Put Down the Juneteenth Ice Cream and Pick Up These 15 Books

It is perhaps fitting that a list dedicated to the celebration of slavery’s “official end” in the U.S. begins with the oral account of Cudjoe Lewis, long believed to be the “last” survivor of the Middle Passage. Lewis was one of more than 100 kidnapped Africans stashed in the hold of the slave ship Clotilda and smuggled from Benin to Mobile Bay, Alabama, in either 1859 or 1860 (it’s hard to say), decades after Congress’s formal 1808 ban on the importation of African slaves. Hurston tells Lewis: “I want to ask you many things. I want to know who you are and how you came to be a slave; and to what part of Africa do you belong, and how you fared as a slave, and how you have managed as a free man?” He responds: “Thankee Jesus! Somebody come ast about Cudjo! I want tellee somebody who I is, so maybe dey go to tell everybody whut Cudjo says, and how I come to Americky soil since de 1859 and never see my people no mo.’” Eager to be asked, Lewis shared his experience of alienation and enslavement with Hurston, whose sensitive transcriptions add a new texture to our existing archive of slave narratives.

Taking to fiction to confront the limits of and unmake our concrete understanding of slavery, the literary development of “neo-slave narratives” muddy the border between enslavement and emancipation through narratives that address the problem of self-possession. Reed’s enslaved protagonist declares, “Here I am, involuntarily, the comrade of the inanimate, but not by choice … I am property. I am a thing.” Morrison’s Sethe, a fugitive slave haunted by both slavery and freedom, understands that “freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Though these novels often explore the harrowing conditions of the peculiar institution through humor (“The devil’s country home. That’s what the South is,” one of Reed’s characters remarks) and haunting (“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children,” opens Beloved), they push readers to consider the psychic toll of slavery and how its material cost to the mind defies tone and time.

Explicitly concerned with the elusiveness of free ground, this groundbreaking text — to be reissued later this year by W. W. Norton with a new preface by Hartman, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and afterwords by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley — sets the complex stage of terror under slavery and its influence on scenes of Black self-making in the 19th century.

Calling us to consider “the nonevent of emancipation” in a country where “freedom did not abolish the lash,” Hartman frames the question of liberation on terms that center on the “terrible spectacle” of bondage that lingers in our discourses of redress, resistance, and individual rights.

Jones’s historical novel follows Henry Townsend, a freeman born to former slaves, as he takes up the charge of liberty as a challenge to brutality. For Henry, freedom is best affirmed in contrast to the unfree, and thus, he dreams of running the perfect plantation — one that exceeds the standards set by the white enslavers who came before him: “Henry had always said he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had spoken the first syllable of the word master.”

The Black Texans who created the Juneteenth holiday did so as “the celebration of the freedom of people they had actually known.” As Gordon-Reed’s work shows, this intimate and regional specificity cannot be severed from the celebration. Fusing memoir and rigorous research, the Texan author proposes a new telling of her state’s legacy, one which centers the significant influence enslaved Africans and their descendants have had on the political, geographic, and social shape of the Lone Star State.

In this runaway-slave narrative set in Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888, Jones conjures Almeyda, an escaped slave who takes leave of her Portuguese captors to join the historic 17th-century Brazilian maroon society that the book is named for — only to discover that some still occupy the position of slaves even among the maroons. Nobrega, one of those slaves of Palmares, remarks on the contradiction, “I am not a free woman … I have no free ground to hold. Every ground I walk on is the same.” Indifferent to the fate of Palmares, whose members faced constant threats of Portuguese land conquest and re-enslavement, Nobrega remarks, “Why should it matter to me if Palmares is no more?” As Jones’s novel shows, the unbound possibility of slavery beyond the plantation and the narrative of emancipation in the U.S. can be neither settled nor singularly confined to Juneteenth.

The issue of freedom’s lag is precisely what marks the narrative legacy of Juneteenth as precarious. Challenging the popular understanding of emancipation as a singular event that secured Black freedom, The Long Emancipation presents the issue on a global scale weighed by slavery and colonialism, in which the end of bondage could be said to be buffering at best.

Posing the “long emancipation” as a more accurate description of the chasm between freedom and manumission, Rinaldo Walcott contends that, “the conditions of Black life, past and present, work against any notion that what we inhabit in the now is freedom.”

An incomplete manuscript that was edited and published following Ralph Ellison’s death, Juneteenth embodies the essence of “unfinished business” embedded in its title. Giving voice to a righteous skepticism about the holiday’s presumed meaning, the protagonist, a Black Baptist preacher, retorts in a sermon (at a Juneteenth gathering no less), “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free!” And though the scope of the novel is not centered on the observation of Juneteenth, its characters — a race-baiting, white-passing Black senator and the aforementioned preacher who raised him — live out the ambiguous legacy of emancipation through a complex melding of ambivalence, anguish, and ambition.

“It is not enough to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed,” Hayes writes in this collection of seventy poems concerned with themes of American politics as they secure his own implied and impending death. Embracing the language of assassination — a murder that, due to the influential status of its victim, gives death new meaning — his poetics work to reconstitute the meaning of a “land of the free” predicated on deadly pursuits. Speaking to violence and capture as distinguishing elements in the formation and future of the U.S., the poet names a sense of confinement at the level of the nation’s literary form: “an American sonnet that is part prison, part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.”

Jackson writes, “When I revolt, slavery dies with me. I refuse to pass it down again. The terms of my existence are founded on that.” Shakur likewise asserts that “after a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” Framing slavery in terms of a consciousness forged by criminality, the writings of Black activists who have suffered the conditions of being “locked up,” compel us to unlock our minds toward the psychology of state violence and a legal apparatus that preserves anti-Blackness.

In Colson Whitehead’s novel, inspired by the horrifically unstable distinctions between school and prison for mid-century Black youth, the teenage protagonist, Elwood, shakes his head when he listens to a 1962 recording of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon at Zion Hill Baptist Church in Los Angeles. On the record, the reverend declared, “Throw us in jail, and as difficult as that is, we will still love you … We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.” For Elwood, a Black boy abused at a racist reform school, this request for love prior to liberation is unfathomable: “What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.”

Mariah Carey’s memoir features a comparison of her former Bedford, New York, marital home (a 33,000-square-foot mansion on 51 acres where she was plagued by anti-Black bigotry, constant surveillance, and emotional abuse) to the nearby Sing Sing Correctional Facility: “No matter how prime the real estate, how grandiose the structure, if it’s designed to monitor movement and contain the human spirit, it will only serve to diminish and demoralize those inside.” After Carey’s personal Sing Sing has burned to the ground, the R&B artist responsible for 2005’s best-selling album The Emancipation of Mimi, declares, “I have had to emancipate myself several times.” Even the most glamorous among us cannot deny the glaring fault lines in our flimsy talk of freedom.

Named after a cinematic trope coined to describe the prevalence of Black secondary characters in film whose narratives were shaped by a superhuman (if not supernatural) selflessness, the “Magical Negro” is the visual manifestation of slavery’s afterlife in myth and metaphysics.

Blending pop-culture references with a biting poetic form, Morgan Parker takes up this figure in contemporary culture as a means to assess our political imagination. In so doing, she reminds us that only after reading the world and fully realizing the stakes before us might we, as in Parker’s “Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn,” “learn to pronounce freedom.”