Juneteenth
What Juneteenth Means to Me
I’m biracial. White mother, Black father. I grew up in the San Francisco bay area. Juneteenth means the people that walked before me. The ones who sacrificed so much just to give me the chance to be here and be free.
June 19, 1865. Galveston, Texas. The day the last enslaved Black people in America were told they were free — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Two and a half years of still being owned. Still being beaten. Still being sold. Because nobody bothered to tell them. Because freedom moved slow when it was moving toward Black bodies.
I think about that delay. I think about the women who kept braiding their daughters’ hair every morning even though they were still property. The men who kept whispering “someday” to their sons while they worked land they’d never own. The grandmothers who died in 1864, one year too early to hear the news. They didn’t get free. But they kept the faith alive so I could.
I’m free because they weren’t. I write because they couldn’t. I’m editing my book in a beautiful room because they were denied a room to call their own. I share my story with men and women /because my ancestors were forbidden to read, forbidden to testify, forbidden to exist as human.
Being biracial, Juneteenth hits me in both sides of my blood. My white side benefited from the system that held my Black side in chains. I carry both the debt and the inheritance. I don’t get to pick one. I don’t get to pretend slavery was “someone else’s history.” It’s mine. All of it.
When I rose from. a shelter in 2023, when I got on housing waitlists and clawed my way back, I wasn’t just doing it for me. I was doing it for the women who never got a door that locked, never got a kitchen to clean, never got a second chance.
Juneteenth isn’t just barbecue and a day off. It’s a debt I pay with my life. Every time I refuse to be small. Every time I speak in that speaking club. Every time I’m in the gym getting mentally and physically strong. Every time I correct my errors and live the way God wants me to live. That’s the freedom they bought me. Not with money. With blood.
I’m 51. I was baptized in Salem after the hardest ordeal of my life. When I came up out of that water, I thought of them. The ones who were baptized in rivers they didn’t choose, on plantations they couldn’t leave. I got to choose. That’s Juneteenth.
So I celebrate it loud. I grieve it deep. I don’t need anyone’s permission to claim it. I am their wildest dream: a free Black-biracial woman with a voice, with a book, with a future.
They walked so I could run. They bled so I could write. They waited so I could be told: You are free.
And on June 19th, I remember. Then on June 20th, I live like I believe it.
*Cathrynmharris
