The Watch Night That Never Came
“On the night of December 31, 1862, enslaved and free African Americans gathered, many in secret, to ring in the new year and await news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. Just a few months earlier, on September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the executive order that declared enslaved people in the rebelling Confederate States legally free. However, the decree would not take effect until the clock struck midnight at the start of the new year.”
--National Museum of African American History and Culture
It is a day for poetry and song, a new song. These cloudless skies, this balmy air, this brilliant sunshine . . . are in harmony with the glorious morning of liberty about to dawn up on us.
--Frederick Douglass, December 31, 1862
It was 11:59 on New Year’s Eve, and a slave named Thomas was packed into a small and raggedy wood-framed church with nearly 100 others who had lived and shared his same dread life experience on the plantation. Those who had known no other experience for their entire lives and had banished the word ‘hope’ from their scant vocabularies as a word far too dangerous to even think about, let alone utter out loud. Hope, at least hope for anything this side of the grave, could get you killed. Each of them had seen the bloody evidence of that. Far too much evidence, and far too often.
But on this day, at this moment, one minute before the dawning of 1863, hope had found a way to make them believe. To make them not turn away. Because there had been a war after all, the great war, and that war had been won!
So after several hours of nighttime darkness, Thomas, a dark-skinned young man not quite sure of his exact age, born to parents he could not remember, and sold once he was old enough to pick cotton, decided to escape the crush of anxious, murmuring bodies. He yanked open the doors of the church and dashed outside to celebrate this thing called freedom in the cold evening air. For so long, the church, tucked away deep in the woods, had felt more like a place of hiding than a sanctuary. But today, there was no need to hide because Thomas was free. He desperately wanted to know if freedom would feel any different, smell any different, or sound any different.
Sound any different…
Why hadn’t the clock struck midnight yet? He was certain he had heard the distant ringing of 11 bells from town some time ago. Certainly, an hour had passed by now, right? He sat down on the church steps, wrapped his arms around his knees, and looked up at the moon as it hid behind a thickness of clouds. After what felt like another hour had passed, the clock had still not struck midnight, and the joyful voices from inside the church were mostly silent. Soon, a girl Thomas had always liked named Peg came outside and joined him on the steps. They didn’t speak for several minutes before she quietly reached over and grabbed his hand to squeeze it.
“Something’s wrong,” said Thomas in a near-whisper. “The bell, it didn’t…”
“Shhhh…” said Peg. “Someone could be listening.”
“But come midnight, ain’t we supposed to be…”
“Shhhhh!”
“But Peg…”
“But midnight didn’t come, did it? Why you think that is? Huh?”
Thomas shook his head slowly, his dark eyes registering the terror of understanding.
Midnight can’t come ‘til they say so.