Chapter Three
On the white side of town, June 19th was just another day, and it dawned just as hot. I had slept well on my grandmother’s pullout bed, and I was up early.
Breakfast was bacon and eggs, cooked by my grandmother and served at the kitchen table. She had an oxygen tank and a twenty-five foot long tube that reached from the tank in the bedroom throughout the three rooms of her small apartment. The food was hearty and fat, the way we all liked it in those days.
“I need you to run to the market for me, baby,” she said to me between cigarette puffs, her oxygen mask perched on her forehead like sunglasses. “Get a pencil from that drawer in there, and there’s paper on the shelf.”
I obliged, and took down the several items she wanted. I got her green purse from the bedroom closet and she gave me a twenty for the groceries. “Get whatever you want for yourself, too,” she added, as she had done as long as I could remember. I kissed her wrinkled cheek and headed out the door.
My big yellow Chevy may have had working air conditioning at some point earlier in its life, but I never saw it. Air conditioning to me was to roll down the windows, usually while driving, and go fast. I couldn’t go very fast in the winding streets of the old folks’ development, however, so to cool off I drove up to South 12th Street and headed to the highway at the edge of town. Along the way I passed a few black people, including a skinny teenaged girl walking in the opposite direction, toward town.
After driving around for a few minutes and cooling off the Chevy’s black interior, I decided to venture downtown to see if there were any bookstores. I had a vague memory from long ago of a post office lobby where stood a magazine rack run by a blind man, and I wondered if he was still there.
But before I reached the post office I saw two things: a sign for a used paperback bookstore, and a crowd of black people of all ages milling about on the street. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I did ask the man at the bookstore what was going on.
He was a fat man with a red face and black hair plastered to his head with oil. He looked at me over his glasses and said, “You mean all them niggers?”
“Yes,” I smiled. “Where are they all going?”
“Their parade. Don’t you know it’s Juneteenth?” He looked at me a bit like a scientist looks at a bug he’s never seen before.
“What’s that?” I asked, figuring out in my mind that, since it was June 19th, this must be some contraction of the date, but not understanding the meaning.
“Juneteenth started right at the end of the War Between the States,” he told me, “when Abraham Lincoln” (his lip curled slightly at the name) “freed the slaves up north. There wasn’t no TV or radio then, see, and news traveled mighty slow.”
“So?” I prodded.
“So, by the time the owners found out about what Lincoln had done, some time had passed. And they were in no hurry to tell their niggers, so they waited awhile. When the niggers finally found out the government had gone and freed them, it was June 19th, 1865, and in Texas that’s been a nigger holiday ever since!”
We both laughed, and I browsed through the racks of paperbacks for awhile before stepping back out into the June heat. I got in the Chevy, which was hot again, despite my having left all the windows down. I thought about driving by the Juneteenth parade but decided to head for the grocery store and get back to my grandmother’s apartment before she began to worry about where I’d gone.
I drove out of downtown Ransom and didn’t hear the shot fired a block away.
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