Incidentally, the story of the historical Juneteenth, which falls on today--and tomorrow--is not radically different in its message-lore and significance. If anything, it provides the ultimate template for the kind of thing inspiring my rants on here.
The story is disarming in its simplicity, and yet invigorating in the lessons it provides. In the plate of inspiration it serves. It is obvious that when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation for slaves in September,1862, he did so in the full awareness that he had no power to enforce it. At least, not immediately. Lincoln was in charge of the industrial North, and America's African captives--alias slaves--were predominantly in the agrarian South.
But even if the Proclamation was simply a political sleight of the hand with obvious propaganda and even military benefits, Lincoln was doing something that he himself might probably not have thought of at the time: He was re-instating/re-inscribing/reiterating what has always been right and proper. All men are born free, and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...Constitutional language plus legalese plus moral prerogatives in addition to refined religious thoughts...all seemed to agree on that...
But how to implement the wonderful proclamation? It was just as hard as the the conundrum of belling the proverbial cat; for the forces ranged against freedom were so strong, and for the short-term they seemed like they were going to dominate forever. In hindsight, we do know, thanks be to all the powers that convene for the good of mankind from time to time, that the pro-slavery party lost out, and it became politically possible to implement the Emancipation Proclamation three odd years after it was issued.
But that was not the end of the story because if it was, Juneteenth would not have become relevant. We are told by many sources that many slaves, because of illiteracy and other historical obstacles, did not even know that the Proclamation had been issued. Perhaps knowing would have helped them to organize, but the fact was, they just did not know and so they went on plodding through cotton fields and breaking their backs for Massa as if nothing had changed.
This is a multi-versioned story with manifestations at multi-points. But the most poignant one, perhaps, is the one that took place at Galveston, Texas on the morning of June 19th, 1865. There, on a hitherto not too prominent balcony, one General Gordon Granger brought the words of life and light to the people who lived under the shadow of darkness and death:
[You] 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 lab or.
The rest, as they say, is history. History as Faulkner imagined it: Never past; never dead. Or as Elliot would have it: "The historical sense...[involving] a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence."
For Juneteenth past makes especial sense because of our many brothers and sisters in various chains at the moment. Chains of ignorance, chains of inequality, chains of various forms of injustice. Even the chains of modern day slave masters who would insist, just like their forebears among the slavocracy of the old American South, that there is something natural in the state of things which allows man's inhumanity to man.
And we should, each one of us, see ourselves as Granger obviously did: As messengers for the new dawn in which people across all divides must be able to pursue lives free of all artificial/man-made contortions.
Did Fanon not say "each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, and fulfil or betray it"?
Juneteenth speaks the language of Jubilee, but it also says the relevance of Jubilee for all of us will become a reality only if we will take up the message, climb all the metaphorical balconies, and boom above all the noise:
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me;
Because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek;
He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the
opening of the prison to them that are bound;
To proclaim the acceptable year...
...of Jubilee a la Juneteenth!!
