Corpus

There’s something about Juneteenth.

I submit to you, dear reader, my annual Juneteenth reminder - with some new reflections - that, no, the slaves did not not know they were free for two and a half years. They were just… not free for those two and a half years.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 did not abolish slavery. There’d have been no need for a war if everyone was united under presidential edict. The end of the war in April 1865 did not abolish slavery. That’s not how the U.S. legal system works. The ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865 abolished slavery. Six months after Granger galloped into Galveston.

Whatever the political calculus behind the making of this into a federal holiday (and the bizarre desire to believe in the two years between freedom’s happening and its communication), it’s special to me that we get a day to contemplate the experience of finding out that people won a war for you to know yourself as more than the proverbial They said you could be. That you are, specifically, more than stuff.

I feel it’s fair to assume, or I want to, that at least some probably already knew that, not that they had been made free in legal status (cause they technically still weren’t yet) but that they were, had always been, free by fact of existence - in ways that transcend the material fact of captivity, however brutal.

Transcend. Ah, yes. I will take this opportunity to note several decades of Black Studies error about W.E.B. Du Bois as originator of the concept of “double consciousness,” seeing its relation to this idea of knowing one’s self to be more than others can see. His use of the phrase in “The Strivings of the Negro People,” published in 1897 in The Atlantic Monthly and collected in The Souls of Black Folk six years later as “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” was an allusion to a famous lecture given in 1842 by poet Ralph Waldo Emerson that was circulated in The Dial as “The Transcendentalist,” with which Du Bois’ Atlantic readers would have been familiar.

Therein, Emerson lays the foundation for the elitist bent the concept’s contemporary reference still takes: double consciousness as the unique inheritance of a special few who see the materialistic Other and the transcendent Self with absolute clarity. In the hands of Du Bois’ late 20th century and 21st century readers, that bent seems to have become something more like: “Black people have had to know white people better than they know themselves in order to survive, to hold both how they see us and who we know ourselves to be.”

I disagree with them both. Double consciousness is not a superpower of Emerson’s white isolationists or Du Bois’ late 20th century readers’ (because, again, Du Bois did not stake this claim) marginal oppressed but a humanity-wide obligation, one might go so far as to call it a cross. And inherent in that obligation is to see in their mis-seeing of you your own mis-seeing of them.

The other day I was on the 51, heading to work. Two ladies, connected by an aisle, recognized each other from the line they’d both been in at a welfare office the day before. How you made out yesterday? One on the left asked the other, who had been trying to get a housing voucher. Squiggles of dyed-black hair were gelled back over patches of bare scalp. Lupus, a too-long perm, deathly tight braids.

Another woman got on the bus and spoke with the driver, maybe confirming that the stop she wanted was indeed along the route, before she slid her money into the slot. The woman on the left thought she recognized her and called out a name, “Stuff! Stuff!” The woman did not respond.

The conversation continued about housing vouchers, how quickly she got her apartment in the Melph, what to expect from the process. Periodically, between clauses, she called out to Stuff.

As she exited, she slowed down in front of Obviously-Not-Stuff and her voice softened into that of a child worried you might be upset with them. “Stuff?” The woman looked up at her blankly. “Oh, I thought you were Stuff.”

I think there is a lot of confusion about what it means to be more than stuff, a confusion older than the Gnostics and furthered by the flawed arguments of abolitionism just 150ish years ago (and the tensions between the movement’s several factions that we don’t acknowledge existed because we’re committed to believing that the only argument that matters is the one that won the cause and we’re scared of questioning the argument that won the cause lest doing so undo the win).

I want to clarify one point: Being more than stuff, which is to say more than the body and its capacity, and being other than stuff are not the same thing.

Taste and see.