International literary, arts and ideas journal. Always read free at sareview.org.
Our sulky gods cried
acid rain, when prayers dried
within earthen pots.
Aanuoluwapo Adesina is a Nigerian-born poet and MFA student at Butler University, USA. He is the author of Emocean, a poetry book published in 2016 by Kraft Books (Nigeria). He has been published in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, HEBE, Brave Voices Magazine, ROPES Literary Journal and elsewhere. Aanuoluwapo lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Always read free at sareview.org.
Slavery didn’t end in the United States on January 1, 1863, with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. As the National Archives notes, the proclamation
applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.
Page three of “The Emancipation Proclamation” specifies the states to which it applies. Source: National Archives, 6 Oct. 2015, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation.
In fact, it wasn’t until the summer of 1865 — two and a half years after the proclamation — that slaves in Texas were informed of their freedom.
On June 19, 1865, Union Major-General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 to the people of Galveston. It stated:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.
Original version of General Order No. 3 from General Gordon Granger. Courtesy of the United States National Archives.
General Orders, No. 3. U.S. House, 54th Congress, 1st Session (H. Doc. 369, Part 2). “General Order Number 3,” 1896. U.S. Documents Collection. Y 1.½: SERIAL 3437
Juneteenth, celebrating this announcement of abolition over two years after the proclamation, is the name given to Emancipation Day by African Americans in Texas. Similar celebrations are also called Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Juneteenth Independence Day, and Black Independence Day.
The practice of slavery didn’t end in the United States didn’t end on Juneteenth either, though.
As the Congressional Research Service remarks in its factsheet for elected officials,
Even after the general order, some slave masters withheld the information from their enslaved people, holding them enslaved through one more harvest season.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed January 31, 1865, but wasn’t ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states until December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18, 1865:
13th Amendment/Amendment XIII
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This ended slavery in the Union border states of Delaware, Maryland and Kentucky.
Yet still officially sanctioned slavery survived in the United States.
For a few months more, Native American tribes on “Indian territory” were allowed to continue to hold slaves, as explained by J. Gordon Hylton:
By Indian Territory, I refer to that part of the unorganized portion of the American public domain that was set apart for the Native American tribes. More specifically, I use the term to refer to those lands located in modern day Oklahoma that was set aside for the relocation of the so-call “Civilized Tribes” of the Southeastern United States: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.
These tribes were the only Native American groups to formally recognize the institution of African-slavery. As Southerners, the Civilized Tribes had accepted the institution of African-slavery, and at the outset of the Civil War, African-American slaves made up 14% of the population of Indian Territory occupied by the civilized tribes.
As it turns out, neither document applied to Indian Territory, and consequently, slavery survived in that part of the United States for several months after it was abolished everywhere else with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December, 1865.
Slavery didn’t officially end in the United States until treaties with each of the Civilized Tribes were entered into in mid-1866, more than three years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
. . . in each of the 1866 treaties the tribal signatory acknowledged that slavery would no longer be recognized as a legal institution by the tribe.
If we simply go by the dates on which the Tribes ratified these treaties, slavery in the continental United States came to an end as a legal institution on June 14, 1866, when the Creek Tribe agreed to abandon African-American slavery. The was, somewhat ironically, the day after Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment.
Slavery's end in the United States has a long, delayed, long-delayed and staggered history. Official recognition of Juneteenth celebrations traversed a similar path until the summer of 2021.
Juneteenth celebrations began in Texas and spread to other parts of the country as Black people migrated over the years. It was declared an official state holiday by Texas in 1980.
On June 15, 2021, the U.S. Senate passed by unanimous consent Senate Bill 475, declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday.
On June 16, 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 475.
Image of Congressional Record — Daily Digest of June 16, 2021. Available at Congress.gov.
The following representatives voted against recognition:
President Joe Biden signed the legislation on the afternoon of June 17, 2021.
Image from whitehouse.gov.
Untitled (Chispitas), 15”x12”, (framed), acrylic and gouache on paper, 2021, Andrea Muñoz Martinez,
when i fall plummeting sure as an arrow into the deep waters of love it doesn’t matter that it's black as the pit my eyes are faulty but my heart is sure
yet navigating by the heart is a tricky business akin to being a privateer marauding the open ocean for a prize
there is none warranted to issue an act of grace hence we with no protection are held accountable for all we do
and in the court of love judgment albeit made by arbiters with scant and often flawed illumination is not only swift but final
no point in reappearing in the ragged threadbare cloak of the appellant no point in moving for mistrial for once the sentence is pronounced it is immutable and graven in the record for all time
*RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in* Uno: A Poetry Anthology (Xlibris, April 2002), New York City Haiku (Universe/NY Times, 2/2017), Coffin Bell Two (Coffin Bell, March 2020) Winter Anthology: Healing Felines and Femmes, (Other Worldly Women Press, 12/2020), Now We Heal: An Anthology of Hope, (Wellworth Publishing, 12/2020) in print: in 2River, Adelaide, Door Is A Jar, Event, Gargoyle Magazine, Genre Urban Arts, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, the minnesota review, Night Picnic Journal, Prairie Schooner, San Antonio Review, Southword, York Literary Review among others and appears in numerous online literary journals.
*Andrea Muñoz Martínez is a visual and performance artist currently living and working in Austin, Texas. She has an MFA from UC Davis and a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Her work can be found in private collections around the United States and has been exhibited at ICOSA Collective, Artspace111 and at Camiba Art. Martínez paints a colorful, vibrant imaginary space she calls Borderlandia. Her works include series on dogs, targets, roaches, chispas and caras malas. Martínez grew up in the borderlands of South Texas and her paintings and performance art take the border and boundaries as their subject. Her painting exhibition, “Dogs Heal in Borderlandia,” can be viewed online and at Link & Pin Artspace in Austin. Her paintings are available for purchase at xoxoam*
When she holds the tin up to her ear, she could swear that she hears a voice. Not enough to recognise. It is, without doubt, one of the boys there for the season. One of the new friends her brother recruits every summer. Never the same — they seem to outgrow him, all of his games, from one year to the next. And then, buzzing resolves itself. The words are clear.
“Come in, Dan Dare, come in.”
Pa has already hauled Euan away to have the skin off him for wasting the twine on his tin phone. For wasting time. For doing something, anything at all.
Rhona puts the tin to her mouth. Pulls the string as taut as she can.
“Mayday, Digby. Mayday.”
The twine goes slack. The voice doesn’t return. She hears the dull thudding of shoes across the turf as he runs away.
Even in the dark, Euan’s eyes are very blue. Not like some that go grey on a dark day. They are bright, even from beneath his bed.
“Come on, come with me,” she says. She can always talk him out from under. “There are all sorts of nasty things under there. Mice. Beasties.”
He holds on to the bed slats. If she pulls him, those slats would be wrenched out of the frame before he would let go. She doesn't have the heart or the strength to do that.
“Did you see the frogspawn by the gate?”
There is a silent nod and she tries to think of other things that boys might like. The big barn cat and her latest litter of kittens, he likes them. And there is the chance that the shop might have the latest copy of The Dandy or The Beano. He shakes his head: No, they do not. Some other boy has already been and reported.
In the end, she lies on her side on the floor and he slowly creeps toward her. She holds him and feels his little boy heart pounding under her hand. They both listen for the door.
When does he stop telling her everything? The year he comes home from university at Christmas with a green scarf instead of the red one that she had packed him off with, the one that she had bought. Rhona tells him that green is a fairy colour and that the fairies will steal him away from her. Just a wind up, the kind he gives her.
But in the summer, it isn't him that comes home. He doesn't speak any more. Not the way he had. She goes to his room, sits on the bed, and asks him if he remembers when the men used to come for work. Travelers, he says to call them. Not what their father did. There was the woman with the sad, sad songs, the man with the sea shanties. Even Pa would get out his whistle and play. Euan ran every morning to walk to school with the other boys and she envied the girls’ ponies.
And one morning, when the work was over, he would run out and the barn would be empty. All the children gone. There were some bright boys and girls there, she had thought, boys and girls who would have been something if they’d gotten more school. The teacher had said as much.
“You’d stand and cry. You’d cry for days. Do you remember that? Crying for all your little ti — Traveler — friends that had gone away.”
“Because they hadn’t taken me with.”
He was the only child for miles who couldn’t be frightened by the idea of someone taking him away in the night. Of being stolen. Peter Pan was an escape manual to him, the plan for the way things could be done. Kidnapped was a recipe for the kind of wild life he wanted to live. It would have just been off and away to adventure for him. No thought of what would be left behind.
Euan pulls her through the crowd as it streams away from Murrayfield. This is half a lifetime ago; she is only thirty-five and he is barely twenty. No, he is older than that, he must be, but she always makes him more the baby than he is. He says something about the rugby but, between the rain and it being about the rugby, she can’t get a word of it. She would be lost without him. She could listen to him forever.
“You’ve got longer legs. Slow down.”
“If we stop, we won’t make the train.”
And she runs beside him until she has a stitch in her side so sharp that she can barely breathe. They make it the mile to Haymarket in time to see the train pull away.
‘“We’ll say it was my fault. I couldn’t keep up. You can tell me what you were saying about the French side again —“
The shutter has come down, though, with a snap. There isn’t going to be any more. He watches the train recede. There is rain dripping from his nose, from his hair. It’s another losing year, another year of coming out on the very bottom.
Pa doesn’t come down hard, not really. Not for missing a train. Any fool can miss a train, he says, and he’s right. Anyone can be just the tiniest bit too late for something. Euan would stay up all night, waiting for enough light to go out to the barn for his friends. But somehow he had always missed saying goodbye. Fallen asleep just a few moments before,
“You two can do what you like, after all. Best that you’re happy. Follow your whims until you’re in the ground.”
And he is right again, they can do as they like, her and her brother, like he never could. They can come and go. It has been different for him, he has had the land and the farm and the children to look after. She mustn’t forget that they owe him that.
In July, he rings to give her his news, sounding like he might as well be calling her on a tin can and a piece of twine.
“At my age, she says, I'll die with cancer. Not from it.”
But what sort of age is it? It's no age at all.
“Rhona?” He shouts down the line. “For God's sake, Rhona, I'm paying for this time.”
Euan stands in the hall. Just after Hogmanay. He’ll be away again in the morning, gone back to school with his strange green scarf. More a stranger now than he ever was before. He comes through when Pa gets Rhona by the hair. It’s only caution — he saw his own granny catch fire at a paraffin stove and die.
“You tie this up. I don’t want to be eating it for my tea.”
“Yes, Pa.”
Euan’s back in Aberdeen, back at University, already. She can see the miles back there ticking away in his eyes, taking him further and further. He isn’t here, not with her and Pa. It makes it hard to look at him for long, so she looks away.
When he gets himself thrown out on his ear, he doesn’t dare come home. It isn’t Pa he’s afraid of, he writes. Rhona knows it is her. He’s out there with his cardboard suitcase because he has made himself too much of a stranger to know where to go.
“You can come back,” She says to him when she rings from the post office phone. “You can come home to me.”
He is quiet for a long time, until they are almost cut off. But she puts in more coins.
Rhona hears someone walking up the stair. Somewhere in Glasgow, using a phone set out in a hall. She knows that it is cold there. Bitter. She can hear his teeth rattling. She asks if he has enough for a room or if he is dossing in hallways, in lobbies, any place he can find.
“Tell me how much money you have. If you don’t have any, I’ll send some. I’ll send you a ticket. Tell me where you’re staying.”
‘“That Christmas,” he says at last. “When he let me go back to Uni after Christmas. How?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not now.”
“What did you do, Rhona?”
His voice is so small and so very sad that she has to put the phone down. She hangs up the receiver. Then she picks it up again, expecting to hear him again, but there is nothing. There is someone else waiting for the phone. It’s past time for her to be home with the shopping.
Pa couldn’t last forever, but Euan doesn’t come home for that. It’s funny how it happens: Pa is riding along in the tractor, a big yellow thing, and picking up more and more speed. It must be funny, because she laughs. He crests the hill, just as he always does, and begins to come down it. But something is changed now. The tyre strikes a rock, sinks into a burrow. The angle and speed are all wrong. She looks out the windows, even comes to the door. And in that moment, as it rears up, she knows that if she screams she can stop time, hang the tractor there forever. She laughs. One short bark, but a laugh all the same. And the tractor rolls. It rolls and rolls.
It is the neighbours who come and make the tea and who do the washing up. They carry the coffin. They do not ask Rhona if she doesn’t have a brother somewhere that could be doing these things for her. Are you all right alone, the neighbours ask her. But she isn’t alone. Euan has been there. She knows that he has been — for a few moments, anyway, while she was at the kirk. He has left things changed to let her know. The cup of coffee that she had forgotten has been tidied away. The tea towel hanging from the drawer pull is damp. He must have been there. She has only just missed him. He is already up and running ahead again.
The voice on the phone asks where she is. It’s breathy and nasal. American. Or Canadian. It doesn’t have that hollowness that transatlantic calls used to have. That sound of all the miles being crossed, of being in the past.
“Grantully. In Scotland. Grantully, Scotland.”
“Are you at home?”
Yes, she is at home. She is in her bed, making a very early night of it. She has a book that she will never finish and hot water bottle that will be cold before she puts her feet under.
“Is there anyone with you? Maybe you can get someone.”
She holds the phone away from her ear and only hears bits of what they are saying. Nothing that she understands. It’s a long way for someone to call to have a joke. She asks who it is, and they tell her again. They ask again if she wouldn’t like to get someone.
She sets the phone down on the kitchen counter and goes round to the neighbours in her slippers. The wife comes back with her. She does well not to stare too much at Rhona’s dressing gown, her baffies, not to ask questions as to why she has been fetched away from her television. They speak to her and then she speaks to Rhona. Whatever they have told her to say, not a word of it makes any sense at all. A game of Chinese whispers, though she mustn’t call it that any more.
“Do you want me to stay with you?”
It’s very kind of her, but Rhona can’t see any reason why she should. She sends her back to her family.
The train to Edinburgh is delayed at Perth, then it is cancelled. There is a replacement bus service, instead. When she arrives, she collects her forms that entitle her to a refund of the difference in price. All to be posted off at a later date, but no more than thirty days past the date of travel marked on the ticket. There is no sense in paying the price of a train journey for riding on a bus.
She leaves her bag at the bus station and walks up to Prince’s Street, past Jenners. Never the sort of place she’d shop, no, because it would be a terrible waste of money. Those clothes on this body. But there are some very handsome things there; Lovely things, shining under spotlights in the dark windows. The street and pavement are a mess of fences and hoardings from the trams they’ve been promising. They put down the rails, but with no trams to run over them, to keep them in place, they have warped. They need taken out and laid again. Their Pa was right. They'd lived to regret the day they got rid of the old trams, sold them off for scrap.
She would like for Euan to be with her here. His shoulders and elbows would get through the scrums of shoppers and tour groups. Her folding walking stick used to do the job — take it out, and the crowds would part. Now she needs it to keep from being knocked over on the torn-up paving stones. If he were here, she would turn right and walk with him back to Murrayfield, find out what it was he'd wanted to tell her about the French side outside that café. She turns left, down to the parliament.
He hasn’t seen the parliament in person, only on her postcards. She’s told him time and again that he’d like it, even if he couldn’t tell what it was meant to be. If only he’d come to see it himself. It’s a beautiful place, the low grey concrete entryway lifting up, giving way to steel, oak and glass. It’s like coming out of the darkness, out of the past, she says. Like being born. She isn't sure if she's read that somewhere or thought of it herself. It is the only time he sends the same postcard back, with her words scored out.
“Over budget. Behind schedule. Ugly, ugly, ugly,” he writes.
He apologises later and asks for another card. She sends him a new one, one with the puffins on Orkney. She sends the rugby scores, too. He can’t complain about puffins. Instead, he complains about getting the wooden spoon again. Another losing year, one bleeding into the next.
She tells Euan that the building is meant to look like boats. Like hulls and bows and sails. A fishing fleet. Like the fleet has only been pulled in for the night and is ready to set off again in the morning. When the design was first announced she’d told him that. She can't remember the year. The last year that Scotland won the Calcutta Cup, maybe. That makes sense to her, he would have had more important things to remember then. Trys and conversions. The names of captains. How many points they had beaten England by.
She runs her fingers through the words carved into stones on the Canongate side of the building, into the outlines of the old town pressed into the concrete. A wodge of green gum is packed into a corner. The guide she has says that this is the view of Edinburgh that the architect had from his hotel window. She thinks about him, the architect. He never saw it finished. Not in stone. Cancer.
Here are the swans, just as always. And Euan goes charging up toward Arthur’s Seat, storming up it, trying to find the place where they found those strange little dolls from the museum. Burke and Hare’s bodies, some people say. Witching, maybe, or guilt. Or are they meant to be the sailors that never had a grave, that never came home? Half of them are gone to dust now.
He leaps and skips and their mother is calling for him to slow down. He's part mountain goat, she says. He must be. Such wee legs, but so strong. So fast.
A car slows down for directions. They put down their window and she goes over to them, ready to tell them she’s only a tourist herself. The egg arcs over her shoulder, but the flour strikes home. They speed away. Now that she looks, she sees the explosions of white powder all up and down the path.
“What’s happened to you, dear?” says the woman behind the desk of her hotel.
“There were some lads —”
“Oh, you’ve been lucky. Sometimes it’s bottles of wee.”
The flour comes out of her coat. Enough of it, anyway, that she doesn’t feel ashamed to wear it back out. It’s her only good coat. The rest have been eaten to pieces in the cupboards.
When she heads back out, the woman at the desk calls to her that she should keep away from the dark places, the gardens and the parks. There’s no respect in them bairns these days. No one teaches them any anymore.
Euan’s voice is on the answer