Writing in the Raw: Juneteenth

I hate maintenance.  I don’t make the bed in the morning because it’ll just need to be made again the next day.  Our house needs painting.  A few years ago it was painted.  My friend the painter did an excellent job–prepared the surface, used quality paint, applied it well.  And still my house needs painting.

Some have tried to find permanent solutions to the painting problem.  Sadly, vinyl siding turned out to have some flaws, as Judith Helfand made devastatingly clear in her movie Blue Vinyl.  Alas, there is always a price to pay, and anyway, not a damn thing is permanent.  Check out granite gravestones from the nineteenth century.  Humans are not the only things who pass this way but a while.  Alas, poor granite.

In short, I wish progress was permanent, I wish victories lasted, I wish people didn’t always keep acting like . . . people.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863, but the slaves in Galveston just kept on a-slavin’.  Two and a half years later, on June 19, 1865, federal troops arrived on Galveston Island and General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3:

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.

Hooray!  Juneteenth (a portmanteau of June 19th) marks the beginning of “absolute equality of personal rights” between former slaves and their owners.  Our blissful coexistence in equality since that date is well documented. . . . Is that murmuring from the masses I hear?  Jim Crow?  Plessy v. Ferguson?  Damn, there’s always more maintenance.  I hate it.

And while we’re on the subject, here’s another aspect of delicious freedom which may be in need of further tinkering: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.”  The life and death of Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez comes to mind.  I mean there’s slavery, and then there’s slavery. Bonded labor,  indentured servant, what’s in a name? A slave by any other name would be as debased.  

Some historian who is NOT going to be linked here (laziness, not resentment) used metrics to make a convincing case that the standard of living of factory workers in New England was lower than that of slaves in the South.  Racism?  Defense of slavery?  People defended him by claiming his wife was black.  Big deal, I say.  Doesn’t prove a thing.  And anyway, I’m not looking to protect myself from the knowledge that things were, and continue to be, bad all over.

Fortunately, there are some good maintenance men around.  Take it away, Dennis:

Some people say a man is made out of mud

A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood

Muscle and blood, skin and bones…

A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong.

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

another day older and deeper in debt

St. Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go

I owe my soul to the company store

Am I the only one thinking of the World Bank and IMF?

What if you had the power to control what someone wore, what they ate, where they went?  What if you had the power to make them keep agreeing, over and over again, to do whatever you told them wherever you told them to do it?  What if you could force them to go into the most dangerous places and do things which destroyed their souls?  Ladies and gentlemen, the modern military slave, your sons and daughters.  Damn maintenance.

But hey, it’s not all bad news.  When there are victories, we can celebrate.  And best of all, we can eat delicious food.  You aren’t a former slave?  No slave ancestors?  That’s no reason you can’t eat barbecue, watermelon, fried chicken, chitlins, cakes and pies.  If we’re going to keep fighting the disappointing creations of human nature, we’re going to need to keep our strength up.  And yo, be stylin’ fly gear:

Dress was also an important element in early Juneteenth customs and is often still taken seriously, particularly by the direct descendants who can make the connection to this tradition’s roots. During slavery there were laws on the books in many areas that prohibited or limited the dressing of the enslaved. During the initial days of the emancipation celebrations, there are accounts of   former slaves tossing their ragged garments into the creeks and rivers to adorn clothing taken from the plantations belonging to their former ‘masters’.

from Juneteenth website

Keep In Your Heart The Blood

Remember always the glory days,

the dances, the songs, the chants, the rituals, the customs,

the people.

Remember times in beautiful Africa, your people.

From green forests, golden deserts, to the deepest, darkest regions

of Congo and Virunga.

Hear, here in this land.

Hear always in your heart the beating of drums,

the ancient customs of the Kagani.

Remember always the kings and queens,

Tutankhamen, Cleopatra.

But do not sit and not remember the dark days.

Keep In Your Heart The Blood.

Blood spilled by those who fought for freedom.

The blood of the slave as the whip touches the flesh.

Do not be enslaved, be now empowered.

Feel it, taste it, drink it.

Gather it in buckets, bathe in it.

Bathe your children in it

Keep In Your Heart The Blood

emphasis mine

The poet refers, I think, to the blood of African ancestors.  Will it maintain its shape if I stretch this into a general injunction to remember times of slavery even in times of freedom?  Remember the suffering under British rule, before brave men created a constitutional government founded on freedom.  Remember the dark days of feudalism before the rise of human self-respect.  Remember it. Feel it. Taste it.  Drink it.  Gather it in buckets, bathe in it.  Bathe your children in it.  Those times of suffering are past, but human nature remains.

And finally, in simple tribute to Juneteenth:

“But, if this part of our history could be told in such a way that those chains of the past, those shackles that physically bound us together against our wills could, in the telling, become spiritual links that willingly bind us together now and into the future – then that painful Middle Passage could become, ironically, a positive connecting line to all of us whether living inside or outside the continent of Africa…”    

Tom Feelings