Last year around this time, an acquaintance ended an email with “Happy Juneteenth!” and I was at a loss. I had never celebrated Juneteenth before, and having a holiday that was, in my experience, on par with a family reunion or local festival suddenly given the same national prominence as Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July was a little disorienting.
Like it or not, the black experience in America has included necessary distinctions between what we do and what the nation as a whole observes, between optional remembrances that color our ethnic and religious sojourns and those obligatory cultural train stops on the U.S.’s annual holiday route.
Adding a new holiday is a bit like adding a new station to a familiar rail line, but that’s not the disorienting part. I’ll grant, ‘disorienting’ may not be the best word. Still, there may be a few people who share my perspective: we are celebrating the freedom of a group we have yet to humanize.
People in academic circles are moving away from referring to human chattel as “slaves” and referring to them more conscientiously as “enslaved people.” Still, I don’t think enough effort has been made to peer, to contemplate, to acquaint ourselves with their lives, and to understand that we are them in another time.
Maybe it is because they are — or seem — so far removed from us in time or experience, that terms like ‘slave mentality’ carry any meaning, or phrases like ‘like a slave with no papers’ evokes any humor. Due to shame and to our shame, we exploit temporal distance between then and now to other our own ancestors — the arms that bore the flesh that birthed us, the accents that haunted our first and dearest body of music. Our commitment to maintaining that distance prevents us from recognizing slavery for what it was.
To be a person from somewhere who meant something to somebody, who was once engaged, who was learning to cook or slaughter an animal, and to suddenly be uprooted and transported — shelved in the hull of a ship, or torn from home by one’s own two feet on a coffle — have we really considered it?
To find that something you took for granted back home, like speaking the language you were raised with, or resting a half-day on weekends, is now illegal and punishable by physical torture — have we pondered it?
To have bonds of fidelity interrupted time and again at the whim of one’s owner, in contradiction to the owner’s own piety no less, and still to feed and give expression to the human desire for lifetime coupling — have we scaled the height or plumbed the depth?
For some of you, yes, the horrors you know. The fabled, regional torture of flesh by flesh in the land of free flesh is a porn we have all glimpsed (or indulged). And for you I am most concerned, because it may be that, distracted by the percussive rhythm of the whip, you missed the chanted whisper of their humanity.
For reasons unknown, a prescient adult gave me a copy of Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave. I was eight or nine. Eventually, it occurred to me to ask an older relative about slavery. As children will, I asked whether they had been a slave or if they knew someone who had. And as people of a certain generation and experience were wont, that relative did not respond immediately. Over the years, though, I began to amass a collection of second-hand memories from that relative that, though meager, have become my Dead Sea Scrolls.
I learned about their familiarity with death. To be orphaned, motherless or fatherless, was not uncommon. To be taken in or joined by family or neighbors was also, for cause, a regular occurrence. Such was the case with this relative of mine: death occasioned her grandmother to move in with her widowed father and siblings.
This grandmother had been alive during slavery, but due to a few unique factors (and the grandmother’s own likely reticence to talk about her experiences), my relative could not say whether this person had been a slave or not. It must be explained that not being a slave cannot be confused with freedom as we know it. Free people of color (e.g., manumitted blacks with no property or unenslaved Native Americans) could be claimed and made to work as tenants, if not enslaved outright. Such seemed to be the case of my relative’s grandmother.
Songs were sung, ring games were played, advice was given. One piece of advice that stuck out to me was also a piece of advice given to me. My relative, watching me make a sandwich, recollected aloud how her grandmother would tell her that the end-pieces of a loaf of bread were the sweetest pieces.
I’m an adult now, and I’m still unpacking that moment. The humanity and genius of the enslaved, to see the humanity in children whom they birthed but who were not theirs, and to pass on such life skills and coping tools as they could, is astounding.
If you didn’t see it just now, well, neither did I, for years and years. Let’s look at this more closely. First, it is not accurate to assume a toddler, or child, or preteen with an owner would have bread to eat all the time. Some children were fed gruel from a trough; for others, grits or cornmeal would have been present for the vast majority of meals. At some point, someone took into account the natural reaction the child nearest them would have to something as bland as a bread end, were it a scrap snuck from the kitchen or a leftover too precious to cast out. Someone (a $300 field hand? $500 maid-seamstress?) gave the gift of double-think to a child and probably helped keep that child alive.
And this was the advice that got passed to me. It was both immediately falsifiable and tremendously motivating: was the bread-end sweeter? Obviously, it was only as sweet as the rest of the bread crust. But after a few mentions and a fair try, I found they were at least as good as the normal slices for bologna sandwiches — indeed, more like buns. An enslaved person passed that advice to me.
An enslaved person taught me to sing, preserved what they had received of what had been before slavery, augmented it and impressed singers who heard them with explicit notions of meaningful music.
An enslaved person saved my life, made sure to say aloud how they stopped a baby from strangling on mucus once so that mothers that needed to know it would and would pass it on to someone who used that advice on me.
An enslaved person taught me traditional religion, enforced a situational sabbath every time the God of thunder and lightning was at work, and reinforced it with such gravity that scientific accounts of storms made no dent in my piety, until at last the ancient name Shango was said in my hearing.
How they managed to do it, how they found the mental and emotional energy and creativity to pass on and build culture in one of history’s most deleterious versions of slavery, is amazing. Consider all the loose teeth, all the ‘boogamans’ that haunted dark corners, the invented lullabies, the corny stories about the rabbit’s tail turning white and other observations, and we have a better picture of what was enslaved and later set free.
Juneteenth, boldest yet of the holidays that depict the American saga, reaches nearest to the experience of chattel slavery, and passes itself off as no other than what it is: the celebration of the enslaved and their descendants of the end of chattel slavery everywhere on American soil. That a country would celebrate its own policy reversal, especially one so simultaneously heinous and profitable, is no pittance, no trifle.
However, as with anything that refers to slavery, there is an uneasiness, an unwillingness to see what it was that was undone. Slavery in America has become a weird story: Would the florist trample the garden? Would the shepherd slaughter the sheep? Of course, the answer is yes, but there lacks the bravery to approach the scene of violence and see the gardener’s footprints or the shepherd’s bloody knife. Maybe Juneteenth will become America’s attempt to be brave, which ought to be celebrated.
Yes, in every future Juneteenth, let’s revel! Let the parades flow down every Main Street and Elm Street and MLK Boulevard! Let us provoke one other to envy with special rubs and homemade barbecue sauces and recipes that riff on tried-and-true themes. In the noonday, beneath the shade of a tent or tree, let us pray in the old-time way, and in the cool of dusk let the children patiently teach us the newest moves.
And most importantly, let us remember — so that Juneteenth can mean what it was meant to mean; so that I and the similarly surprised can bring myself to it with full heart; so that those whose work led to its recognition will see the spirit of their work blossom — daily let us remember that a seven-year-old bedwetter with a snaggletooth, or an unsuspecting mother returning from church, or a father biting his lip as he worked to get past his neuropathy, were all liable to be sold off to pay someone else’s debt. Let us remember that they knew it, but looked beyond themselves to keep us alive. And let us be grateful.
