The Lesson of Juneteenth

After a long day on Friday, seeing no one and still dealing with the lingering effects of Covid compliments of my recent international trip, I began feeling sorry for myself. The next day would have been my 40-something wedding anniversary and after that was Father’s Day. My sons had been without their father for decades.

How could it be that I had come to this place, living alone, with nowhere to go, and feeling tired and worn out? As usual, when feeling down, I turn to books. I began reading the short and transcendent essays in Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou. In one essay, she wrote that after considering suicide, a friend advised her to write. “When I reached the last line on the first page of the yellow pad, the agent of madness was routed.”

I could identify, not with wanting to commit suicide, which I never have, but how writing lifts the spirit. “When I decide to write anything,” Angelou went on, “I get caught up in my insecurity despite the prior accolades. I think, uh, uh, now they will know I am a charlatan and that I really cannot write and write really well. I am almost undone, then I pull out a new yellow pad and as I approach the clean page, I think of how blessed I am.”

I knew the insecurity and also how blessed I am that I have the privilege of being a writer with a life that never would have been had I not been an educated woman with a roof over my head.

The next morning, as I skimmed weekend happenings in my community, I found a listing of Juneteenth events. Other than knowing Juneteenth was made a national holiday to commemorate that it was two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued that enslaved people in Texas learned on June 19, 1865, they were no longer enslaved, I didn’t “get” Juneteenth. One event caught my eye. A poetry slam.

I got in the car and drove thirty minutes to a park where the poetry slam was held in a bandstand backing up to a lake encircled by green and gold marsh grasses. A family of ducks lazily swam by the water’s edge. Poets and pastors mingled in the warm June air as the smell of barbecue from the smoker brought back memories of cookouts in the park when I was a Girl Scout. Not far from the Mason-Dixon Line, the area played an integral role in the Underground Railroad. A building in the nearby town features a Harriet Tubman mural.

I’ve spent much of my life in the company of other writers, not only writing with them but listening to their work and reading their books and articles. But sometimes, you forget, get lazy, and need a little jumpstart to remember just how marvelous it is when the voice is strong and the message passionate.

The Juneteenth poems rang with vulnerability and struggle…one man recited by heart a long poem he had written—his story after being incarcerated for twenty years. As a teenager, he had seen drugs on the streets, and he sold drugs. He saw liquor stores built in his community, the poverty and the anguish in a cruel generational cycle. But he had survived on Juneteenth to tell his story. A thirteen-year-old girl read a poem she had dedicated to Breonna Taylor. “Just say her name,” she said. “Say her name.”

Another young poet celebrated her hair, her body, and her race.

Emotions, passion, honesty, and vulnerability make for compelling writing and storytelling. Creative work isn’t just about yourself, but about the rap, the voice, the highs and lows of a life worth living.

Somewhere along the way as a white Protestant girl, penning her memories and her life story, I may have withheld some of my deepest feelings. I had grown up in a house where silence, rather than emotions, reigned sacrosanctly.  I think, uh, uh, now they will know I am a charlatan and that I really cannot write and write really well.

It’s up to me to shed weariness and stay engaged in a country that needs voices of gratitude and faith that this can be a better place to live. Pessimism will come again, and when it does, I’ll pick up that book or pick up that pen and pad…or head out to hear my fellow writers entertain and teach and bare their souls. Juneteenth was a lesson and an incentive to infuse more of that in my work.