Juneteenth, a delayed jubilee
A belated reflection on belated good news
It takes about eight minutes for light from the Sun to reach Earth, which means every time we look up at the sky we engage in a kind of time-travel. Whatever we see when we mistakenly look directly at the Sun happened 8.3 light-minutes in the past. Despite being a mediocre science student, physics always fascinated me. In my mind, physics required an unreasonable degree of faith to understand it. While my experience with gravity is confined to a downward force of 9.8 meters per second, there are places where the inverse is true—that’s to say, it’s possible places exist in the universe where I can fly.
One of the epigraphs in Hanif Abdurraqib’s remarkable book of poetry, A Fortune for Your Disaster, is a line from a poem by Terrance Hayes called “What It Looks Like.” The line goes, “Never mistake what it is for what it looks like.” Every time I look up at the Sun or at the stars, the next nearest one, Proxima Centauri, being 4.3 light-years away, I think about this line by Hayes because it’s an easy mistake to make. Our reality is shaped precisely by what we can see, not necessarily by when we see it.
So when I think about Juneteenth, the first federal national holiday established since Martin Luther King’s birthday in 1983, I also think about lag time. After all, that’s what Juneteenth is, a delayed celebration. Here, it’s worth stopping and reading an excerpt from Vann Newkirk’s phenomenal 2017 essay in The Atlantic about such a delay:
“In its spread across the country and gradual supplanting of other emancipation celebrations, Juneteenth has always retained that sense of belatedness. It is the observance of a victory delayed, of foot-dragging and desperate resistance by white supremacy against the tide of human rights, and of a legal freedom trampled by the might of state violence. As the belated emancipation embedded in the holiday foretold generations of black codes, forced labor, racial terror, police brutality, and a century-long regime of Jim Crow, it also imbued the holiday with a sense of a Sisyphean prospect of an abridged liberty, with full citizenship always taunting and tantalizing, but just one more protest down the road.”
So, as Vann so eloquently describes, Juneteenth celebrates the late arrival of the news in 1865 that previously enslaved peoples were now free. Yes, it is the celebration of emancipation but two months after the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, and two-and-a-half years after the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation—almost half the time it takes for light from Proxima Centauri to reach Earth. So pardon me if I invoke time travel again.
On Thursday, June 17, 2021, President Joseph Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, nearly 160 years after President Lincoln declared that enslaved people “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Since then, which is to say, last Thursday and since Lincoln, American Black people have wrestled with what it means to extend an open invitation to the country’s non-Black population to the proverbial and literal cookout. We wrestle with what it means to have a unique cultural tradition co-opted by a mainstream society that fails to recognize all the ways that Juneteenth’s message of “liberation” has always been more palpable than tangible.
I have never officially celebrated Juneteenth. My father, who is from Dallas, Texas (4.2 light hours away by car from Galveston, Texas where the Juneteenth declaration was first delivered) recalls having the day off and celebrating with his family in a way that many Americans celebrate the 4th of July—with barbecue and fireworks. In those days, history wasn’t contested on such a large stage. Especially for Texans, the protagonists in the Battle for the Alamo was rarely questioned and for most Americans, the year the country was born corresponded with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and not the arrival of enslaved Africans. And though I’ve known about the origins of Juneteenth for quite some time, I can’t help but feel like the United States writ large is experiencing a novel lateness in regards to its history. In other words, we been known about this.
Now that June 19th will forever be a federal holiday in the U.S., I sense much hand-wringing amongst white people about how to spend that day off. In a recent panel discussion on the matter, Newkirk was asked how white people should observe Juneteenth without culturally appropriating it. His answer was immediate and precise: “I don’t know. I always barbecue on major holidays.”
What I do know is while people in the United States argue over how to spend a day off (or if there should be a day off at all), there are Black people in that very country who are still waiting to hear the news of liberation just as there are Black people who are done waiting and instead trying to fashion it themselves. There are Black people in that country who are fighting for their right to participate in democracy and Black people who've said eff it altogether and have taken community protection and nourishment into their own hands. Whatever we think this country and its dreams mean is clouded by what and who we can see, who we make ourselves proximate to. Despite our best intentions, there will always be a delay between our reality and the one experienced by our neighbors, whoever they may be.
I find solace whenever the gap between history and the present is confronted. In facing my own history, I learned that my father’s great-great grandfather, Charles Young, was born into slavery in Brenham, Texas, nearly a decade before a man on horseback came bounding into Galveston. Carrying what I imagine to be a satchel made of leather, or maybe canvas, that man delivered the following the decree:
"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere."
I wonder what the Sun looked like at the precise moment when this reality set in for the enslaved people of Texas. I wonder if they sensed a delay all along. My great-great-great-father, Charles Young, a freedman, married a young woman named Milly Newsome in 1878. They had a child, Maggie Young, who would become my great-great grandmother, and they all built a life together in Brenham. But the reason that Juneteenth is the “observance of a victory delayed” is because Charles Young and Milly Newsome were later killed in one of the many race riots that ravaged the state of Texas. The riot broke out because a Black brakeman was hired by a local railway—he was trying to work for wages just as he had been advised.
I’ve been considering the Sun a lot lately because it's the rainy season where I live and I cherish the moments when I see it. The fact that it reaches me late doesn’t bother me, but it’s a constant reminder to never mistake what it looks like for what it is. If we genuinely want a more equal and just world, it’s crucial that we seek opportunities to be joyful and celebrate moments of progress. But in the midst of celebration, we must never forget that if equality and justice is delayed for anybody, it’s delayed for everybody.