The first years of my Big Mama’s life were spent in a home where generations of my ancestors resided. The eldest of whom was enslaved as a child, her great-great-grandfather. They lived on the same land that my people owned and had existed on since her great-great-grandfather was freed from slavery. Big Mama farmed this land with her siblings, cousins, parents, aunts, and uncles. When the time came for her to venture out on her own, she started a family.
My grandfather was a bit of a rolling stone and left my grandmother to support their five children. She took a job at the Procter & Gamble factory in Jackson, Tennessee, and raised my mother and her siblings there. My mother was a basketball star in Jackson and had an opportunity to play ball at Lane College. After graduating, my mother joined the United States Navy to get out of Jackson. While there, she met my father and they started a family. As successful officers in the Navy, they were able to build an upbringing for my sister and me filled with the privileges of financial security, quality education, and support.
Now my sister and I have been handed a baton, and for the first time in my lineage, since my people arrived in this country shackled and enslaved, we have been given an opportunity to ask ourselves who we want to be and what we want to do. Due to the perseverance and strength of the generations who came before us, my sister and I have been allowed to move outside of what we must do and granted the freedom to imagine, to dream, and to construct lives built on what we want to do. Our collective freedom in this country has been a relay race — every generation compelling us forward toward liberation, carving their own mark into the baton.
We go up for Juneteenth as an opportunity to celebrate the perseverance of our people participating in this relay. It gives us a concentrated moment to lift up our ancestors and celebrate the endurance, the love, and the brilliance displayed during their legs of the race through enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression, lynching, and the prison industrial complex. We lift up the miracle of the Black folks who came before us who found ways to keep dreaming and pushing against all odds, the magic of Black folks who found song and dance despite the violence and persecution this country assigned to them. We lift up the innovation of our ancestors who gave room for our culture while the rest of the country was still debating our humanity. We marvel at the marks that they left on the baton. It takes us out of a vacuum and puts our work in direct conversation with the giants whose shoulders we sit upon. I can think of no celebration greater or more powerful than the one I can share with my ancestors and elders. It’s our moment to watch the race as it comes to us. It’s our running start when we are timing our step with the runner before us and preparing to take off with the baton.
Now we have the baton and it’s time to run like all hell. It’s our moment to push this as far as we can. Our chance to decide what mark we want to leave on the baton. Our chance to figure out how far we can propel our people today. This is our chance to celebrate the innovation and the stamina of today. We get to dream and imagine in this moment and celebrate the potential of the future we will build. With the legacy of our ancestors still powering our step forward, we get to boost off like Sha’Carri. The beauty of this relay is that it’s very much about how you perform, how you show up, and at the same exact time it is about all of us, how our entire team is running and has run. It’s our chance to celebrate getting in step with one another.
At some point in our sprint we’ll catch a glimpse of the next leg. They’ll be timing their step with us the same way we timed ours with our elders. With the same vigor and passion that we ran, we will be tasked with handing that baton off. Timing this hand-off correctly will be a determining factor of all of our journey toward liberation. This means that there will be a chance for us to hang up our armor and rest. We are not running this alone on the front or back end, and we must trust those running ahead to make their own mark on the baton. The exhaustion my team at TONE and I have faced makes the promise of rest worthy of celebration. Our young folks need to know that when it’s time to hand that baton off, it will be done in cheer and in celebration. So we go up for the babies watching too.
Juneteenth is not some fixed day in our past; it’s not a freedom finish line. Instead it is a celebration of the race and of the runners. It is an opportunity to build an altar around this centuries-old baton, a chance to dance and to cheer and to celebrate just how far we’ve come. A chance to celebrate the victories and triumphs of today. A chance to celebrate the next leg so that they will be ready when the time comes to hand it off. Juneteenth gives us this opportunity to celebrate the liberation of Black folks in this country like no other day. We owe it to our ancestors, to ourselves, and to our future generations to celebrate and experience joy like our liberation depends on it.
Victoria Jones is the founder and executive director of TONE, and the co-founder and president of Orange Mound Tower.