“The image of Texas has a gender and a race: ‘Texas is a White man’”, Annette Gordon-Reed asserts in On Juneteenth. A cowboy at home on a range that appears devoid of people of colour is the popular icon of the Lone Star state. “What that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man is part of what I hope to explore in the essays of the book.” Gordon-Reed, a Harvard professor and Pulitzer prizewinning historian, uses the prism of a personal memoir to reflect on the multiracial experiences and legacies the state’s official histories have long suppressed, stretching from the 1820s to recent celebrations of Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the emancipation of slaves.
Gordon-Reed grew up in Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, in a middle-class African American family. She recounts vignettes from her childhood that describe encounters with family members, teachers and peers, visits to a popular amusement park and public history sites such as preserved Indian reservations, all of which help her to take the measure of what it was like growing up in a racially segregated society in the 1960s and 1970s.
The book offers an affecting child’s vantage point on Jim Crow. “I integrated my town’s schools, a la Ruby Bridges, with the chief difference being that I was not escorted to my first day of school by federal marshals”, Gordon-Reed states. Her parents decided to switch her from the all-Black school where she attended kindergarten to an all-white school when she began first grade because they could see the “writing on the wall” – that white resistance to integration would have to eventually desist following the US Supreme Court ruling Brown vs Board of Education in 1954. Her parents arranged with the school district to make the transition smooth and “no fuss was made”, despite initial threats against the family.
Gordon-Reed’s singularity honed her consciousness of the racial politics of her environs, the double standards her family experienced in separate and unequal waiting rooms of the doctor’s offices and the “forbidding atmosphere” of shopping at white-owned stores. The reader is given the sense that, in school, she sometimes felt like she was afloat in a fishbowl, as official visitors traipsed through to observe the novel experiment. After school she puzzled over the ambivalence of friendly white classmates who pretended not to know her in town. The ethics of racial mixing were clearly delineated and only certain lines could be crossed in select contexts.
On Juneteenth scrutinizes oft-told origin stories of Texas and argues for the importance of widening the conventional narrative that is captured in the famous exhortation to “Remember the Alamo”. Defeat suffered at the Alamo in 1836 was followed by a victory in battle the same year that gave Texas its independence from Mexico and has been touted as the exemplary birth of the republic (which lasted until Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845). The desire to preserve the institution of slavery was one of the principle motivations for the separation from Mexico, although this fact is not widely heralded by those who prefer the comfort of provincial half-truths.
Texas officials have changed very little in the decades since Gordon-Reed’s childhood in their insistence that inconvenient facts should be ignored. The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, signed a law this past summer mandating “patriotic education” and the promotion of the “1836 Project”, which calls for “foundational principles” and “founding documents to be taught”. Abbott signed another bill that prohibits connecting slavery and racism to the “true founding” or “authentic principles” of the United States. He is one of many Republican state law– makers throughout the country fighting to avoid showing white Americans in an unfavourable light in public-school social studies classes.
Abbott, however, is not well informed about the history that he professes, including the centrality of slavery to the state’s founding. As Gordon-Reed notes: “Race is right there in the documents – official and personal. It would take a concerted effort not to consider and analyze the subject”. The Texas Constitution of 1836 was explicit that only white people were welcome to migrate there. Ironically, the new legal mandate’s emphasis on “founding documents” will inadvertently open the door to teaching lessons that it was intended to silence and negate.
The book ends with a brief sketch of the history of Juneteenth, the observance of emancipation that began on June 19, 1866, marked with barbecues, red soda, music, speeches and, in later years, fireworks. African Americans who moved during the Great Migration of the twentieth century recreated the holiday wherever they travelled. The federal government embraced its symbolism and declared Juneteenth a national holiday this past June, amid a backdrop of record-breaking protests against white supremacist violence and police brutality. The conservative backlash to sanctioning an inclusive history has put Texas in a pickle, however, as its own law will make it difficult to teach about the meaning of a home-grown holiday. On Juneteenth is a timely, though compact, intervention in making sense of these contradictions.
Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A reckoning with the history of slavery across America nicely dovetails with Gordon-Reed’s book in purpose and style. In 2017, when his home town, New Orleans, began the controversial move to take down statues glorifying white supremacists and Confederate officers, Smith was inspired to write about how different places have told the story of their relationship to the history of slavery. A former high-school teacher, poet and staff writer at the Atlantic, he began to look at New Orleans with fresh eyes, realizing that echoes of slavery were everywhere in the built environment. “I became obsessed with how slavery is remembered and reckoned with, with teaching myself all of the things I wish someone had taught me long ago.”
Smith took to the road to explore living history in eight places, from New York to Louisiana, and travelled across the ocean to Gorée Island in Dakar, Senegal, a point of embarkation for the Atlantic slave trade. “Our country is in a moment, at an inflection point, in which there is a willingness to more fully grapple with the legacy of slavery and how it shaped the world we live in today”, he acknowledges. He decided to explore to what extent and in what ways different locations have taken an honest approach to characterizing this legacy in plantations, museums, cemeteries and memorials.
Some of these sites will be familiar to history buffs, such as President Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation in Virginia; the African Burial Ground in New York; and Galveston Island in Texas, where the Juneteenth holiday began. Others are less widely known, such as the relatively new Whitney Plantation in Louisiana and the Blandford Cemetery in Virginia. Readers are likely to be stunned to see Angola prison, officially known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary, on a list of tourist attractions.
As well as visiting these sites to understand how they interpret the past, Smith interviewed museum professionals, tour guides and casual visitors. Mettle and sensitivity are required to get this right, to invite strangers to share their views (often diametrically opposed to his own) on polarizing topics. Smith’s journalistic expertise led him to ask both open-ended and pointed questions that encouraged candid dialogues.
Smith joined the Slavery at Monticello Tour on his visit to the plantation strategically built on a mountaintop in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is a relatively recent undertaking for the pastoral estate purchased by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation and open to the public since 1923. The foundation took another seventy years to discuss the history of slavery openly, starting with oral history interviews with descendants who told their enslaved ancestors’ stories. The foundation conceded in 1998 that Jefferson sired several children he claimed as human property through Sally Hemings, his deceased wife’s enslaved half-sister, thanks to DNA tests forcing its hands.
Smith witnessed visitors struggle with their misunderstandings of history as they realized the deficits in their educations. He approached two women who were initially drawn to the architecture of the main house created without modern tools and machinery. Smith asked them if they knew of Jefferson’s participation in bondage, brutality and separation of families. They were visibly disappointed by what they learned. “You grow up and it’s basic American history from fourth grade… He’s a great man, and he did all this”, one explained. The tour “really took the shine off the guy”. Smith also enlisted assistants on his excursions, some to mediate awkward situations and others for their knowledge. Norris Henderson fits the latter category. He is a political activist who spent thirty years incarcerated at Angola prison and accompanied Smith on his visit to the museum there. Henderson had returned hundreds of times since his release in 2003, leading tours of the jail in conjunction with visits to the Whitney Plantation, two hours away, to draw the connections between their histories of forced labour and captivity.
The parallels between the two institutions and the continuity of inmates over centuries are palpable in Smith’s retelling. The current inmates are largely Black. The biggest maximum-security prison in the country is called Angola, in honour of the plantation that once occupied its land, which lore has it was named after the African country from which many of the enslaved people in Louisiania originated, though that may be apocryphal. A former Confed–erate major purchased it from a slave-owning widow and continued its traditions of exploitation by other means, entrapping the formerly enslaved population based on fabricated charges in the vicious convict leasing system during the Jim Crow era.
A museum at a prison is an odd juxtaposition. Officials’ judgement about what they choose to display is perhaps more dumbfounding. The Angola Prison Rodeo enjoyed special pride of place through photos and posters. “The Wildest Show in the South” brought out tens of thousands of visitors annually. Curators dared not publicize that many of the cowboy play-acting prisoners suffered broken bones and concussions for the sake of entertainment, however. Gift shop tchotchkes for purchase include this gem: a mug with the label “Angola, a Gated Community”. Who was this designed to amuse? At whose expense?
“If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage”, Smith states sharply. Yet in the United States “such collective outrage at this plantation-turned-prison is relatively muted”. The public’s ignorance is not an excuse, because the media has spotlighted the prison for more than a century.
Smith ends the book with personally meaningful exchanges with people close to him, if still on a sombre note. He visited the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC with his grandparents. They talked about some of the hard history on the walls as affirmations of what they had witnessed first-hand or learned about from their elders a generation or two removed from slavery. “I realized that in an effort to dig into the archives that explain the history of this country, I had forgotten that the best primary sources are often sitting right next to us”, Smith acknowledges. “My grandparents’ stories are my inheritance; each one is an heirloom I carry.”
Smith and Gordon-Reed are writers within a long tradition that ponders the “twoness” of being both/and, Black and American, as the eminent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois described it. Even as the end of de jure segregation divides their experiences growing up in the South years apart, the history that they were taught in school, and the public history sites and symbols that still dominate the landscape, are much the same. The reality is that the nation’s reckoning with slavery, Jim Crow and race that they set out to elucidate is still a work in progress.
Tera W. Hunter is Edwards Professor of American History and Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Bound in Wedlock: Slave and free Black marriage in the nineteenth century, 2017
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