Happy Juneteenth, friends!
If you haven’t checked out my historical fiction Little Women remix, So Many Beginnings, the above is an excerpt from Part II. And it—the above excerpt—epitomizes my definition of freedom.
Freedom is not one dimensional. It isn’t defined solely by what we’re free of. It is woefully incomplete if it isn’t freedom to something as well. And perhaps that’s where freedom becomes liberation, for me. I demand freedom to demand recompense and answer for the years it took for the Emancipation Proclamation to extend to Galveston. I demand freedom for my people to determine whether or not they want to celebrate, or how celebration looks, from person to person. I demand freedom to accept the national acknowledgement of Juneteenth without respecting the disingenuous reasons. Freedom to call this country home and call it to account, to demand reparations, to refuse a holiday without historically contextualizing curriculum in schools, so that children know why it’s now a holiday and why it wasn’t before.
And who am I kidding, we’re still waiting on the freedom from to arrive. Like. Let’s be for real.
Alright, I didn’t wanna keep you today.
Go on, my darlings. Be free.
