Juneteenth and Two Degrees of Separation

Intimate memories of slavery, segregation, and morality

"Slave cabin near Petersburg, Virginia, December 1864, artist's impression, detail," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College.

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Juneteenth is a splendid addition to the national calendar, commemorating, as it does, a key milestone in the elimination of America’s greatest blight—slavery. For me the subject of slavery is intertwined with memories of an angelic soul whose family stories informed my views on American history and, in particular, on the segregation that suffocated the Virginia of my youth.

The engraving atop this article depicts a slave cabin near my hometown of Petersburg, Virginia in 1864. What astounds me most about this image is that in my earliest years, this scene was not ancient history. This scene would have been within the living memory of my town’s oldest residents—some of whom might even have known the two women depicted by the artist. The end of slavery preceded my birth by a mere eighty-eight years, so in early childhood, I might well have crossed paths with people born into bondage—a single degree of separation between me and that barbaric institution. With certainty, no more than two degrees of separation stood between me and the survivors of slavery—a fact impressed upon me by the aforementioned soul who graced my early childhood. She lovingly shared that history with me, forever shaping how I understood my birthplace, the world around it, and humanity in general.

Mary W—, an African-American lady, was my childhood caretaker, and watched over me and guided me while my parents worked in their store. She was smart, wise, kind, and possessed of a finely calibrated moral compass. Her role in shaping my ethics was equal to that of my parents—and I’m sure my parents would agree approvingly. She was a household presence from not long after my birth till sometime after my college years—and a friend for another 30 or so years afterward.

I was a precocious child, fully literate by age 4 and eagerly devouring history from those earliest years. By around age 5, I could rattle off the names of America’s 34 presidents and regularly wrote to the World Book Encyclopedia editors with corrections and suggestions. In the stories of Mary W—, I had living history to accompany the books. She would tell me tales of farm life in nearby Dinwiddie County—a distance of only 10 miles and 30 years, but a world far removed from my small-town urban existence. Most significantly, her stories often involved her beloved grandparents—the patriarch and matriarch of the family farm. They had spent their childhoods in slavery—a fact she noted matter-of-factly, leaving me free to build my own moral edifice around that knowledge.

The notion of “degrees of separation” did not really enter the public lexicon until John Guare's 1990 play and 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, though the concept dates at least back to a 1929 Hungarian short story, “Chain-Links,” by Frigyes Karinthy. Nevertheless, precocious me had an intuitive feeling for the concept, realizing from Mary W—’s stories that only two degrees separated me from slavery. I knew Mary W—, and she knew freed slaves. That knowledge cast a shadow over the endless rounds of Civil War history taught in our schools. Mary W— did not tell me that slavery was unjust or evil. Rather, she gently told me the stories of her family, leaving me free to draw my own conclusions. I suspect that her approach did more to instill in me a hatred for slavery than overt preaching would have done.

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The first practical impact of these stories came when I was 4 or 5 and accidentally encountered Virginia’s perverse and despotic regime of segregation—and I can still remember the incident as vividly as if it were yesterday. My mother took me to the Trailways Bus Station, where we were to take a 23-mile ride north to Richmond. As we entered the station, I quickly turned to my right and sat down in an empty seat in the waiting room. My mother leaned over and quietly told me that I was sitting in the “wrong” seating area. I didn’t understand what she meant. Whites and blacks, she explained were required to sit in separate areas, and I was in the wrong area. This was my first awareness of contemporary Jim Crow, and the malice was instantly clear to me. Mary W— and I sat side-by-side in our home, and yet Virginia law would not allow us to do so in this bus station. (As I’ve written previously, blacks citizens were limited to the basement of our public library and prohibited from browsing in the stacks.)

Lest anyone blame my mother for what happened at the bus station, it’s important to know that the separate seating was compelled by law—and violators could be prosecuted. My parents owned Tots and Teens, a children’s clothing store a few blocks from the bus station. Unlike many institutions of the time, their store had no separate restrooms, separate changing rooms, or any of the other detritus of Jim Crow. My parents were not by any means social activists; they were simply decent people—in a time when decency was not universally appreciated. My father had been a U.S. Army instructor at nearby Fort Lee and was known for his rapport with the African American troops who studied with him in the segregated Army. Such interracial camaraderie was a rarity in Petersburg, Virginia, in the 1940s. In 2005, a book on African American life in our town specifically mentioned that my parents’ store “was ahead of its time in the gracious manner that it treated all of its customers, regardless of race.” (From Fort Lee in Transition: 1940s-1970s/Black Quartermaster Officers’ Families at Fort Lee, Virginia, by Charlene Gregg and Lillian Gaskill, whose husbands were both generals at Fort Lee.)

Stationery from my parents’ store, a 1930s/1940s postcard of their store’s locale, and the aforementioned passage from Fort Lee in Transition: 1940s-1970s.

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When Mary W— died in 2010, one day after her 98th birthday, her granddaughter honored my mother, my brother, and me by including our names in the obituary in the their list of family and friends. In this lifetime, no honor has ever meant more to me. Other than my parents, she was my life’s greatest teacher—and her words and wisdom are with me still.

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A SONG FROM SLAVERY

For the entirety of my childhood, I was the beneficiary of the wisdom imparted by Mary W—, the African American lady described in the above essay. Another of her gifts was that of music. On and off through the day, she would sing religious songs in her high, ethereal singing voice. I studied music from age 5 on, and would discuss her songs with her and try replicating them on the piano—a habit that profoundly impacted my tastes in music and my performance style.

In the above video, I perform a jazz improvisation on the lullaby, “All the Pretty Little Horses.” Popularized in the early 1960s by Peter, Paul, and Mary, I always assumed it came from the British Isles, but in researching it for this 2021 performance, I discovered that it was likely an African American song from the time of slavery. As I explain in the video, the tender second verse, which sounds so gentle (“birds and the butterflies, flutter round his eyes”) aparently has a hidden meaning of anguish and suffering stemming from life under slavery.

Here’s the version I first heard in 1963:

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Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.