Been Country: Commemorating Juneteenth in a Dying Empire

Country. That word has different valences depending on who’s doing the telling. Every year in elementary school, I marked the summer by being shipped off “to the country,” a multi-acre rural homestead on the far east end of the parish, just a few miles from town. For Black children whose parents migrated North during the Great Migration, they narrate this journey as being sent “down South” for the summer. But there are levels to the South, levels that only really become apparent if you are born and raised there.

I’m from the Deep South and was reared in a small college town, the parish seat, a few miles away from the rural village in which generations of my mother’s family still lived. My grandmother had over decades—and dying generations—become the steward, the matriarch, of our multi-acre family homestead. The family properties existed on both sides of the highway, my grandmother’s house on one side, my great-grandparents’ house on the other. That highway, the one my grandmother taught me to look both ways before crossing, existed before the interstate highway system was built. Two generations of poor Louisiana farmers accessed this bountiful land, most likely because the land is known as The Bottom, desired only by those who aren’t high enough to look down on it. I spent every summer down in the country, to be exact.

Living in unincorporated places, outside the city limits, where there is exactly one stoplight and streetlights are few, is a different experience, even more so than the daily rhythms of college town life. In my college town, we purchased our sundries at the local Walmart. Down in the country, you made do with the Mini Mart and the Old General Store. Every summer, I shifted from my mom’s monthly Walmart and grocery store runs for food and necessities, to my grandmother’s fully stocked pantry lined with canned fruits in mason jars and two deep-freezers filled to the brim. I welcomed those summers, running barefoot, hiking through wooded trails to the neighbors’ house, and watching out for sticker bushes and snakes along the way.