By Feliks Garcia, Offsite Editor
One hundred fifty years ago, word of abolition of slaves finally reached Texas, months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House. The resulting celebrations became the annual Juneteenth holiday. Today, on the sesquicentennial of Juneteenth, the Black community, yet again, must find the strength to heal in the aftermath of the attack on the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which left nine of its members dead. Librarians, teachers, pastors, leaders, humans. And while a community mourns, we can’t help but notice the Confederate flag flying high over South Carolina’s state capitol.
But it’s not a question of North vs. South. Racism is prevalent across this country, as black men and women are victims of white violence in South Carolina, New York, California, Texas, Missouri — in every corner of the nation.
In “Letter to My Mother After Charleston,” Carvell Wallace meditates on the murders in Charleston, the memory of his late mother who took news to heart, and how much the Rodney King video affected him, despite feigning apathy as teenagers do.
But seeing them beating that man on television, it must have scared me so deep, in a place so hidden, that I didn’t even know about it. My brain kept playing as though I were a regular teenager. But my body. My body ma. The body you gave me. My body knew the truth. My body locked the door from the inside without me even knowing it.
We weren’t used to these things yet. We thought this was as bad as it would get. We didn’t know there’d be a day when they would not only beat that man on television, but they would strangle that man, taze that man, shoot that man, kick that man, kill that man on television. We thought this was as bad as it would get. Everyone had seen it. And they certainly couldn’t let it go now. They were caught. Remember how we thought that, ma?
“Some things never change,” he imagines his mother would say, conceding she would be correct.
Read the rest of Carvell Wallace’s work at The Toast.