Annette Gordon-Reed’s ‘On Juneteenth’ complicates notions of Black history
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Yet those experiences did not tamp down the joy of her upbringing or the pride she took in being a Black woman in a state mythologized as the Wild West home of ranchers, cowboys and oilmen. In the popular imagination, she writes, “Texas is a White man.” Nothing punctures that myth so perfectly as Juneteenth, a once-obscure holiday birthed in Texas that has in recent years become a nationwide celebration of Black American independence.
In “On Juneteenth,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian interweaves her personal, trailblazing history with that of her home state to pierce many of the false narratives we learned as children about the country’s treatment of African Americans. To understand what happened on June 19, 1865, when African Americans in Texas first learned of their freedom — more than two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — one needs to understand the Lone Star State, and Gordon-Reed offers a timely history lesson. She does so with beautiful prose, breathtaking stories and painful memories. Like the story of Juneteenth itself, the history she tells is one of yarns woven, dark truths glossed over and freedom delayed.
Gordon-Reed is no stranger to debunking heroic myths of the past. Most of her written work has been on the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular. In the 1990s, Gordon-Reed was at the forefront of scholars who helped convince Americans that Jefferson fathered children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed’s literary gift is the ability to research and write about subjects with broadly accepted stories in a convincing way that allows readers to consider other perspectives.
In her new memoir, Gordon-Reed notes her somewhat miffed reaction in recent years to learning that Juneteenth was increasingly being celebrated outside Texas. The “red soda water,” barbecue, parades and fireworks that marked her own family’s celebration were taking on new significance as a fresh generation of activists demanded accountability for police killings of Black people and racial injustice. But her annoyance quickly gave way to a realization that Texas’s history is America’s history — and that the joy of Juneteenth, naturally, belongs to the entire country.
That is not to say the history of her part of Texas is entirely joyful. Some of the most powerful sections of this book relate to the author’s experience of growing up during the final years of segregation and her understanding of major events that occurred in her community before she was born, including the 1885 lynching of Bennett Jackson, the 1922 lynching of Joe Winters and the killing of Bob White in 1941 — acts of “pure terrorism” directed at Black men accused of sexually assaulting White women.
As a scholar of slavery, I welcome Gordon-Reed’s discussion of “origin stories” and the importance of enslaved people throughout Texas history. She criticizes the notion, unfortunately creeping into the educational system, that slavery destroyed African and African American personhood. In the classroom and in lectures, I describe these enslaved individuals’ “soul values”: the self-worth, pride and humanity they claimed in the face of commodification and oppression.
By starting her history in the 1500s with a North African named Estebanico, who traveled with the explorer Àlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in Texas, Gordon-Reed forces us to reconsider Black history. He survived under grueling conditions and was in no way connected to the plantation slavery that entrapped so many people of African descent 300 years later. His presence in history complicates generalized understandings about Africans in North America and expands our understanding of the land that later became the United States.
Origin stories also matter, Gordon-Reed reminds us, for the Indigenous people who populated the American landscape before Europeans arrived; they matter to those who came seeking religious freedom; and they matter for those who declared independence and settled on land that was not originally theirs. Telling the stories of our nation through conflict, annihilation, negotiation, slavery, war and freedom is to tell history through the people who shaped it. “The American story is,” she rightly claims, “endlessly complicated.”
The story is further complicated by our gauzy and imprecise view in the rear-view mirror. And at times, Gordon-Reed’s meanderings into her decaying memories seem to get us lost — for instance, when she recalls a Six Flags amusement park employee in stereotypical Indian garb (complete with a feather and headband) diving into the water of a ride to rescue a child who had fallen in. Was he White? She thinks so, but she can’t be sure.
But she uses her subjective recollections as a stand-in for our nation’s self-serving amnesia about its history. In the case of the “Indian Brave,” as she remembers the Six Flags worker, the anecdote is a launching point for a rumination on the false idea that Indigenous American culture belongs to the past and that what is widely known about these original inhabitants is almost exclusively related to their relationship with White settlers.
As an expert on Jefferson, one of the architects of our founding documents, Gordon-Reed knows that liberty, equality and freedom sit at the beginning of our national story. But that national history is replete with myths. Gordon-Reed offers a gentle correction to the romanticizing of Western history and the erasure of marginalized communities. And for those cringing at the thought of revisions to American history at a moment when history has become so politicized, she shares that “history is always being revised, as new information comes to light and when different people see known documents and have their own responses to them, shaped by their individual experiences.” America has room for people who are “deeply invested” in “heroic” notions of the past, but it also should leave space for different interpretations based on new revelations and documentation. As a historian, I could not agree more.
Yet those experiences did not tamp down the joy of her upbringing or the pride she took in being a Black woman in a state mythologized as the Wild West home of ranchers, cowboys and oilmen. In the popular imagination, she writes, “Texas is a White man.” Nothing punctures that myth so perfectly as Juneteenth, a once-obscure holiday birthed in Texas that has in recent years become a nationwide celebration of Black American independence.
In “On Juneteenth,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian interweaves her personal, trailblazing history with that of her home state to pierce many of the false narratives we learned as children about the country’s treatment of African Americans. To understand what happened on June 19, 1865, when African Americans in Texas first learned of their freedom — more than two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — one needs to understand the Lone Star State, and Gordon-Reed offers a timely history lesson. She does so with beautiful prose, breathtaking stories and painful memories. Like the story of Juneteenth itself, the history she tells is one of yarns woven, dark truths glossed over and freedom delayed.
Gordon-Reed is no stranger to debunking heroic myths of the past. Most of her written work has been on the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular. In the 1990s, Gordon-Reed was at the forefront of scholars who helped convince Americans that Jefferson fathered children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed’s literary gift is the ability to research and write about subjects with broadly accepted stories in a convincing way that allows readers to consider other perspectives.
In her new memoir, Gordon-Reed notes her somewhat miffed reaction in recent years to learning that Juneteenth was increasingly being celebrated outside Texas. The “red soda water,” barbecue, parades and fireworks that marked her own family’s celebration were taking on new significance as a fresh generation of activists demanded accountability for police killings of Black people and racial injustice. But her annoyance quickly gave way to a realization that Texas’s history is America’s history — and that the joy of Juneteenth, naturally, belongs to the entire country.
That is not to say the history of her part of Texas is entirely joyful. Some of the most powerful sections of this book relate to the author’s experience of growing up during the final years of segregation and her understanding of major events that occurred in her community before she was born, including the 1885 lynching of Bennett Jackson, the 1922 lynching of Joe Winters and the killing of Bob White in 1941 — acts of “pure terrorism” directed at Black men accused of sexually assaulting White women.
As a scholar of slavery, I welcome Gordon-Reed’s discussion of “origin stories” and the importance of enslaved people throughout Texas history. She criticizes the notion, unfortunately creeping into the educational system, that slavery destroyed African and African American personhood. In the classroom and in lectures, I describe these enslaved individuals’ “soul values”: the self-worth, pride and humanity they claimed in the face of commodification and oppression.
By starting her history in the 1500s with a North African named Estebanico, who traveled with the explorer Àlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in Texas, Gordon-Reed forces us to reconsider Black history. He survived under grueling conditions and was in no way connected to the plantation slavery that entrapped so many people of African descent 300 years later. His presence in history complicates generalized understandings about Africans in North America and expands our understanding of the land that later became the United States.
Origin stories also matter, Gordon-Reed reminds us, for the Indigenous people who populated the American landscape before Europeans arrived; they matter to those who came seeking religious freedom; and they matter for those who declared independence and settled on land that was not originally theirs. Telling the stories of our nation through conflict, annihilation, negotiation, slavery, war and freedom is to tell history through the people who shaped it. “The American story is,” she rightly claims, “endlessly complicated.”
The story is further complicated by our gauzy and imprecise view in the rear-view mirror. And at times, Gordon-Reed’s meanderings into her decaying memories seem to get us lost — for instance, when she recalls a Six Flags amusement park employee in stereotypical Indian garb (complete with a feather and headband) diving into the water of a ride to rescue a child who had fallen in. Was he White? She thinks so, but she can’t be sure.
But she uses her subjective recollections as a stand-in for our nation’s self-serving amnesia about its history. In the case of the “Indian Brave,” as she remembers the Six Flags worker, the anecdote is a launching point for a rumination on the false idea that Indigenous American culture belongs to the past and that what is widely known about these original inhabitants is almost exclusively related to their relationship with White settlers.
As an expert on Jefferson, one of the architects of our founding documents, Gordon-Reed knows that liberty, equality and freedom sit at the beginning of our national story. But that national history is replete with myths. Gordon-Reed offers a gentle correction to the romanticizing of Western history and the erasure of marginalized communities. And for those cringing at the thought of revisions to American history at a moment when history has become so politicized, she shares that “history is always being revised, as new information comes to light and when different people see known documents and have their own responses to them, shaped by their individual experiences.” America has room for people who are “deeply invested” in “heroic” notions of the past, but it also should leave space for different interpretations based on new revelations and documentation. As a historian, I could not agree more.
On Juneteenth
By Annette Gordon-Reed
Liveright.
144 pp. $15.95
THE WASHINGTON POST
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