Historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s “
On Juneteenth” is an
unexpected book. She’s best known for her work on
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson had multiple children — a once
controversial thesis that’s now accepted as historical fact in large part
because of Gordon-Reed’s scholarship. She has written before about the need for
historians to maintain a certain distance from the people they write about, to
see “the complexity and contradictions” that might otherwise get crushed in an
overzealous embrace.
اضافة اعلان
In “On Juneteenth,” Gordon-Reed identifies quite closely
with her subject — and only a sliver of the book is directly about Juneteenth
itself. But if this book is a departure for her, it’s still guided by the
humane skepticism that has animated her previous work. In a series of short,
moving essays, she explores “the long road” to June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen.
Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in Texas, the state where
Gordon-Reed was born and raised.
Her family’s Texas roots run deep, to the 1820s on her
mother’s side and at least as far back as the 1860s on her father’s side. She
remembers Juneteenth celebrations from her childhood, drinking red soda and
setting off firecrackers that her grandfather bought. The history they were
commemorating still felt close, with slavery “just a blink of an eye away from
the years my grandparents and their friends were born.” When she heard that
people outside Texas were starting to celebrate the holiday, she confesses that
she “was initially annoyed,” feeling a “twinge of possessiveness” that she
chalks up to “the habit of seeing my home state, and the people who reside
there, as special.”
And Texas is special, she says — although not exactly in the
ways that it’s usually made out to be. Yes, it’s big, not just geographically
but also historically: “No other state brings together so many disparate and
defining characteristics all in one — a state that shares a border with a
foreign nation, a state with a long history of disputes between Europeans and
an Indigenous population and between Anglo-Europeans and people of Spanish
origin, a state that had existed as an independent nation, that had
plantation-based slavery and legalized Jim Crow.”
Yet that capaciousness seems to have been reduced in the
public imagination to the western half of the state, with its sparse population
and its desert brush. To the iconic Texan figures of the cowboy, the oilman and
the rancher, Gordon-Reed says we should add the slave plantation owner, for
whom Texas was ultimately founded: Stephen F. Austin brought colonists to the
Mexican province of Coahuila y Tejas not to chase cattle but to have his fellow
Anglo-Americans turn the land into cotton fields.
Gordon-Reed was born in Livingston and raised in nearby
Conroe — a town of 5,000 when she was a child in the 1960s; its population has
since grown more than 17-fold. When she was in first grade, toward the end of
Texas’ decadelong resistance to the Brown vs Board decision, her parents sent
her to attend what was known as the “white school” in town. She remembers being
a child in segregated Conroe and noticing the separate entrances and waiting
rooms at the doctor’s office, and how the other waiting room had a better
selection of magazines. Even when integration was legally mandated, she “knew
that law wasn’t the only thing,” and neither was straightforward material
self-interest. The churlish shopkeeper at the old-time general store would
glare at her and any Black people who wanted to exercise their right to spend
money there. For a child who hadn’t done anything wrong, “it was puzzling.”
This discrepancy — between abstractions on the one hand and
lived experience on the other — is something that seems to have fueled
Gordon-Reed’s curiosity as a historian. How could Jefferson, the author of the
soaring ideals enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, have been an
enslaver? And how is one to square his racist musings in “Notes on the State of
Virginia” with his determination to petition the Virginia legislature on behalf
of the men he freed?
No matter what she’s looking at, Gordon-Reed pries open this
space between the abstract and particular. Early in the book, she writes about
the Texas habit, not uncommon in the South, of taking refuge in the notion of
states’ rights. But such lofty appeals to freedom mean little without any
reference to what that freedom was actually supposed to entail. As she wryly
puts it: “States’ rights to do what?”
One of the things that makes this slender book stand out is
Gordon-Reed’s ability to combine clarity with subtlety, elegantly carving a
path between competing positions, instead of doing as too many of us do in this
age of hepped-up social media provocations by simply reacting to them. In “On
Juneteenth,” she leads by example, revisiting her own experiences, questioning
her own assumptions — and showing that historical understanding is a process,
not an end point.
“The attempt to recognize and grapple with the humanity and,
thus, the fallibility of people in the past — and the present — must be made,”
she writes. “That is the stuff of history, too.”
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