My 112 year old grandmother Maple describes how her knees would dig inside the pavement in her plantation cabin. As a 8 year old girl in 1865, she would hold together the last 6 fingers she had left into a prayer position. She would begin to pray to her spirit guides and ancestors.
Grandmother Maple’s fingers have drawings of X’s and O’s, diamonds, and crystals. Inside both her palms, you could see every shape and math symbol within them. Including octagons, pentagons, hexagons, division signs, and subtraction signs from the cotton thorns tearing into her flesh. Her arms look burnt, as if acid or alcohol had been splattered on them. Her back printed with pinstripes, candstripes, chalk stripes, and graph checks. Her knees planted with brick dots and half- drop dots. Anyone would have thought someone had run her over with a tractor, physically installed nails in every part that revealed skin, or pulled off each piece of her skin and ironed it.
She would wonder if dinner, lunch, or breakfast would come about. As she would ask god things like, “Am I going to get hung next?”, “Are my eyes going to roll back?”, “Are my ears going to shiver?” “Is my heart going to lose rhythm?”, “Are my lungs going to lose structure?”, “Is my voice going to travel to the gates of heaven?”, “Are my feet going to float and fly off within the air?”, “As if they had bird wings and upheld the gravity that’s stored within a spaceship, with an astronaut suit on and the moon right outside the windows vision, as pluto and mars drift into the stars sunlight, and into a euphoria and zootopia like atmosphere?”
Due to the fact that, there was no place on earth where there was a home for people who looked like her. A place that didn’t treat her like the litter that lays on the side of the curb. A place that didn’t only see lightness but realized how great darkness could be. Once the flashlight was inserted into the parts where there was brightness. But as she begged God to spare her and not let her last breath be her choking on her own blood. God then whispered in her right ear and said “I will not let that happen to you my dear child!”
Soon after, her master Mark Smith breaks down her door and tells her to get off his property. She was now useless to him. As my grandmother ran through the woods, the train tracks, and the swamps. She saw other slaves running and carrying their babies. They were all headed to Chicago and once they arrived they all fell to their knees. Repeating “We’re free, oh God!” “We’re free!” “We’re free!”
Today, at 112 years old, she still tells me “Do not ever bow down to them, kiss their feet, or suck up to no white man!” You must never say “Yes Massa” “No Massa” “Don’t let no man call you gyal or drag you around like some lost puppy” “You betta raise yo head up chile!” Until the day I take my last breath, I live by her words and I walk with my head held high!
As the years have passed, we now celebrate the day she became free! Last year’s Juneteenth was the most memorable of them all. Me and the family all danced to “Brick House” by the Commodores, “Let it whip” by Dazz Band, “Mary Jane” by Rick James, “After the Pain” by Betty Wright, and “Have you ever loved somebody” by Freddie Jackson. As we danced, I could see the chitlins boiling and the pork chops frying. I saw the ribs drowning in barbecue sauce, I could see the sugar sinking into the kool aid, and the hot links spread across silver trays. I inhaled the smoke from the barbecue pit, I dug my hands inside the ice chest, I ingested the banana pudding, and I could hear the soft crunches from my aunties vacuum cookies. While my older cousins were breaking crab legs, peeling shrimp, opening oysters, biting at their corn, and unwrapping their crawfish. Dining as one big happy family! Celebrating our freedom, for those that had none!