More words against the worst
Black Americans have a complicated historical tradition with the New Year. During slavery, New Year’s Day was the day when Black people were sold off. Families would be broken up, often never seeing each other again. Black folks called it Heartbreak Day then. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, abolitionist Harriet Jacobs described what she saw during a Heartbreak Day:
“On one of these sale days, I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price?”
New Year’s Day is also historically known as Freedom Day to us, but even that is complicated. The Emancipation Proclamation was to take effect on Jan. 1, 1863, but, that’s a bit of a misnomer. The proclamation announced the freedom of enslaved people specifically in states that were “in rebellion against” the United States. Lincoln was obviously not the president of those states, so the proclamation didn’t do a lot on its own. It did even less than you might think, because slavery continued uninterrupted in Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia — Union states where Lincoln was the actual president.
But, because Black people had already been freeing themselves since the boats first arrived, Black leaders used Lincoln’s edict to inspire self-emancipation in greater numbers, which also led to the tradition of Watch Night.
If you’re unfamiliar, Watch Night is a Black American Christian tradition celebrating the coming New Year with a church gathering. The custom gets its example from Luke 6:12-13: “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles.”
The first Watch Night happened on Dec. 31, 1862, when Black Christians gathered to spend the night praying for those about to self-emancipate. Frederick Douglass spent that first Watch Night in Boston at Tremont Temple. He would later write about the experience, “The occasion, therefore, was one of both hope and fear. Our ship was on the open sea, tossed by a terrible storm; wave after wave was passing over us, and every hour was fraught with increasing peril. Whether we should survive or perish depended in large measure upon the coming of this proclamation. At least so we felt.”
Like I said, it’s a complicated historical tradition. But it’s necessary.
We also need personal traditions.
Last January, I asked Portland’s 2021-2024 Poet Laureate Emeritus, Maya Williams, if she would share a couple of poems in this column to set the tone for the New Year [“Words against the worst,” Jan. 2025]. She not only agreed, but what she shared was so wonderful, I had to ask her again this year. She very graciously said yes, and I hope you find as much fulfillment in them as I do. You can find Maya’s latest book, Feminine Morbidity, and so much more at mayawilliamspoet.com.
Olaf Would Make an Excellent Therapist or An Erasure of the Last 37 Seconds of Frozen 2
Show yourself, right now!
Elsa, be who you are.
I will Mama, I will!
Elsa’s dead.
Olaf’s dead.
Anna cries.
And then a bunch of important things happened that I forgot, but all that matters is I was right, and water has memory, and thus…I live…and so do you.
An American Sonnet that Ends in a New World
after Wanda Coleman, Sasha Banks, Sarah Kay, and Joshua Bennett
America crumbles and stumbles into rubble.
Children roast marshmallows at the kindle of money
we no longer need. The one percent are janitors for now.
A few help them. Only if they want to. Together we
are gonna learn how to employ a classless buddy system.
Indigenous people have the land back. Not just the
federally recognized ones ether. What is “federal” now?
What is “imperialism” now? What is “war”?
What was it? It doesn’t happen overnight now,
but it does happen. Black people don’t have to save us anymore.
Black people don’t have to fear or die for the wrong reasons
anymore. Grieving has been and will continue to be
encouraged. Poetry still reckons with terror, but not
without the beauty we have built and created.
