Ms. Khalilah Hanan serves as an Intervention Coordinator and is a member of our Executive Leadership team.

This fictional Juneteenth tribute envisions the events of June 19th, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when the last enslaved people learned of the Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished slavery two years earlier.

I remember hearing the birds first.

They rose up from the marshes over to the East; the wide wings of the cranes flapping as they went overhead. The smaller geese lifted in the air and red head herrings. It was a beautiful spectacle really. It happened often enough to not cause a curious head to raise.

More riders bringing the wagons that would load the cotton and behind that the men sitting high up on their mounts looking menacingly at the Afrikaans and Negro faces. Menace and mean; raw hate. Combinations that spelled Terror so we didn’t look up at them. Heads stayed bent working the fields unmindful of the presence. Today was different.

The long parade came into view with a flag flying. I didn’t recognize this flag though I had seen it’s colors in other flags. The men did sit high as well and their uniform was a color I had not seen before either. A precious Blue with the gold buttons down the chest.

The head man passed and nodded to the bewildered eyes that looked up from their obligations. I saw them move on. Some jotting pass hurriedly flanking the field and making a fence around us. The same Terror rose up in us even though we did not know why. The faces were not the faces of what we had seen before but the weapons were the same; big guns and sticks with blades.

The men pulled the women and children in and made a circle of false protection around us. Today we would all die here together.

The men, fathers, husbands and brothers, and the rest of kin’s people would succumb to the dominance of these peoples. We believed that death was freedom that some had remembered, others had chose to forget and most had never known.

The elder from among us stood apart and looked at the face that looked down at him. The soldier with his blue uniform on came down from his horse. He approached as others along with him dismounted from the horses. Their faces were different and his words were even and strong. “Today you are ‘emancipated’. Today you are a ‘free’ people. The President Abraham Lincoln signed his name to a paper making all the Afrikaners and Negros free.”

The evening was full of talk, laughter and celebration; the newness of freedom surging like the full birth of new life. We recited this date over and over again. Children’s voices rising in unison the made up songs unrehearsed.

Today is June 19, 1865. A celebration of freedom deferred. A celebration of freedom of life.

We had believed that death was freedom that some had remembered, others had chose to forget and most had never known.