As I came in for a landing down on the Square in Athens, I overheard two gentlemen conversing. One commented, “Why, that’s Kafkaesque!” Now, as you know, my only word is “Who.” Upon hearing the word “Kafkaesque,” I asked, “Who?” Luckily, the two men were deeply engaged in their discussion and didn’t consider it odd that an Owl had joined their conversation. One answered, “Franz Kafka was a Czech author who wrote in the early part of the 1900s. He wrote fiction about topics that were ‘hauntingly complex, bizarre, and illogical.’ His stories read like nightmares from which you couldn’t wake up.”

I was taken aback by this. They continued, “Yes, the fact we needed Juneteenth came about because the real world was then Kafkaesque. Imagine waking to find yourself in prison. You don’t know why you are there. You also don’t know how long your sentence is, and there is no one to ask. If you decide to read about your case, you discover you can’t read. One of the rules of the prison is you are forbidden to read. You have no access to news — no one who can tell you what is happening outside your prison, and no one who even knows you are there. That’s Kafkaesque.”

I found that impossible to imagine. Scary — no horrifying — indeed. He continued, “The American Civil War was over in April 1865. Union soldiers arrived off ships and camped in a town park in Galveston, Texas, in June of 1865. Blacks all across Texas were not told by their owners that on the 1st of January, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation stated, “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” In fact, Union Major General Gordon Granger made it crystal clear when he read General Order No. 3 to the assembled Texans of Galveston, “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.”

That wonderful news, that slavery was declared over forever, is what we celebrate on June 19. Limestone County has celebrations of this event. Our federal government declared Juneteenth a federal holiday, just like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

“Juneteenth marks both a long, hard night of slavery and subjugation and the promise of a brighter morning to come,” President Biden said in a signing ceremony at the White House. “This is a day, in my view, of profound weight and profound power, a day in which we remember the moral stain, terrible toll that slavery took on the country and continues to take.”

One of the gentlemen I listened to on the Square added, “I also liked what I heard Vice President Kamala Harris say. She showed how Kafkaesque it was to not know you are free, or ever would be. She said, “Think about that: For more than two years, the enslaved people of Texas were kept in servitude. For more than two years, they were intentionally kept from their freedom.”

Slowly, slowly we learn more about who we are today. Never be afraid to know the truth. Oh, and did you know, it is not for nothing that the informal name of the Juneteenth holiday was the Jubilee celebration. This came from the Bible. Jubilee was the Hebrew word for ram’s horn. It would be blown at a special time to celebrate redemption from forced labor.

I flew away from the Square, glad to have listened in. Juneteenth will always be a special celebration day for us all now.