The Juneteenth Father’s Day Solstice Pride Love Moon Weekend of 2015
Two days ago, on the weekend of June 19– 21, the weekend that our 150 year old cakewalk away from slavery, Juneteenth, was celebrated, on the very weekend we honored our persistent determined fathers, on the very weekend the first and longest summer day of 2015 arrived, Sunday, June 22, at 12:38 p.m., on the very same salty latitude and longitude shores where Miss Harriett was born and learned to power walk herself and us away from slavery, within the very same latitude and longitude alignments where Misters Banneker and Douglass sun dialed the sky and wrote freedom pages that became our majestic timepieces, one poet and one scientist, two natural-haired girls, one from Carolina South, the other from Carolina North, wearing bright red strumpet wedding dresses, caught hands in front of the light of a baobab tree, named long ago by the villagers who had watched it grow for 800 years "les Baobab Amoureux" and they gave cool water to each other and promised their love and faithfulness to each other for the rest of their lives, while 500 miles away people who looked just like them mopped up pools of blood in Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and filled bullet holes in walls first touched by Denmark Vesey, all because two days before this powerful weekend began, a young white boy with a soup bowl haircut entered the sacred sanctuary, sat down beside 9 Black people, and listened to their baritone and soprano voices fill the sacred air for one whole hour, as they professed their love for their Savior, before cowardly whipping out his hidden cowardly gun and stealing their laughter and goodness away. The morning after he pulled the trigger, reloading five times, hoping to start his new Civil War, I had to pack the car with wedding symbols and love paraphernalia and ready myself to drive the 8 hours up to Maryland to be with my beloved. For every mile away from the shores of South Carolina, and all the way to Maryland, I held the steering wheel with both hands and kept the tissue box in the passenger seat. I wanted to turn around and drive to Charleston. I wanted to somehow postpone the wedding and turn all my attention to what people in Charleston needed. What I was doing felt selfish. But love won because love always wins. I believe love can and must push through and alter hate even after evil has tried its very best to wipe us out and change our plans. To the Bowl Headed Boy with the gun I say this: There will be no second Civil War. My friend Melynda Price, who was there at the ceremony, as one of our love witnesses, reminded all of us of this as we sat at the feet of love and 800 years of curvaceous baobab strength, with our hearts broken in 9 specific Black Life pieces, "What has always kept us going as a people is our fierce commitment to love and loving and being loved in the face of evil. Black love has always been our weapon" is what she said and it is what I fiercely believe.
—Nikky