Juneteenth energy on the page
Summoning the courage of our ancestors, and the practice of writing free.
The first time I wrote something brutally honest, my hand slowed down. My body knew what the words would cost.
I was sitting at the dining table in the early morning. The rest of the house was still asleep. I’d just finished my morning ritual of tea and tarot before settling in to write. Client work would take over soon enough. A page was open in my notebook. The words were forming. And somewhere between my chest and my fingers, I felt the tug. The one that says: soften this. Make it palatable. Translate so everybody understands.
I wrote the words my ancestors gave me anyway. Then I sat with my hands in my lap, staring at them for a long time.
That’s where this essay starts. With the weight of a page that is waiting for you to tell the truth on it.
There were laws in this country against Black people reading. Specific, enforceable, punishable laws.
In South Carolina, the 1740 Negro Act made it illegal to teach an enslaved person to write. In Virginia, the penalty for a second offense of assembling to learn could be twenty lashes. In North Carolina, teaching a free Black person to read carried a fine and jail time. I have never once believed these were abstract policies. They were responses to a real fear: that a literate Black person was a dangerous Black person.
And they were right. Literacy is dangerous when it belongs to someone the system was built to silence.
Your nervous system doesn’t know these laws were repealed. The body keeps the record that the legislature tried (and still tries) to erase. When you sit down to write and feel that clench in your throat, that pause before the honest sentence, or that instinct to explain yourself to a reader who was never going to understand anyway, you’re not being dramatic or overly sensitive. You’re responding to an inheritance that lives below language.
The silence moved through families the way most inheritances do: without announcement.
Black families learned to speak sideways. To tell the story in the car but not at the table. To keep certain things oral on purpose, because the written record had been used against us before. The stories that mattered most were the ones that never made it to paper because it was safer that way.
Think about your own family. The things they told you, the things they kept quiet about, and the things you figured out later by piecing together what nobody said directly.
That silence is a strategy that outlived the conditions that created it. And for writers who come from those families, the act of writing isn’t neutral. The page itself has a history. And by filling it, you are breaking a pattern that kept people you loved alive.
Juneteenth named the end of a specific delay.
The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863. The news did not reach Galveston, Texas, until June 19, 1865. Two years and five months. People were living in bondage that had legally ended, and no one told them.
Sit with that for a minute. The cruelty of withheld knowledge. The freedom that already existed but was kept from the people it belonged to.
This is the writer’s inheritance too. The permission to write as yourself, in your own syntax, with your own grammar and your own references and your own rhythm, has existed for a long time. The news just didn’t always reach us. It got intercepted by writing workshops that taught us to write for a universal reader who was always white. By MFA programs that called our dialect “inconsistent voice” or ghetto. By the editorial process that smoothed us into something readable for people who were never going to read us anyway.
You were already free. You just didn’t know.
Writing from freedom is different from performing freedom on the page.
Performing freedom looks like writing something bold, then undercutting it with an explanation. Adding a footnote that translates your reference for the reader who doesn’t share it. Cleaning up the syntax that follows your actual thought because someone once told you it wasn’t grammatically correct.
Writing from freedom is quieter than that. It’s the AAVE left intact because that’s how the thought arrived. The dialect that doesn’t apologize. The sentence that follows the shape of your mind instead of the shape of the workshop handout. The story that doesn’t translate, and the decision to tell it anyway.
This is a practice. It requires you to catch yourself mid-translation and choose the original. It requires repetition because the conditioning runs deep. You will reach for the smooth version out of habit. The version that reads easily to someone who is not your reader. And then you will put it down and pick up the one that is yours.
Every time you do that, you are doing Juneteenth work.
Call it a posture.
Juneteenth is available every time you sit down to write. Every time you choose the word that is yours over the word that will scan more easily to someone outside your lineage.
Write something that doesn’t explain itself. Let that be the practice.
I'm writing from freedom to tell you that the Ancestors are proud. Keep writing. ❤️