Greetings, Humans.And Happy Juneteenth! When Juneteenth became recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, there were so many people that were learning about it for the first time, especially in Tennessee. But fun fact, as a Texan, I had the privilege of having Juneteenth on my radar since I was little. I remember banners flying over the streets in our little rural county advertising the annual Juneteenth picnic. My grandmother described it to me as “the day the slaves learned they were free” and left it at that. We never attended any of the Juneteenth picnics; they were being put on by a different church, not the one we went to, and we usually only went to our own church’s picnics. Plus, the weekend it was held usually overlapped with a Father’s Day picnic so that’s where we ended up. We didn’t avoid it or make any kind of hay about it—it was simply a party that wasn’t meant for us and that was fine. It was the early 90s, Roseanne was on TV talking about supporting a friend after getting an abortion. It was understood that racism was bad, that all people were created equal and were equally God’s children. Still, I have an early memory of a looming Klan rally marching through that same town around the same time. My mother explaining to me that some people didn’t like it that white people and Black people could be friends and that they could be angry over it, possibly even violent. I remember how terrified I felt in that moment, that someone could want to hurt someone else just for having a friend. How things used to float just under the radar of my child consciousness. I remember the OK City bombing, watching the Waco compound burn on TV, my grandmother watching and shaking her head. Pitiful, she would say. People gone plumb crazy. I could sense the grown up conversation around me, too old for my ears and nothing I was interested in anyway. I wonder what it’s like for the children today. Do they notice the conversations being had over their heads, in other rooms while they play? Do they notice the concerned look when their adult scrolls through their phone to see yet another terrible piece of news? How and when will the weight of all this rise to their consciousness? And when it does, how will we, the adults, handle those conversations? Will we be proud of what we have to say? Anyway, I’m off track. This is a newsletter about writing, isn’t it. And it’ll be a shorter newsletter because today is a well-earned federal holiday. So I will leave you with a wish for a peace, liberty and justice-filled Juneteenth for all, and with that — Let’s gossip.
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