From @emilyorton2020: Happy Juneteenth! I learned about Emancipation Day in 2014, when this photo was taken. It’s celebrated across the Caribbean. When we lived on a sailboat, we stopped in Matthewtown, Great Inagua, Bahamas. It’s not a tourist town. This town makes Salt. Morton Salt in the main employer. It’s a quiet place so this man, Steve, and his daughter, Keva, drove to the docks to see who might be new and found us. They offered us a local fruit, guineps, and taught us to eat the tangy white pulp. Steve was a former mayor of Matthewtown and he loved country music. When he learned that we didn’t listen to much country, he decided to educate us. Steve opened up the doors on his massive pick-up truck, turned up his speakers, and ran through a playlist of all his favorites. We all sat on the dock while Keva and Lily danced. Keva was home for the Emancipation Day holidays. On Great Inagua, families celebrated with reunions. Everyone came home to reconnect for a couple of weeks. Steve played country music for us until his truck battery died. I’m still not a huge country music fan, but I get excited when I see guineps at the street markets in my Caribbean neighborhood (Washington Heights). Most of all, I love the Emancipation Day celebration as a renewal of family bonds. I told Steve and Keva, “I love your holiday. I wish we had it in the US. Americans would love something like this because nobody is really free until we’re all free.” Little did I know, we had a holiday like this in the US: Juneteenth. I was late to the party. My parents didn’t tell me. I doubt they knew because they are social activists and would have leaned hard into an emancipation celebration. I never learned about it in school and I went to 6 of them. I never read about it in history books or in biographies about African Americans. I didn’t see it in movies. None of my Black friends mentioned it. Now, everybody knows about Juneteenth—it’s a Google doodle. Now, that we know about the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery (well, everybody knowing that slavery was over-even in Texas) in the United States. Now, that we know—let’s celebrate! 🎉 #juneteenth (at Matthew Town, Inagua, Bahamas) https://www.instagram.com/p/CBqu3wHhjF3/?igshid=t467uc6reeh9
