That Juneteenth this year falls on Father’s Day makes it an even greater holiday for African-Americans to celebrate. Our culture is filled with great fathers and grandfathers who despite being born of inopportunity and racism were able to shine a positive light on fatherhood and their heritage. My grandfather was one such man full of such idealistic sayings about our race and culture. Among his favorites were the standard clichés we all know about the glass being half-full not half-empty, being a chip off the old block, making lemonade from lemons. But the one that most echoes in my mind was his spin on the pride of being dark-skinned. When my grandmother would affectionately call him her strong, dark, black man, he would comeback with “the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice.” Growing up I took this literally and always looked for the darkest berries in the supermarket. Overtime learning my history through his stories and euphemisms, I understood fully his positive spin on his dark complexion.
As it were, Juneteenth was my grandfather’s favorite holiday. Every Fourth of July he and my uncles and other male relatives would make a point to discuss that blacks in Texas were not yet free on this day. On Juneteenth like the Fourth, he would wake at dawn get the patio cleaned up, season the meat, and prepare the grill. During this celebration they would rejoice in discussing how the freedom of all slaves came to be.
Like the sayings my grandfather jovially extended to me, the true meaning of Juneteenth was somewhat lost in translation to me as a young girl. In my hometown, Juneteenth meant a parade and barbeque at the community park on a way too hot day, all the free kool-aid one could drink, and trying to get the cool guys in school to notice that you had on the nicest jumper set. One might have never guessed that Tyler, Texas had so many black people until every one of us turned out at Woldert Park for our annual Juneteenth celebration.
Now that I look back I can understand why our celebrations never seemed to end on time. With the sun going down and mosquitoes on our tail, we’d continue to run, play, gossip, and eat to our heart’s delight reveling in all it meant to be free. Now that I am older I understand that the celebration was more than about the gathering, but about our right and ability to celebrate ourselves and those who carried us over.
The image of our Juneteenth celebrations in the park and the moments shared with my grandparents recounting the importance of this day, I see this day always as a day for remembrance and gratitude. I see that we did “make lemonade out of lemons” as my grandfather would say. Juneteenth is more than about the celebration of freedom and the official end to slavery for all Americans, but it is about the essence of a culture ripe with the fortitude to endure and triumph any obstacle. In this way Juneteenth marked the official end of all slavery and the beginning of a cultural tradition.
Carrying on this tradition of celebrating and remembering keeps our hopes alive and those of our forefathers. To thank each one of them individually would be a list too long to print. But on this special day of thanking Fathers, I thank my father and my forefathers who have given us a life where we can hope, dream, and recount moments of old with pride and resolution. For I know if in his hardship my grandfather could rejoice in his blackness and make lemonade from his bag of lemons, I will most certainly celebrate the sweet beauty of my own skin and see my glass of lemonade half-full. I hope in this way I am a chip off a huge block of our many great and noble forefathers.