A Different Kinda Juneteenth

Issue # 03 Keith’s SciFi Musings June 16, 2024

NOTE: In celebration of Juneteenth, I am reprinting the story I wrote last year about the holiday.

From the PBS.org website:

The holiday's origin story begins in Galveston, Texas, which was the westernmost area of the Union in 1865. When enslaved people there were told of their emancipation on June 19, 1865, they had technically already been freed two-and-a-half years prior, when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Slaveholders in Texas had kept the information to themselves, extending the period of violent exploitation of enslaved African Americans. The following year, in 1866, a celebration was held in Texas, the first Juneteenth observance to recognize freedom from slavery in the U.S.

Notice the section I put in bold because it’s nearly as important as the actual holiday itself. Today, Juneteenth is recognized as a federal holiday, and many of us celebrate the day when enslaved people were given the news that slavery was over. This bit of historical information is presented to us as a reason to celebrate, and granted, the end of slavery was most definitely a good thing.

But imagine having your freedom put on pause for two and one-half years because those who had enslaved you were so pissed off at having to let you go that they just decided they weren’t gonna do it until they had to. For them, it wasn’t much more than a white racist male temper tantrum. But for those they enslaved, it was more than 800 additional days of hell for no other reason than because white people felt like it.

And so, because I’m not always such a forgiving type, I have what I guess you would call these alternative fiction dreams of what it could have been like if, as a measure of repayment to the enslaved people for all those days of freedom that were stolen from them: white people were somehow forced into slavery for that period of time. An eye-for-an-eye kinda thing. Or maybe a little longer. Maybe, like, 200 years or so longer?

I dunno. Seems cruel, right? But then…I mean…

How would the former slaves have handled that switch, though? If they woke up one morning in the Big House, wearing these fancy clothes, white folks scurrying and bowing all around them, making sure their every need was met? No doubt it would have been confusing, even somewhat terrifying initially, trying to make sense of it all. Looking out the window and seeing all those white folks in the cotton fields, or strolling down to the cabins to peruse your property. Maybe deliver a whipping or two.

But then, once they got the hang of this superiority thing, how would it all have turned out? Would we have become them?

Or would we have taken all the slave ships, set sail toward home, and leave the white folks to fend for themselves in a damnation of their own making?

Yeah. Happy Juneteenth.