A Stirring Chronicle of Slavery, Sweet Freedom

With the flurry of shopping lists and marinating rituals for Juneteenth celebrations just about to commence, this might be the best time as any to pause and consider what is at the heart of a tradition. A tradition that for many African Americans of later generations has been largely just a good excuse for an annual reunion of family, a quick catch-up, along with a good barbecue or two.

People don’t often pause to consider how the last line of enslaved ancestors might have reacted when the news of emancipation first reached their ears. Legend has it that it took at least half the year for the word to make it to many far-flung Southern hamlets--hence the June 19th celebration date (its origins in Texan tradition). The more citified we become, the less we tend to remember, to question. With details lost, histories lose shape and form. And without the building blocks of memory, the encyclopedia of oral tradition, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate what was won and what was lost and what the abstract concept of freedom truly means.

Velma Maia Thomas’ “Lest We Forget” (Crown Publishers), a lively, interactive collage of a volume, doesn’t just speak for history, but lets history speak for itself. Collecting photographs and documents from the touring Black Holocaust Exhibit, which Thomas conceived and curated, the book may serve to fill the void in knowledge: Its sharing of the historic tangibles of struggle could become the centerpiece of a family tradition on its own.

Thomas, a historian, ordained minister and manager of the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore in Atlanta, has from the start seen the project’s ultimate purpose: “It was a resurrection of the stories that the enslaved wanted to be told, only awaiting a vessel through which they could speak.”

*

Lushly illustrated, inventively art-directed--there are faithful reproductions or artist’s renderings of freedom papers hidden in a tobacco tin, a deck that can be opened to reveal the cargo hold of a slave ship--the volume reconstructs the history of the Africans’ passage to America, from African soil and capture to the selling block and plantation life and ultimately the first notes of the call of freedom--the Day of Jubilee:

Thomas writes: “They called it ‘Jubilee,’ the day that freedom came. It came after almost 300 years of cruel bondage. . . . It sped along the plantation grapevine, through conversations overheard in the big house and carried to the slave quarters. My people received the news cautiously, wondering if the president would go through with his plan. . . . Nothing could match the euphoria, witnesses tell, of the day that the president signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In the nation’s capital, my people filled the streets, the town halls, the African churches, praying, praising and thanking God that they had lived to see this long-awaited day. Old women sang and testified. Old men openly wept. . . . What freedom was like and what it would bring my people was not yet known. But they knew slavery’s chains had been broken. From the cotton plantations of the Deep South to the rice fields of the coastal states, there rose a freedom song: ‘No more driver’s lash for me, no more, no more. No more driver’s lash for me, “Many Thousands Gone.” ’ “