May your Juneteenth be filled with free time

I’ve got red beans and rice broken down to a science.

I’m convinced of that.

It’s barbecue ribs that give me a hard time.

I’m hoping to get around to practicing my technique this weekend, in celebration of Emancipation Day.

It’s as good an excuse as any to barbecue.

The way I see it, the barbecue is the best part about Emancipation Day – I’m talking about Juneteenth of course, which happens to fall on a Sunday this year.

Everything else about it seems like a pretty sad reason to celebrate.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously I’m as thrilled as the next black American that President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation made black slaves free on Jan. 1 of 1863.

But the whole thing is sort of cheapened by the oh-so-American delay of the news spreading to the people whom it mattered to most – the slaves in the Deep South, Galveston, Texas, to be specific (insert sarcastic George W. Bush remark).

Slaves there weren’t granted freedom until the June 19, 1865, arrival of Union soldiers, after General Lee’s April 9 surrender (insert cynical “Dukes of Hazzard” reference).

The popular conclusion for why it took freedom 2 1/2 years to drag its glorious butt to Galveston: a messenger was murdered on his way to Texas with news of freedom (“If we don’t tell ‘em, they’ll never know.”), the news was deliberately withheld by slave masters (“If we don’t tell ‘em, they’ll never know.”), federal troops actually waited for the end of one last cotton harvest before enforcing freedom (“What? Set ‘em free? All right, at least let me get in one last lick, maybe two.”).

In other words, freedom was somehow kept a secret from blacks in Galveston until 18-cottonpickin’-65. Incidentally, the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers formed the terrorist Ku Klux Klan secret society in December of that same year in Tennessee.

It all smells of rotten watermelon.

So the now-freed men and women threw a barbecue and thanked God and their former masters for giving them the very free will they were born with. The annual June 19 celebration of freedom became known as Juneteenth, as a mnemonic device for former slaves who’d been denied literacy.

But freedom to do what?

Start a business and buy a house with all that fine ejumacation? How long was it before most former slaves could read the Fourteenth Amendment, which promised them fair and equal treatment under the law when ratified in 1868.

Many used-to-be-slaves didn’t even leave the plantations to which they were sold. Maybe that says something about the treatment they received.

Juneteenth celebrators mainly gathered in rural areas or church grounds until blacks became landowners; one of the earliest documented land purchases was in 1898, for a place called Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas.

Over the years, recognition of Juneteenth has been treated with less participation with urbanization, integration and ultimately assimilation into a mainstream culture.

The tradition of barbecues with strawberry sodas seems to be waning locally as well.

In town there used to be an annual neighborhood barbecue at Liberty Park in the East Central neighborhood, believed by many to be the “black” part of town. That’s since been sort of replaced by Unity in the Community, which features speakers and performing artists, held in August.

There is also a group of senior black men in the community who get together annually on this particular weekend to golf, a relatively recent luxury no doubt.

There are some who see Juneteenth as a made-up holiday with little meaning (they put Kwanzaa in the same box). Nevertheless, it was made a Texas state holiday in 1980.

Imagine being black in Galveston on June 19, 1865.

“Whaddaya mean we spose to been free ferr two years? How long izzat?”

It’s so sad it’s almost laughable.

Fourth of July comes early for blacks, but freedom took way too long.

The date does hold great significance, but it is more bittersweet than the strawberry soda attached to it. So I’ll be sure to reach for a dark beer for Sunday’s ‘cue instead.

Like I said, any reason to consume high amounts of cholesterol is a good one.

Now I just gotta find me a holiday to use as an excuse to learn how to master smoked salmon.