“Visiting Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth felt like freedom,” my father mentioned as we pulled into Booker T. Washington Park, the web site close to what was once referred to as the ancient Comanche Crossing on Lake Mexia in Texas. “Listen, Bobby, this place would be full of Black folks cooking, dancing, and playing music. It was a big festival with fireworks and a party.”
It were greater than six many years since my father had visited the park in the summertime of 1965. However he seemed like a bit child once more as he breathlessly recounted the entire meals: “We would have barbecue ribs, chicken, brisket, blood sausage, raccoon, armadillo, fried chicken, potato salad, beans and yellow meat watermelon, and we had to have that Big Red Soda – you know it was created in Waco, right? – banana pudding, peach cobbler, pecan pie, white coconut cake, German chocolate cake, berry cobblers, pies and homemade ice cream.”
Lengthy ahead of Juneteenth turned into a countrywide vacation in 2021 and Texas honored it as a state vacation in 1980, the park used to be the place generations of my circle of relatives would sign up for hundreds of Black Texans each and every June to have fun June 19, 1865. That used to be the day Union troops knowledgeable enslaved Africans in Texas that they have been unfastened, two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 6 months ahead of the ratification of the thirteenth Modification, which formally abolished slavery within the U.S.
Comanche Crossing lies lower than 3 miles north of the web site the place the area’s enslaved other people first discovered in their freedom, and it’s the place they made up our minds to have fun with a dinner party from their harvest.
But the tale of Black Texans – and the way they shepherded the traditions of Juneteenth celebrations via meals for over a century – is a central a part of this historical past that receives scant consideration.
Spectators watch a Juneteenth parade commemorating the tip of slavery within the U.S. on June 19, 2021, in Galveston, Texas.
Cross Nakamura/Getty Pictures
I’m a local Black Texan, so Juneteenth is private. And I believed I absolutely understood its importance whilst I gobbled smoked red meat ribs, summer season sausage and brisket, 12 months after 12 months, at my paternal grandmother’s area in my homeland of Citadel Price.
However now, as a pupil of Black meals tradition, I see those celebrations otherwise. The mouthwatering spreads that have been laid out every 12 months did greater than nourish Black Texans. They celebrated the way in which meals used to be wielded as a device of resistance and a logo of freedom all the way through and after slavery.
The liberty dinner party
As we endured strolling via Comanche Crossing, I requested my father what he remembered about getting ready meals for Juneteenth.
Via summer season 1965, he recalled, they have been residing in Citadel Price however traveled again to his homeland of Waco the evening ahead of Juneteenth to lend a hand his circle of relatives prepare dinner for his or her annual Comanche Crossing go back and forth. He recalled that the cooking lasted all evening, with the beef smoked to perfection over the pit, whilst different members of the family, together with my grandmother, assembled dishes for the following day, the usage of most commonly recent substances and farm-raised cattle. The meals used to be packed up at the morning of June 19, after which the entire circle of relatives headed for Comanche Crossing.
“And that’s when we would really have a time,” he mentioned.
As my father excitedly described the entire meals and its preparation, I considered culinary historian Jessica B. Harris, who, in her 2011 guide, “High on the Hog, wrote, “The backbone of Juneteenth festivities has always been the table.”
Each and every circle of relatives that got here to Comanche Crossing ready their very own distinctive dishes for the Juneteenth unfold.
“You can’t pinpoint how each family would prepare the foods,” my father mentioned, “but you know you would see smoked meat for sure because that was our main tradition.”
For my circle of relatives, smoked meat and potato salad have been nonnegotiable.
The smoked meat echoes the ritual of hog killing that has lengthy been a part of the agricultural Black revel in. The observe used to be probably the most few moments when enslaved other people exercised a measure of regulate over their meals. Potato salad symbolized the abundance of the harvest of the land, placing on complete show the rural wisdom and hard work of the enslaved.
After emancipation, those traditions symbolized extra than simply birthday celebration for Black Texans. They mirrored what I known as “emancipatory food power” in my first guide, “Food Power Politics” – the power of Black communities to make use of meals as a useful resource for survival, self-determination and freedom.
Candy potato pie used to be at the menu at a Juneteenth birthday celebration at Nichol Park in Richmond, Calif., in 2004.
David Paul Morris/Getty Pictures
A portal into the previous
After we approached the huge, increased dance pavilion, the park’s biggest construction, my father remarked, “It seemed much bigger to me as a kid.”
He wasn’t flawed. The present construction isn’t the unique, which used to be destroyed through a hearth within the Nineteen Nineties. However for my father, it however conjured reminiscences of him and his cousins “running around it and watching the adults dance and just be free.”
He mentioned it reminded him “of that Sugar Shack picture.” He used to be regarding the enduring Nineteen Seventies portray through Black artist Ernie Barnes depicting a bunch of exhilarated Black women and men enthusiastically dancing, legs and arms splayed each and every which means, to reside song at a juke joint – one of those casual accumulating position that emerged in rural Black communities within the American South after emancipation.
The writer’s father all the way through his go back to Comanche Crossing in Mexia, Texas, for the primary time in 60 years.
Bobby J. Smith II, CC BY-SA
I watched as my father walked beneath the pavilion and across the park and considered his reminiscences: a portal into the ones previous Juneteenth celebrations in Texas, when those that attended have been only one or two generations got rid of from enslavement. It used to be a short lived glimpse into how deeply they precious that day.
Black Texan and historian Amilcar Shabazz choices up on that thread in his 2004 guide, “Advancing Democracy”:
“Before Black Texans had their own history, schools, churches … they had Juneteenth. It may not have looked like much in the eyes of an arrogant world, but it was everything Black Texans had, and they each loved and cherished that day with all their heart … and most important of all, they remembered.”
A homecoming 60 years within the making
As my father and I walked again to the automobile to get again at the highway, I may just inform that he will have stayed there, reminiscing, for hours.
He saved glancing round, as though his cousins, aunts, uncles, mom, grandmother and great-grandparents have been proper there with him in spirit, in their very own little nook of Comanche Crossing, passing round dishes, filling plates and toasting to freedom.
However after we have been within the automobile, his tone modified. He started speaking concerning the 1981 tragedy on the park, which rocked the Mexia group to the core. 3 Black boys, referred to as the “Comanche Three,” have been being transported through 3 law enforcement officials throughout Lake Mexia in a small aluminum boat. Some form of twist of fate befell at the water, and all 3 boys drowned. The 3 law enforcement officials survived. To these days, the cases of what took place that evening stay unclear.
Attendance at the once a year Juneteenth birthday celebration dropped sharply after the drownings of the ‘Comanche Three.’
Whilst the tragedy disrupted the way forward for Juneteenth celebrations in Comanche Crossing, the occasions endured, despite the fact that the selection of guests declined dramatically. But it surely didn’t erase the previous from the minds of Black Texans like my father.
Obviously, the odor of barbeque, the sound of song and the affection of group and circle of relatives lingered in him.
In some ways, returning to Comanche Crossing after greater than 60 years used to be a homecoming for my father. It used to be one for me, too. Via his reminiscences, I got here to look myself within the Juneteenth tale – each in my view and intellectually.
“I’m glad that I got the chance to see this place again in my lifetime,” my father mentioned, preserving again tears as Comanche Crossing disappeared within the rearview reflect.
