Jubilee Juneteenth: how our people celebrated freedom time.

During this season of Juneteeth, Black Issues Book Review lifts up the voices of the ancestors in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation's 140th anniversary. These passages words of freedom and songs of Jubilee, compiled with affection and admiration for generations gone transport us to a moment of jubilation we must always hold dear. Whether through the backward glance of a former slave Temple Cummins's mother echoing "Is free, I's free" across the plantation or the Emancipation Proclamation's legally binding declaration that the bondspeople shall be "forever free," we are reminded of our great-great-great grandparents unflagging fortitude. We find ample evidence whether in lyric fragments or a recipe to marvel at the capacity of our foremothers and forefathers to pray and hope and work for a better day.

In our bones, we carry the ancestors' anguish. In our souls, we feel them gasp from the chokehold of bondage. But in our hearts, we are inspired to know that when Emancipation was decreed, they embraced their liberty. They danced and stomped and swayed and wept with the promise that their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be free. And now we must honor them by never taking for granted the freedoms and civil liberties they were denied.

Feast upon these literary offerings, these ancestral libations, these balms to the soul. And know that through the ancestors' words, Jubilee is ours to claim.

Jubilee: 1: often capitalized: a year of emancipation and restoration provided by ancient Hebrew law to be kept every 50 years by the emancipation of Hebrew slaves, restoration of alienated lands to their former owners, and omission of all cultivation of the land

2 a: a special anniversary; especially: a 50th anniversary b: a celebration of such an anniversary

3 a: a period of time proclaimed by the Roman Catholic pope ordinarily every 25 years as a time of special solemnity b: a special plenary indulgence granted during a year of jubilee to Roman Catholics who perform certain specified works of repentance and piety

4 a: JUBILATION b: a season of celebration

5: an Afro-American religious song usually referring to a time of future happiness [c] 2001 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated

At nine o'clock all the slaves gathered at the great house and marster and missus came out on the porch and stood side by side. You could hear a pin drop, everything was so quiet. Then marster said, "good morning," and missus said, "Good morning children," they were both crying, then marster said, men women and children, you are free. You are no longer my slaves. The Yankees will be here soon."

--Mary Anderson, North Carolina, quoted in Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom, edited by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau and Steven F. Miller, the New Press with The Library of Congress, W. W. Norton & Company; Book and Cassette edition, October 1998, ISBN 1-565-84425-4

THE LATE AFTERNOON OF THE 1863 NEW YEAR'S Day, Matilda came almost flying from slave row. "Ya'll seen dat white man jes' rid in here? Ya'll ain't gon' b'leeve! He in dere cussin' to massa it jes' came over de railroad telegraph wire Pres'dent Lincoln done signed `Mancipation Proclamation dat set us free!"

--Roots by Alex Haley Doubleday September 1976 (reissue edition), ISBN 0-385-03787-2

AS THE YEAR 1863 CAME TO A CLOSE A BLEAK atmosphere settled over the whole South. That year was also a high watermark in the lives of the slaves, for the word seeped through every hamlet and village that Abraham Lincoln had issued a proclamation emancipating the slaves.... the year 1863 saw a wholesale disappearance of the black people from the southern plantations.

--Jubilee by Margaret Walker, Houghton Mifflin (1966), March 2001, ISBN 0-613-29273-1

IT WAS ON JUNE 19TH [1865] THAT THE UNION soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas, with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order....

Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations.--From www.Juneteenth.com

WHEN FREEDOM WAS 'CLARED, MARSTER WOULDN'T tell 'em, but mother she hear him telling mistus that the slaves was free but they didn't know it and he's not gwineter tell'em till he makes another crop or two. When mother hear that she say she slip out of the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, "I's free, I's free."

Then she runs to the field 'gainst marster's will and tol' all the other slaves and they quit work.

--Tempie Cummins, Jasper, Texas, quoted in Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Freedom, edited by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau and Steven F. Miller, the New Press with The Library of Congress, W. W. Norton & Company; Book and Cassette edition, October 1998, ISBN 1-565-84425-4

"Everybody went wild. We all felt like heroes and nobody had made us that way but ourselves. We was free. Just like that we was free. It didn't seem to make the whites mad either. They went right on giving us food just the same. Nobody took our homes away, but right off colored folks started on the move. They seemed to want to get closer to freedom, so they'd know what it was--like it was a place or a city."

--Felix Haywood, Texas, quoted in Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives, Bulfinch Press, February 2003, ISBN 0-821-22842-0

WHAT IS HELD AS FACT IS THAT JUNE NINETEENTH--the day the federal troops rode into Galveston with orders to release those kept as slaves has been celebrated for 127 years, in Texas and beyond, as Emancipation Day, as Jubilation Day, as Juneteenth, the day the last ones heard.

Juneteenth, the name, is one of those fab African-Americanisms, functional, rhythmic, at once concise and not too concise. It fuses the month of June with the number nineteen, and eludes to the fact that the holiday was held in adjoining states on different days of the month as folks got the word."

--"Juneteenth" by Lisa Jones, excerpted in The African American Book of Values, edited with commentary by Steven Barboza, Doubleday September 1998, ISBN 0-385-48259-0

IN THEIR PAJAMAS AND NIGHT GOWNS, THEY WOULD gather around Papa, who would read Bible stories aloud. Sometimes Papa would tell them about the day that the Civil War ended in 1865. This meant that the slaves were truly free. Papa was just seven years old. He said he ran about the house yelling, `Freedom! Freedom! I am free! I am free!"

--The Delany Sisters: Reach High by Amy Hill Hearth, Abingdon Press, January 2003, ISBN 0-687-03074-9

"THERE WAS A GREAT OUTCRYIN. THE BENT BACKS straighted up. Old and young who were called slaves and could fly joined hands. Say like they would ring-sing. But they didn't shuffle in a circle. They didn't sing. They rose on the air. They flew in a flock that was black against the heavenly blue. Black crows or black shadows. It didn't matter. They went so high. Way above the plantation, way over the slavery land. Say they flew away to Free-dom.

--The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, Knopf (1985), January 1993, ISBN 0-679-84336-1

AND YOU SHALL HALLOW THE FIFTIETH YEAR AND you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.

--Leviticus 25:10 New Revised Standard Bible

Emancipation Proclamation

Breakfast Cake

(Serves 6.)

2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter
1 large egg
1/2 cup (more or less) milk
1 to 2 cups washed blueberries
1/4 cup honey
Grated rind of one orange
Grated rind of one lemon

Cream sugar and butter, add egg and beat. Sift dry ingredients, add blueberries then add alternately with milk to the butter, egg and sugar mixture. Make a dough stiff enough to handle. Par out to 1/2 thickness on a floured bread board. Cut with a biscuit cutter and arrange in greased pie pan in tilted fashion. Spread with honey and sprinkle with orange rind and lemon rind and bake for 15 to 20 minutes in a hot oven. Serve hot or cold.

--(The Newark Council) New Jersey. The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro: The Classic Year-Round Celebration of Black Heritage From Emancipation Proclamation Breakfast Cake to Wandering Pilgrim's Stew by National Council of Negro Women (Creator) Beacon Press, October 2000, ISBN 0-807-00964-4

   Go down Moses
   Way down in Egypt land
   Tell ole Pharaoh
   To let my people go
   When Israel was in Egypt land
   Let my people go

--Traditional African American spiritual, www.negrosprituals.com

SECRETARY STEWARD CONVINCED LINCOLN TO postpone his proclamation until after the Union achieved a significant victory. The defeat of the Confederate troops at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, gave Lincoln the opportunity he had been waiting for. Lincoln would later call the Emancipation Proclamation "the central act of his administration" and "the greatest event of the nineteenth century" and "the one thing that would make people remember he lived." Of course everyone did not get the news of emancipation at the same time. Even though the proclamation appeared in the New Year's Day edition of the Evening Star, illiterate whites and blacks would have to be told of its existence. Some owners informed their slaves and gave them the option of leaving, but others did not.

--First Freed, Washington, D.C. in the Emancipation Era edited by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Howard University Press, May 2002, ISBN 0-882-58207-0

NOT ALL THE WHITE HAIRSTONS TOOK A KINDLY view of their former slaves when they abruptly claimed their freedom. Ann [Hairston] bitterly harangued the departing Hairstons, telling them they `They would never be as free again as they had been here.' That declaration summed up the deepest belief of many slaveholders--they had been good masters, and under them, slavery was freedom. The blacks left anyway, in what seemed to Ann to be the ultimate act of disloyalty. The shock of Emancipation rippled through the white family. To see their former servants walk off and start a new life left them stunned. `There has been almost a perfect revolution among the Negroes' one Hairston mistress wrote, as if the servants had pillaged the house and set it afire, when in fact all they had done was leave.

--The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek, Griffin February 2000, ISBN 0-312-25393-1

"EARLY ON ESCAPING SLAVES COULD NOT BE SURE of the future, but the war dragged on, especially after Lincoln's September 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, the conflict turned into a war against slavery, and blacks escaped in droves. Their owners felt betrayed ... Most shattering to the slaveowners during and immediately after the war was the departure of women they had thought of "like one of the family--their black `mammies.'"

--Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White, W. W. Norton, February 1999, ISBN 0-393-34181-2

   Oh freedom
   Oh freedom
   Oh freedom over me!
   And before I'd be a slave
   I'll be buried in my grave
   And go home to my Lord and be free.

--Traditional African American spiritual, www.negrospirituals.com

Abraham Lincoln, The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) By the President of the United States of America: A PROCLAMATION

Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act of acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

That the executive will on the 1st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion against the United States."

Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-In-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for supressing said rebellion, do, on this 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the first day above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Morthhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence; and I recommend to them that, in all case when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.

And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 1, 1863, WAS A BRIGHT CRISP day in the nation's capital. The previous day had been a strenuous one for President Lincoln, but New Year's Day was to be ever more strenuous. So he rose early. There was much to do, not the least of which was to put the finishing touches on the Emancipation Proclamation.... Just before he affixed his name to the document, he said, `I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.'"

--John Hope Franklin, "The Emancipation Proclamation: An Act of Justice." From Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture by Howard Dodson, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, National Geographic, February 2003, ISBN 0-7922-6982-9