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| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3aQjTy328o |
I grew up in Richmond, VA and I was hoping to report that the "June Jubilee" that I remember starting in 1976 was our version of a Juneteenth celebration, but no--it was a local arts festival that doesn't seem to have acknowledged (surprise) any part of Richmond's Black & African American history. What I do know is that since then, the elementary school I attended, formerly known as J.E.B. Stuart School, is as of 2018 called BARACK OBAMA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. I adore this, of course.
If you're unfamiliar, let the NYT lay it out for you. Here's a poem for celebrating this historic day in 1865 and this historic day in 2021.
The Stuff of Astounding: A Poem for Juneteenth
Unless you spring from a history that is smug and reckless, unless
you’ve vowed yourself blind to a ceaseless light, you see us. We
are a shea-shined toddler writhing through Sunday sermon, we are
the grizzled elder gingerly unfolding his last body. And we are intent
and insistent upon the human in ourselves. We are the doctor on
another day at the edge of reason, coaxing a wrong hope, ripping
open a gasping body to find air. We are five men dripping from the
burly branches of young trees, which is to say that we dare a world
that is both predictable and impossible. What else can we learn from
suicides of the cuffed, the soft targets black backs be? Stuck in its
rhythmic unreel, time keeps including us, even as our aged root
is doggedly plucked and trampled, cursed by ham-fisted spitters in
the throes of a particular fever. See how we push on as enigma, the
free out loud, the audaciously unleashed, how slyly we scan the sky—
all that wet voltage and scatters of furious star—to realize that we
are the recipients of an ancient grace. No, we didn’t begin to live
when, on the 19th June day of that awkward, ordinary spring—with
no joy, in a monotone still flecked with deceit—Seems you and these
others are free. That moment did not begin our breath. Our truths—
the ones we’d been birthed with—had already met reckoning in the
fields as we muttered tangled nouns of home. We reveled in black
from there to now, our rampant hue and nap, the unbridled breath
that resides in the rafters, from then to here, everything we are is
the stuff of astounding. We are a mother who hums snippets of gospel
into the silk curls of her newborn, we are the harried sister on the
elevator to the weekly paycheck mama dreamed for her. We are black
in every way there is—perm and kink, upstart and elder, wide voice,
fervent whisper. We heft our clumsy homemade placards, we will
curl small in the gloom weeping to old blues ballads. We swear not
to be anybody else’s idea of free, lining up precisely, waiting to be
freed again and again. We are breach and bellow, resisting a silent
consent as we claim our much of America, its burden and snarl, the
stink and hallelujah of it, its sicknesses and safe words, all its black
and otherwise. Only those feigning blindness fail to see the body
of work we are, and the work of body we have done. Everything is
what it is because of us. It is misunderstanding to believe that free
fell upon us like a blessing, that it was granted by a signature and
an abruptly opened door. Listen to the thousand ways to say black
out loud. Hear a whole people celebrate their free and fragile lives,
then find your own place inside that song. Make the singing matter.
**************
I found this poem first at the Stanford University site, and it doesn't explain where the striking line for this Golden Shovel comes from, but oh what "breach and bellow" Patricia made of it! Let freedom ring and ring again, truly, and may it be so.
Our host today is Buffy Silverman at Buffy's Blog. I'll just mosey on over there after reveling in a little more resting in this fresh wide-open morning...a so much smaller freedom, but precious nonetheless.
