Eight Miles and a World Away

Juneteenth and the neighbors we didn't know

Hi friends, Happy Father’s Day, Happy Juneteenth, and Happy Pride! What a weekend! I hope you’re well in the fullest since of wellbeing, and I pray you’re pursuing what you need for the parts of you that inevitably need care and healing.

I’m trying to maintain an every three week rhythm with these essays. Kind of a random sounding cadence, but I can’t keep up with every other week and yet I have more thoughts in me than once a month allows. So here we are. The email version of this may lop off a bit a the bottom. Apologies if that happens — you can click through for the links and whatnot at the bottom. I always love hearing from you by email and comments. It’s been a joy to be in conversation with you as we all live into this inner and outer journey of love.

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After word of General Major Granger’s June 19th announcement washed northwest from the docks of Galveston into the fertile Texas Black Belt, declaring that “all slaves are free” and that this freedom henceforth “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves emancipated,” for reasons unclear to me, William Kendall decided not to follow the announcement’s next instruction — that “the connection heretofore existing between [master and slave] becomes that between employer and hired labor” which was followed by the none-to-subtle threat that “freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages” — and instead began selling his plantation along the San Bernard River fifty miles west of Houston plot by plot to the formerly enslaved.

Those liberated men and women, participating in one of the most remarkable movements of social re-imagination and re-engineering the world has ever seen, built a community there they called Kendleton.¹ One hundred and twenty years later, my family bought a five acre plot of old farmland² eight miles and a world away.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life a stone’s throw from the three or four hundred people who still call Kendleton home. I don’t ever remember stepping foot there, though we flew by on Highway 59 often enough. There was no significant store or restaurant to bring us there. I was zoned into a different rural school district. My mom would later spend a few years volunteering in their elementary school as a reading specialist. But that ended when executives in the district — named Lamar ISD after another local plantation owner, one Mirabeau B. Lamar who gained fame as a martyr in the Confederate Army — shut it down for poor performance. The kids began getting bussed to nearby Beasley and on into our county’s larger towns of Rosenberg and Richmond.

I don’t remember hearing about Kendleton’s annual Juneteenth Festival. I have no memory of considering whether to attend it’s parade, sample the bar-b-que brisket, play the fair games and or watch the rodeo that raised money for the Black Cowboy Museum. To be fair, or perhaps just to further confess on our lifestyle, our family was typically on vacation in Colorado by late June and not around to consider attending even if it would have crossed our radar. Which it would not have. It would not have because that was not the world built for us to inhabit.

Texas history is required for all fourth and seventh graders, and while I’m fuzzy on a lot of those lessons, I’m confident Juneteenth didn’t come up. In fact I don’t remember hearing about Juneteenth at all until well into my adult life when I had long since moved out of state. But even if I had heard of it earlier, it simply wasn’t the sort of thing I was formed to pay attention to. It would not have mattered to me—not in a flippant sense, but in the way our culture gives certain things consequence while others become nearly unregisterable to our perception. What Juneteenth commemorated could not have mattered to me because in the theological-political-cultural-historical mind of white evangelicalism it lacked the kind of connective tissue to a broader view of the world that gives a thing meaning.

There’s a question the great theologian Willie Jennings asks in the introduction to his most famous work, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. A question that leaves a pain in my chest because I know it says something true of me, my people, and the places I’m from.

Jennings remembers a day when, as a child working in the garden with his mother, two white men who said they were from a church up the street stopped by and began to proselytize. The experience was bizarre for his young mind. Did they not know his family were devoted members of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church? Why were they not curious to learn about his family first, to simply ask if they were already Christians? What, he wonders, made it possible for these men to assume on sight that he and his mother were, and must have been, by default not only out of relationship with God but wholly ignorant of their God?

Willie’s childhood confusion shaped itself into an achingly vulnerable question that would eventually allow him to pry open the white Christian imagination to expose the deformity at its heart: “Why did they not know us? They should have known us very well.”³

In the 2016 election, the Kendleton precinct went 91% for Clinton. 91% in rural Texas.

The precinct where I grew up, just a few miles of cotton, maize, and cow fields away, went 73% for Trump. And I would wager a meaningful percentage of those 27% who voted otherwise were not white.

Screen shot from NYT’s “Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Election”

The point, of course, isn’t the colors. It isn’t about the parties. The vote is just a proxy for two peoples who have never known how to share a common home, a common love, or a common dream.

The responsibility for that lack of commonality, isn’t, obviously, a fault shared equally by folks in both precincts. Black people have always needed to know white people because such knowledge was essential to survival. Not so for us, though. You see we did not go to Kendleton. We did not know them. They were not our people. Their concerns were not our concerns. What effect on us could they have? When the church I grew up in did go into places like Kendleton (our church was in one of the larger county towns, so the “places like Kendleton” we went as “church” were the Black and Latino neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks), we did so like those two white men whose questions were so bizarre to a young Willie Jennings. We came as missionaries, assuming they did not know our Jesus, throwing events not oriented toward our humble, reparative reaching out to them, but around our expectation that they should be converted yet further toward us.

Because no common life was fostered between us there was no soil in which the seeds of affection could press upward into the light. What is mapped above, I believe, is a gulf in the kind of relationships I haven’t found better language for than solidarity—by which I mean a kind of love that recognizes and repairs harm by joining people together in communities that are liberatory and which work toward a society that’s liberated.

Writing this, I started wondering what the plans were for Kendleton’s Juneteenth this year. So, I did what anyone would do. I Googled it.

An announcement in our local county paper was the first to come up. It begins:

“Folks in Kendleton sure do look forward to their annual Juneteenth ceremony…”

Oh friends.

Can you hear it? The sound of a voice that leaves the other wondering, why don’t they know us?

Three years and a month ago when George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight and we watched from our quarantined homes, the grief of all this generational disconnection compounded with our pandemic isolation until homes emptied into the streets in collective longing for a form of reconnection with others that could dam the flow of death and channel those waters toward life.

My sense is there’s quite a bit of pessimism around what all came out of that moment we took to calling an uprising. Certainly if the measure of success was sweeping legislative reforms a la Civil Rights Act, or corporations actually following through on their pledges, or all those White Fragility book clubs translating into…something, then you will be, and should rightly be, disappointed. The world is largely much as it was, and so are you and I, and that is a shame. I too would prefer for all that to have happened.

And yet I have seen that a thousand small projects were begun that year. And I have found myself agreeing once again with adrienne maree brown that this beautiful world really is a menagerie of fractals repeating themselves at every scale, and because that is true, then she is right in saying “small is good, small is all.”⁴ I find myself remembering someone talking about mustard seeds overtaking gardens and yeast leavening whole batches, and while the pace and scale of that approach to change throws me into a rage on certain nights, I know quite a few folks out there who are the sweetest smelling mustard seeds and yeast you’ve ever met. They are indeed getting their goodness into everything.

The local paper announcement with the ignorant lead ended with a quote from a Mrs. Carolyn Jones:

“We hope the 2023 parade and celebration will be even bigger this year for the Kendleton community and beyond. Through your support, we know we can meet that goal. Presently, we are preparing for 200 persons to come and celebrate with a free luncheon along with a parade and would like assistance in ensuring that we have a safe and fun environment that will allow for fellowship and family fun.”

To contribute or for more information, contact Jones at 281-239-5539 or by email at carolynjones38@gmail.com.

I was just curious what was happening this year. Ok? But there it was. You say you want to know me? You’re lamenting the gulf? Well, here’s my personal phone number and email. Let’s do this.

Smdh.

So, I sent Mrs. Jones an email.⁵

Hi Carolyn,

I saw your email address listed in the Herald as the person to reach out to if someone wants to make a donation to the Kendleton Juneteenth festival. How can I make a contribution?

I married a woman from Boston and have lived out here for a few years now, but grew up my whole childhood through high school graduation just south of Beasley, zoned into the Needville school district. I don't remember even hearing about Juneteenth as a white kid until well into my adult life. Would love to show some solidarity with y'all back home and hope you have an incredible party. 

Thank you and blessings,
Nathan

A week passed and no response.

It’s probably because my email was obviously so painfully awkward and totally tone deaf, right? Why would I say any of that like any of that? Are you kidding me with that second paragraph? Who does this guy think he is? Or, ok, maybe she didn’t respond because she’s just not email savvy? In either case can I just let this go now?

But I needed to finish writing this post. As a card carrying millennial I’m constitutionally terrified of phone calls, but the number was right there.

So, I called her.

Carolyn Jones is a fourth generation Kendletonian. She was once the town mayor. She wondered if she knew my people and swapped names for a bit. She figured she’d probably met my mom if mom had worked in the elementary school during that time. She asked if I knew Kendleton is a freedman’s town and wasn’t surprised how little I’d learned in the high schools. They taught more of the history in Kendleton back when they had their own school district. She asked if it was cold up in Boston and if I was going to make it out to the party. Her address is PO Box 815, Kendleton TX 77451 and checks can be made to Carolyn Jones if you’d like to help out with either the kid games or the free lunch.

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Learn More this Juneteenth

• Texas history is US history (shoutout TX readers and family!). We need to know this stuff better than I did as a kid. Here are four places to start:

  • If you haven’t read the Pulitzer Prize in History winner Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth, do it.

  • The best book I’m aware of on the period of slavery in Texas is Randolph B. Campbell’s An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas.

  • Finally, two books on my shortlist to read: Texas Tough: The Rise of Texas’ Prison Empire and a new one by the Black radical historian Gerald Horne The Counter Revolution of 1836: Texas slavery & Jim Crow and the roots of American Fascism.

• My friend Mako Nagasawa is a one of a kind public theologian who just launched a fantastic new open teaching series called The Long Repentance: Plantation Capitalism vs. Jesus’ Jubilee Economy.

• Jemar Tisby, PhD
  has a great post on the best ways to approach Juneteenth as a celebration and not make it another day of labor for Black folks.

And Happy Father’s Day & Happy Pride Month!

A lot of important conversations are happening right at the intersection of these two things. For now I just want to say I love you wherever and whoever you are: father or mother or neither by choice or circumstance, straight or queer, cis or trans—you are beloved and graced to be all that you are. A couple conversations that resonated with me this week are the Know Your Enemy Podcasts’s recent conversation “What’s Wrong With Men?” and Phil Christman’s response. I’m also grateful to

Ryan Rose Weaver, M.Ed.

for her thoughtful question about the ways we can “disrupt the gendered and limiting narratives we place on this day.” Here was my muddling response.

For myself, Father’s Day this year finds me restructuring my contract to downshift to 75% time at the co-op. The biggest reason is to create more margin to love on my family. We’re privileged to be in good shape financially, but we’re always time-poor. It hit us over the past few months that…we don’t have to live this way. It’s not what I would have expected for my “career” right now, but it feels really good. And, while it feels selfish at moments, I think it’s actually one of the more subversive things I can do as a man and father in this time: to make care the priority and not place all the burden of care on a woman.

Peace, joy, justice, and pride, y’all.

Nathan

1. I can’t help but laugh at the town’s name. Kendleton is obviously based on the old plantation owner’s name, Kendall, but in a way that refuses to reduce who they are to who he was. It’s a name that acknowledges the past but carries it forward reconstructed. Isn’t that just the way…

2. Despite reaching out to my county’s historical society, I can’t find any maps of where plantations were in the county aside from a few of the most well known right along the Brazos that were turned into massive prison labor camps. Our property, which sits almost directly between the two major rivers of the area, and so was less sought after, seems to have been converted into farmland in the postbellum era of settlement, possibly the 1890s when the town where I went to public school was founded.

3. Willie J. Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Page 3.

4. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy. Page 41.

5. My first draft included this sentence here. “So I sent her an email like the awkward little trying-to-hard white boy I am (author’s note: this is how I talk to myself in my head when I’m not writing and trying to sound wise).” It’s not a great line writing wise. But I thought I’d include it down here because I want you to know how I actually feel a lot of the time, and also because sharing a story like this…honestly, I almost didn’t. It can so easily come off as “look at me the white guy who does solidarity blah blah blah.” This whole writing project I’m calling Toward Solidarity is about learning what it would look like to live into the second word while recognizing I/we will always inhabit the first word. I think it’s pedagogically useful to share personal stories, and hopefully makes the writing more interesting or relatable, but never will I hold myself up as any kind of example. If you think this story comes off like that, I would love to hear from you and welcome feedback on how to shift my approach.