Annette Gordon-Reed’s Surprising Recollections of Texas

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ON JUNETEENTH
By Annette Gordon-Reed

Almost every memoir could fairly be subtitled “The Education of. …” Some explicitly embrace the formulation; “The Education of Henry Adams” is the second most influential memoir in American letters, after Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. “On Juneteenth,” Annette Gordon-Reed’s insightful, often touching reflection on the Black experience in Texas, starting with her own, lands between these two: less arch than Adams, more historical than Franklin.

Gordon-Reed’s historical emphasis, like Adams’s, is partly a professional matter. Adams was a distinguished historian at the beginning of the 20th century. Gordon-Reed has earned acclaim as one of the most important American historians of our time. Her 2008 “The Hemingses of Monticello” won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Gordon-Reed’s education included an awakening to the complexity of human existence. Many people look to history for lessons applicable to the present; they seek a “usable past,” in the words of Van Wyck Brooks. The simpler the lessons — that is, the more reducible to adage or slogan — the more usable they are. But simplicity comes at a cost to historical accuracy. Historians recognize this; for them the appeal is in the complexity.

Time and again in this slim volume, Gordon-Reed notes her discovery that the past is more complicated than she had imagined. For her, as for millions of Texas schoolchildren before and after, the required seventh-grade Texas history class served as an introduction to what it meant to be Texan. Other states teach their own histories, but not many take it as seriously as Texas does. It’s probably no accident that Texas history is taught to students at the same age that Catholic children are confirmed and Jewish kids bar- and bat-mitzvahed.

Gordon-Reed is a proud Texan. “My Texas roots go deep — on my mother’s side back to the 1820s, on my father’s side at least to the 1860s,” she writes. She grew up celebrating Juneteenth — named for June 19, 1865, the day on which emancipation was officially announced to Texans by a Union general in Galveston — with her family and friends in Conroe, north of Houston. She thought of Juneteenth as peculiar to Texas. She admits annoyance when she first heard that Black people in other states were laying claim to the holiday: “My twinge of possessiveness grew out of the habit of seeing my home state, and the people who reside there, as special. The things that happened there couldn’t have happened in other places.” She got over her possessiveness in a typically Texan way. “It’s really a very Texas move to say that something that happened in our state was of enough consequence to the entire nation that it should be celebrated nationwide.”

Gordon-Reed’s mother taught at Booker T. Washington High School, which anchored the Black community in Conroe. The school included all grades from kindergarten through 12th, and Gordon-Reed started her schooling there. But in first grade her parents switched her to a previously all-white school, Anderson Elementary. Her father said he didn’t like K-12 programs, which lumped small children and near-adults together. The white schools didn’t do that. From Gordon-Reed’s perspective, the move was uneventful. Only later did she learn that her parents arranged it so, negotiating with the Anderson principal to keep this pioneering action under the media radar.

It helped that she was a model student. “Not to take anything away from the teachers and administrators at Anderson, but I did make things easy for them,” Gordon-Reed writes. She liked school and did very well. “In those days, when people cared less about making children feel bad, I was a ‘Bluebird’ — the group for the best readers.” Moreover, there was only her. “One Black child was not exactly an invasion.”

Outside of class, her situation was more complicated. “I would see my school friends in town with their parents and siblings, say, at a local store, and my greeting to them would be met with total silence,” she writes. “They knew, at that young age, that their friendliness toward me might draw rebukes from their relatives.” Nor were other Black children always pleased with her. She recalls waiting in line for her school bus. “I heard an older boy, who was Black, say to his companions, who were also Black, ‘That’s her!’ I was in the adjoining line, perhaps two people behind him. He turned around in his line, reached over the people standing between us, and began to punch me repeatedly in the chest, as hard as he could. I was shocked and terrified.”

She didn’t understand then, but as she grew older she realized how breaking the color line could be seen as threatening on both sides. Her parents’ decision to send her to a white school was interpreted by some Black families as a vote of no confidence in Black schooling. And the integration project, as a whole, undermined the solidarity — albeit imposed from outside — felt within the Black community. Integration involved teachers as well as students; Gordon-Reed’s mother was assigned to the previously white Conroe High School. The experience there wasn’t the same. “My mother confessed, later in life, that while she took joy in all of her students, she had become a teacher ‘to teach Black students.’ ‘I can’t talk to them the way we used to,’ she’d say. What she meant was that it was harder to address Black students in the classroom, and talk openly about their common mission of moving the Black community ahead.”

The seventh-grade history class remained very traditional when Gordon-Reed took it. “I cannot say with certainty that slavery was never mentioned,” she writes. But it received nothing like the attention it deserved. “Of course, I didn’t need school to tell me that Blacks had been enslaved in Texas.” Juneteenth informed her of that every summer, and her parents and grandparents made reference to slavery. So did Black children. “A common retort when another kid — often a sibling — insisted you do something for them you didn’t want to do was ‘Slavery time is over.’”

A staple of Texas history classes was the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a white girl stolen by Comanches on the Texas frontier and adopted into the tribe. She bore a son, Quanah, who became the last great war chief of the Comanches. Gordon-Reed at first accepted the story as straightforwardly told, but the more she thought about it, as a Black person and a woman, the more complicated it became. “It seemed to me that so many wrong things were packed into this one narrative,” she writes. She learned that the land the Comanches were defending from the whites was land they had seized from other Indians. She discovered that Indians held slaves, with some for this reason siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War. As for the kidnapping itself: “Whatever sympathy we have for a people under siege and fighting for their very existence, there is no way to minimize the problem with kidnapping girls to make them brides.”

Gordon-Reed never lost her affection for Texas, even after she left. “When asked, as I have been very often, to explain what I love about Texas, given all that I know of what has happened there — and is still happening there — the best response I can give is that this is where my first family and connections were,” she writes. “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the objects of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places — and people, ourselves included — without a cleareyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.”

The Juneteenth ritual in the Gordon household evolved over time. Her grandmother added tamales to the menu. The young Gordon-Reed joined the women in the time-consuming preparation. “Those hours seemed endless to me as a child, but they were actually fleeting,” she says. “This ritual was fitting, and so very Texan. People of African descent, and to be honest, of some European descent, celebrating the end of slavery in Texas with dishes learned in slavery and a dish favored by ancient Mesoamerican Indians that connected Texas to its Mexican past; so much Texas history brought together for this one special day.”