Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth. Specifically, today is the 159th anniversary of the reading of General Order No. 3 by Union Army general Gordon Granger. This was the order which served as the Texas version of the Emancipation Proclamation, a full two years after President Lincoln and the federal government (such as it was) freed all slaves. It was therefore the official grant of freedom to Texan slaves, some of the last people to be legally enslaved in this country. The celebration of this holiday began as early as the late 1860s in Galveston, Texas, and has spread outward to every state in the US and, more recently, to Mexico, where descendants of Black Seminoles honor their ancestor’s flight from slavery.
Juneteenth celebrates freedom for the formerly enslaved, but it is also a day to celebrate African-American arts and culture more generally, particularly food and music. As this holiday has Texan roots, rodeo is often a prominent feature, as are barbecues and food trucks hawking everything from Cajun shrimp to collard greens. But of course, the primary focus is on the historical fact of enslavement and the deep trauma it has left on our country. While slavery has existed in one form or another for as long as some humans have been forcing others to do labor that benefits the enforcer and not the laborer, the peculiar institution that built American wealth was almost unique in basing legal status on a new class of “race” based on the skin color of one’s ancestors. So this day marks the end of legally enforcing that status, though it also highlights just how little progress we’ve made in ending the existence of race-based status. In fact, Texas in the 1860s might have been more racially progressive than much of “progressive” New England is today.
I’ve had to bear witness to some truly horrible comments on the fact that this is a bank holiday. Some come from customers who are largely expressing irritation at inconvenience, though there is not a similar level of grousing about Memorial Day. I have tried to respond in bright and positive fashion. At worst, I have said that, with all the work I still have in the garden, I appreciate the day off in the middle of the week. But in my better moments, I have painted a picture of the joy of being freed and the nearly involuntary need to celebrate freedom. We celebrate the beginning of the war for freedom from monarchical rule. Why is this any different?
However, the hardest moments have come from my co-workers. I don’t want to lose my job, but I also don’t want to remain silent. I confess to not being a very good anti-racist in June. I scowl quite a lot, but I have not said as much as I should have. Mostly this is because I do not expect this from grown humans in 21st century urban New England and, truly, I have no response. Something is said and it is so outrageously dumbfounding that all I can do in the moment is blink and stare. I know I make people uncomfortable because there are mumbled retractions, but I think these come more because they felt they have insulted me personally (and one should never antagonize the witch), not because they recognize that what they are saying is patently and disgustingly racist.
And the thing is, they don’t know they are being racist. They are that ignorant. And it can’t be blamed on the parochial New England world view (which is increasingly insalubrious in MAGA-friendly ways). I work in a business that, yes, serves many Vermont natives, but there are also many from outside this culture even on staff. My employer is historically associated with the local military college, Norwich University, which, yes, may be historically white and insular in the way of New England, but is certainly not that way now. Many of our customers are not even from this country, and they would have been slaves if they came to these shores just a few generations ago. Furthermore, my town is a blue-collar crafting economy with many people migrating here in the late 19th century to quarry and sculpt the granites and marbles of the Green Mountains. Most were not white as defined by the 19th century elites who invented the concept. In fact, those Vermonters with darker skin who come through our doors every day undoubtedly have ancestors who were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. So how do people of any skin color in this culture remain so blind? It seems a willful choice to me — making it all the more repulsive.
It is also a foul stain on education in this country and an indication of just how successful the bigoted right take-over of school boards has been at keeping actual history (among other realities) out of the classroom. As an example, last year there was a recent high school grad doing summer work for my employer. He graduated early and with honors, at the top of his class, in one of the best schools in Vermont. I had not heard him denigrating Juneteenth specifically, ut here is a mark of how ahistorical his knowledge is. And mind you, this is the best that Vermont education has to offer.
We were talking about incomprehensible place names, incomprehensible from our vantage point anyway. As an illustration, I said that there weren’t any Delaware Indians anywhere near Delaware when Delaware was named nor even east of the Mississippi River since the 19th century. His first response was surprise that Delaware was named for a Native nation. But then he asked, ‘Well, where did they go?’. I said that I thought that those few who remained lived in Kansas or Wyoming or some such sparsely populated prairie region. He then asked why they would have done that. I blinked a couple seconds, sure he was making a tasteless joke or trying for irony in a pathetic fashion, but then I realized that he actually did not know. He did not know our white settler ancestors forced the Delaware to leave.
First, we forced them to migrate over the Appalachian Mountains into Ohio and then, only a few generations later, we forcibly removed them from those ceded treaty lands and forced them to march off to the dry interior of this continent, places that were completely bewildering to coastal woodlands peoples. He absorbed this for all of three seconds and then rationalized away the rupture we caused by saying “Well, they had horses. It wasn’t that bad”. I couldn’t respond to this except to say that I seriously doubted that our government gave them horses for the forced march.
How could a well-educated teenager, fresh from the rigors of textbooks and tests, not know this essential chapter in US history? The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that I’m not sure I learned it in school either. I might blame this on 20th century parochial school and then Indiana (which is about the most insultingly incomprehensible place name there is), but I don’t know that we had substantially different textbooks from any other school districts. No, I was fortunate in that I had friends who taught me the reality of the past, and I was also sensitized at a very young age to the enormous lacunae in history books by all the missing female pronouns. I came to my level of understanding independent of and, to a great degree in spite of, formal education. And apparently, this situation has not improved in the four intervening decades.
To the point that a young white man in Vermont does not know that his history includes forcibly ripping the original inhabitants of his homeland out of their lives — and then, to add insult to injury, naming our surroundings after the ghosts of the peoples we annihilated. To the point that a middle-aged woman in Vermont says it’s stupid to be closed on Juneteenth because this isn’t a real holiday — implying that reality and culture only belong to people with her own skin tone. To the point that we don’t understand the atrocities that built this country and so have no remedy for the wounds, don’t even know that those wounds are fresh and ongoing and gouged all the deeper by the willful ignorance that passes for education in our country.
I am a little sickened today on my day off. I would ask pardon from all those who have been wronged by my culture. Only I don’t know that I deserve it. And I know this culture doesn’t. So I am working in the garden, working to build up healthy relationship to what is here now and what has been before. And I have written these words, hoping that they might reach a few and reveal all the holes in their knowledge of themselves and their history. But that’s a thin hope.
Be better if I had a rodeo to offer… but even that… most white people assume that rodeo is a white people thing… and it’s just… not.
Look it up… in the margins, of course.
Solstice Time-keeping
The summer solstice is late tomorrow afternoon, at 4:50pm.
I guess I haven’t mentioned it much, but if you want to stand under the solstice sun at her zenith in the sky, that time is not likely to be exactly noon — unless you live in the tropics.
In my part of the world, the solstice sun is highest in the sky at 12:51pm. Those north of here have later midpoints. For example, today in Helsinki (a northern city I selected for the random reason that I know people there and it jumped out of the map) the middle of daylight is 1:21pm. If you’re obsessive about timing or just curious about the rhythms we don’t often notice, go look up your own town on the sun calendar at Time and Date.
Interestingly, in Central Vermont the sun reaches its latest zenith time, 12:55pm, on July 8th, well after the solstice has ended and day length has already been shortened by over twenty minutes.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
Gee wilikers, you’d think people would be happy for a holiday even if they didn’t understand what it was for. My mom still grouses about the MLK holiday in January. And she gets upset about Columbus Day having morphed into Indigenous People’s Day. Since she doesn’t really understand what Juneteenth is about and she’s retired, she’s yet to go venture into the racist comments about it yet. Or if she has, she thankfully has not said them to me.
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