Happy Juneteenth!

We’re really hitting our stride at the Trailing Edge this month. Here it is practically the end of June, and we’re just now limping up - with hang-dog look and, as Pogo put it, “covered with rue” - to celebrate Juneteenth.

If she were trying to deflect blame, a person might say this is poetic justice. Or irony in social justice perhaps. Juneteenth being a celebration of the very belated recognition in Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation. (We used to live in Texas; maybe that’s where we learned our poor timing.)

For those of us who are still unclear about this holiday, a quick check of our trusty internet search engine - and a small typo - will bring up Junteenth and quite a good description by kzntell (who - name notwithstanding - is a better speller than we are, having titled his/her summary of the day “What is Juneteenth?”).

“Juneteenth,” writes the aforementioned kzntell, “also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, annual holiday celebrated on June 19 in the United States to commemorate the ending of slavery…. marks the day in 1865 when word reached African Americans in Texas that slavery in the United States had been abolished. More than two years earlier, on New Year’s Day, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Delivered during the American Civil War, this proclamation ordered the freeing of all slaves in states that were rebelling against Union forces. The proclamation had little effect in Texas, where there were few Union troops to enforce the order …[until] June 19, 1865, when a Union general backed by nearly 2,000 troops arrived in the city of Galveston. The general, Gordon Granger, publicly announced that slavery in the United States had ended. Reactions among newly freed slaves ranged from shock and disbelief to jubilant celebration. That day has been known ever since as Juneteenth, a name probably derived from the slang combination of the words June and nineteenth.”

Other descriptions are available from the National Black Justice Coalition and from the

Handbook of Texas. (That explains our trouble adjusting to Texas! We didn’t have a handbook.) (In case others have similar difficulties, we are currently engaged in writing a “Life Users’ Manual” as a technical guide to the living.) (Our apologies for these digressions, and now we return to the past:)

“On June 19 ("Juneteenth"), 1865,” the Handbook tells us, “Union general Gordon Granger read the Emancipation Proclamation in Galveston, thus belatedly bringing about the freeing of 250,000 slaves in Texas. The tidings of freedom reached slaves gradually as individual plantation owners read the proclamation to their bondsmen over the months following the end of the war [in keeping with the spirit of delaying ethics in favor of money which, among other things, characterized the US Civil War]. The news elicited an array of personal celebrations, some of which have been described in The Slave Narratives of Texas (1974).” And so on.

We hope you did something liberating and ethical on the 19^th.

We intended to. But we made strawberry jam. We’d like to say the jam made us think about Mark Twain’s Puddinhead Wilson. But it didn’t.