged down in it, unable to move on.”

Aunt Rose paused as she mulled over her next words, and Ophie’s heart seized painfully, guiltily.

“Is that bad, to remember?” Ophie asked, voice low, sudden tears clogging her throat and making her voice froggy. Because Ophie wanted to remember, she wanted to spend quiet moments thinking about the good times when Daddy was alive. She wanted to keep living in those warm, happy moments.

“No, honey, it isn’t. But folks have got to move on as well, or else they can just get trapped in a moment, unable to do what they must. To live.”

Ophie thought about Mama, refusing to even talk about what happened in Georgia, telling everyone that her husband was gone when they asked. Not dead, not murdered by some local boys who thought he’d gotten too uppity—just “gone,” as if one day he’d up and disappeared. It made Ophie feel some kind of way whenever her mama said it, like they weren’t even allowed to remember Daddy, like he’d been erased from their world. Hadn’t she just stopped living when he’d died? It seemed that way to Ophie, like all Mama’s good memories had burned down with the house.

But Ophie didn’t think Aunt Rose was talking about Mama.

Ophie’s Ghosts (pp. 137-139)

It’s Ophie’s own growing awareness and understanding that provides the emotional core to this sequence. Sure, Aunt Rose is the helper/guide, but Ophie is our point of view character and through this conversation, she comes to realize the frailty of the seemingly indomitable, the imperfections of parents and their choices, and the limits on her own sense of the world.

Ophie’s Ghosts is a charming and sweeping tale of a young woman’s kindness and courage in the face of dark fantasy elements. Veering more toward compassion than suspense, the novel is nevertheless an intriguing examination of social and cultural elements at play in the early twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a plucky young protagonist.

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Ophie’s Ghosts is available in paperback, hardcover, eBook, and audiobook editions.

Next, we will take a look at another of Justina Ireland’s middle-grade novels. Lando’s Luck is a science fiction adventure story set in the Star Wars universe. Taking the charismatic bastard Lando Calrissian as its protagonist, it tells the story of his involvement in a young princess trying to make good on a promise to set the wrongs her people have done to others right, while also repelling bounty hunters, debts, and the unwanted attentions of a woman called The Assassin Queen. It is available in eBook and audiobook editions.

“Negotiating With the Living and the Dead: Justina Ireland’s Ophie’s Ghosts” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Balzer + Bray eBook edition, released in 2021.

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