A Contemplation on Waiting

This past Friday was Juneteenth — a celebration of the day enslaved people in Galveston, TX were informed they were free 1865. That proclamation came two and a half years after it freedom was originally proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln. That’s a long time coming.

It got me thinking about what enslaved peoples were waiting for. Not just the freedom itself, but the fact of having endured the wait for it — and having endured it in a way that left something worth celebrating on the other side. Which got me thinking about how waiting has changed for me as I have grown older. Which got me thinking about what makes some waiting makes folk peckish and other waiting becomes sacred.

Some Juneteenth Background

Enslaved people in Galveston were informed they were free on the 19th day of June in 1865. The official change from enslaved to free had been made over two years earlier, as a wartime declaration by a President using his war powers to issue an Executive Order. It was, in its origin, a calculated military and political move, designed to weaken the Confederacy and win the war for the Union — not, first and foremost, an act of moral reckoning.

That distinction matters. The people in bondage in Texas were the last to hear it, and they heard it not because justice arrived on schedule, but because Union soldiers physically had to walk it into Texas, the furthest western state in the Confederacy, and read it aloud.

The news was delivered by the military. General Order No. 3 was read in the streets and posted on buildings throughout the city. I try to imagine what the enslaved community members were thinking as those words were read. Were they intimidated by the soldiers? Was there disbelief? Confusion? What would freedom feel like, look like, taste like, smell like, after a lifetime — generations — of not having it?

What Next?

I am sure there were those who thought it was a hoax, who spoke out loud that freedom would be bad for everybody and not to pay heed. I imagine there were others who felt emboldened, who gave release to feelings held in for decades while having to submit themselves to those who claimed ownership of them. And I imagine there were those filled with gratitude and hope, praising whichever God they worshiped for finally having had their prayers answered. All of these responses, contradictory as they seem, were reasonable. That is what a wait that long does to people: it does not resolve into a single, clean emotion. It resolves into all of them at once.

And, of course, while it was the end to one kind of waiting, other forms of waiting immediately took its place. Waiting for justice. Waiting for equality. Waiting for an actual, lived chance at the American Dream that had been promised in theory and withheld in practice.

A Long Wait

The irony is not lost on me that it took until 2021 for Juneteenth to be formally recognized as a federal holiday. That is a long wait — a hundred and fifty-six years — and one that reflects far more about the racism and willful ignorance in white communities than about any lack of effort on the part of Black Americans to have their foundational contributions to this nation commemorated and honored. That we continue, in some quarters, to remain ignorant of those contributions — or to intentionally erase them — is a continuing shame, not a closed chapter.

Yet wait we must, and have. What I find myself most wanting to honor on this day is not the waiting itself, but what was made of it. A hundred and fifty-six years of waiting did not produce passivity. It produced a culture of staggering resilience: spirituals that turned grief into something you could survive inside of, mutual aid networks built because no one else would build them, freedom schools and Black churches and Black colleges, built brick by brick, by people who had every reason to believe institutions would never serve them and built them anyway.

From the Ashes

It produced the Civil Rights Movement, which was not a single moment of triumph but decades of strategic, exhausting, perilous persistence — boycotts that took over a year, court cases that took a decade, voting rights fought for one register, one courthouse, one beating at a time.

It produced art and music and language that the rest of American culture has borrowed from for a century without always crediting the wait, or the cost, behind it. This is the part of the story I think gets flattened when Juneteenth is treated only as a history lesson: the waiting was not empty space between bondage and equality. It was generative. It built something. That is not a small thing to have done under that much pressure, for that long, and it deserves to be named outright rather than implied.

Gratitude for the Gift

I do not want to overstate the comparison between that endurance and my own. The waiting I do now, in my seventies, sitting in the spaciousness of a contemplative life I have been fortunate enough to build, is not the same order of waiting as a people waiting on their own freedom. I want to be careful about that. But I have learned something from witnessing how that waiting was carried — something about what waiting well actually requires — and it has changed how I hold my own.

It seems to me that those who can wait with equanimity end up better off, in the end, than those who seek payback or revenge once the wait is over. I am not suggesting that wrongs don’t need to be righted, or that justice should be delayed. I am suggesting that what we carry in our minds and hearts while righting those wrongs — while seeing that justice is finally done — matters enormously, and shapes what we are capable of once we arrive.

A Lifetime of Waiting

After all, we are all waiting for something. As a child, I waited for school to let out, for holidays to come, for special packages to arrive in the mail. As a working adult, I waited for my paycheck, for the weekend, for vacations. Now, as an older adult, I wait for different things entirely. I wait for news of friends and family. I wait for results from doctor visits. I wait for the change of seasons.

How I wait has changed too. When I was younger, the waiting was often laced with anxiety — will it work out, will I be good enough, will I fit in. Now my waiting is more curiosity-based. My inner conversation runs closer to, “well, if it doesn’t work out, I wonder what else I might find to do,” or, “what can I learn from this?”

The Challenge Remains

I don’t want to make assumptions, but I suspect waiting is genuinely hard for a lot of people, particularly in a culture built around immediacy — calls picked up on the first ring, replies triggered by the ping of a notification, packages arriving overnight.

I have had the good fortune to grow up in slower times, and to now follow a slower, more reclusive rhythm of life that makes room for waiting rather than fighting it. That is not a universal privilege, and I try not to forget that.

Jubilation Day

What were the responses in Galveston that June day in 1865 — the full, contradictory range of them? How has the experience of waiting changed across the generations since? What will freedom bring to each of us when we are finally released from whatever continues to hold us, in whatever form that holding takes? I don’t have answers to any of that. I just know that watching how a people waited — and what they built while they did — has made me, in my own much smaller way, better at it.