We thank Alden Fossett, seminarian at Yale Divinity School and postulant in the Diocese of Massachusetts for this meditation. It was written with Juneteenth in mind and is a worthy reflection for any day of the year.
And since it is because within this sheet of paper you now hold the best of the South which is dead, and the words you read were written upon it with the best (each box said, the very best) of the new North which has conquered and which therefore, whether it likes it or not, will have to survive, I now believe you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live.
— From the fourth chapter of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) by William Faulkner
First, there was the Watch Night service. December 31, 1862, also known as Freedom’s Eve: that vigil held in secret and sustained by profound faith. Enslaved people huddled and alive, praying in the sanctuary or else in the brush, keeping watch on the threshold, waiting for the sun to rise and usher in 1863, when “all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforward shall be free.”1
But that proclamation had no messenger in the Confederate territory of Texas for eighteen months. Like the thick, wet heat of summer, unfreedom clung to the enslaved. Then, there was General Order Number 3 issued on June 19, 1865 by US Major General Gordon Granger in Galveston: yes, “all slaves are free,” but “they will not be allowed to collect at military posts” and they will not be “supported in idleness.”2
What is it that we remember on Juneteenth? Is it an anniversary of freedom? A festival of liberation? For those on that first Watch Night, it certainly was. And for those who had not heard, liberty, even deferred, deserved a celebration. But we are not they. We were not trapped in perpetual, involuntary bondage. We are not Black Texans who have celebrated Juneteenth for nearly 160 years. And we know that the postbellum period of Reconstruction recapitulated architectures of subjection for formerly enslaved Black people–so what can this occasion be for us?
This excerpt from Faulkner’s novel is from a letter written on the battlefield somewhere in Jefferson County, Mississippi in 1865. The author, Confederate soldier Charles Bon, had no ink to write with and was forced instead to use stove polish manufactured in New England that he and his troop had discovered in the bed of abandoned sutlers’ trucks while they desperately searched for ammunition. The notepaper was expensive: French stationery found in an aristocrat’s abandoned mansion. Taken together, this letter recorded the best of the South which is dead, overwritten by the dark gloss of the new North which has conquered.
Those of us who are doomed to live in the residue of histories we can neither change nor apprehend, whose hands are stained with survival, interpret the past to serve our own purposes and construct the present to accomplish our own desires. What can this occasion be for us? We must be very careful because: I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough, included.
1 Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation Proclamation, (Place of Publication Not Identified: Publisher Not Identified, Sep22, 1862), PDF, accessed June 18, 2024.
2 Michael Davis, “National Archives Safeguards Juneteenth General Order,” National Archives News, Jun. 19, 2020, accessed June 18, 2024.
–Mary Beth Clack, Mary Blocher, Cindy Coldren, Pat Krol, Liz Levin
–Published in This Week @Emmanuel Church July 10 & 17, 2024