For the 7th year in a row, I reprised my role as newly emancipated slave,
Mattie Gilmore. Yet, this was the first time I was positioned near the front of the art exhibit part of the George Washington Carver Museum.
I took advantage of my proximity to the Juneteenth blurb on the panel, which hung on the wall across from where I sat. Instead of faithfully reciting the lines from the excerpt of Mattie Gilmore’s narrative, I started off my performance with a trivia question: What month and year did the Civil War end?
That question was a doozy. Only three people knew the correct answer. Most I directed to look behind them to read the first sentence of the Juneteenth panel.
Some people remembered that 1863 was a significant year, but thought that Texan slaves didn’t hear about the end of the war until two years later. They were close.
In 1863, President Lincoln wrote the first Emancipation Proclamation, but since the Civil War hadn’t ended then, it freed not a single slave. Two years passed and the South surrendered on April 9th, 1865. Texan slaves found out about it around June 19th, 1865. Hence why we celebrate “Juneteenth” instead of “Aprilteenth.”
After some variation of the above, I’d launch into my Mattie Gilmore excerpt. Sometimes that was after significant conversation. Other times, reading my audience, I’d zip into the excerpt and send the group of people to the next storyteller.
One Iranian visitor really got into the spirit of Juneteenth and stated that essentially the same thing happened in his country. He felt the key to equality was education. Not just formal, academic education, but also raising the younger generation to have self-respect. At this point, he described the sagging pants on young men. Although he got way off topic, I politely moved him along to the next storyteller, putting my call center agent finesse to good use.
I then was able to talk with one of my friends for a while until another group of people arrived. She stayed to listen to my narrative, then moseyed along when yet another friend spoke with me about his diabetes.
Several kids walked around the corner to escape upon hearing my opening trivia question, but many tried to answer and some even asked me statistics about how many died. One boy asked me how many Confederate soldiers started the war. My answer: all of them. At least the adults laughed. I confessed to him that I didn’t know the war statistics, but I’m now motivated to learn far more about the Civil War, especially the action here in Texas and Texan slaves.
Next Juneteenth 2020, I’m going to know more about the Reconstruction era since most people want to hear more than the sanitized history they learned in heavily biased public school history books.