I'm free bitches!

Wow. What a week. I’ve had the emotional sensations equivalent of being squashed like a bug. But like anything else you dust yourself off, keep your head up and add a lil more hair to the voodoo dolls. To clear my head I decided to take a much needed day off to visit with my fabulous cousin Lisa who was in town from NYC.

With only a couple hours to hang we went to lunch and caught up on our family, careers, men and the like. I’ve always admired Lisa, even as a little girl. I love that she travels to foreign countries by herself, has turned into this quintessential stylish but tough new yorker while still maintaining her L.A. joie de vivre and "valley gurl" accent.

On a whim we went to visit the African American Civil War museum on U Street and I’m so glad we did. Just so happen that this week was the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the Unveiling of the Spirit of Freedom Memorial, designed by sculptor, Ed Hamilton. It’s now a national monument located at 10th & U Streets, NW, Washington, DC. The memorial is also surrounded by a Wall of Honor which list the names of 209,145 troops who served in the “United States Colored Troops” during the Civil War.

We also checked out the museum a couple blocks away, located at 12th and U Street, and was met by the museum’s Curator and Assistant Director, Hari Jones. Mr. Jones was a passionate, engaging and articulate speaker. He spoke on the inaccuracies of what we all know as Juneteenth. The term is a contraction for June 19th, the date in 1865 when Major General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, Texas, and announced that slavery in that former Confederate state had ended and that all African Americans were free. Despite the fact that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation became official January 1, 1863. The popular belief was that African Americans not only did very little to ensure their own freedom but didn’t have the wherewithal to know they were actually freed until over two years later. The reality is that the Proclamation didn’t really free any slaves immediately but did in fact open the doors for over 200,000 black soldiers to join the military and help to courageously earn their own freedom.

In any case we learned a great deal yesterday about our history and each other and it made me feel so very grateful for the daily freedoms we all take for granted. It was a good day. I needed that.