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.