by Ernie McCray
Juneteenth is a celebration
that causes me to wonder
what enslaved men and women
felt when they got the news
of their emancipation
approximately 900 days late.
So many of them, surely,
must have stood gasping and crying, in disbelief,
feeling joy from such an outrageously delayed freedom
while, simultaneously,
grieving from the realization
of all the hardships
that came from the years stolen from them,
their loved ones bought and sold
never to be seen again,
the horrors of the
whippings and rapes
and ropes wrapped
around necks
still in effect
against folks
who were supposed to be free
when what they should have been guaranteed
were the country’s promises of
“40 acres and a mule”
being met.
And then I think of Juneteenth
as a symbol for the hope
of future progress,
fueled by these ancestors
who survived
delayed liberty
through intense resilience,
victors over centuries of
being bent over in the fields
clearing land, turning soil, and planting crops
and then harvesting and processing the crops
or operating as artisans,
blacksmiths and carpenters and masons
or domestic workers
who kept the homes of their enslavers
in order,
so many of them toiling from
sunup to sunset
(“can see to can’t see”) –
leaving their descendants,
in their memory,
to shift from their lives of
being held in physical bondage,
to keeping their eyes
on the prize
they all died for:
true equality.
The full realization
of our nation’s so empty assurance
of equal protection
and liberty
for all.
Something Juneteenth
didn’t accomplish at all.
