"There are, as far as I can see, two kinds of lies in this world. There's the kind I tell Mama when she asks if I've been to see the hoodoo woman who lives on our plantation. And I say no. Though I have been. And now, like Sis Goose, I have a red flannel bag of my own that holds small animal bones, powdered snakeskin, horsehair, ashes, dried blood, and dirt from the graveyard. All to protect me from any evil I can imagine. And some that I can't.
"Then there's the kind of lie you live with when you enter into a devil's agreement with yourself never to disclose a certain fact for fear of the results if you do.
"There are planters in our neck of the woods who believe so much in the lie that the slaves are not free that they will shoot or hang anybody who says otherwise."
- Ann Rinaldi, Come Juneteenth
Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, and marks the day -- two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect -- that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and officially announced that the slaves in Texas were free. Come Juneteenth is the story of a girl in Texas who has to live with the lie she has told her best friend -- legally a slave but raised as her sister -- that the rumors of freedom creeping across the land are not true.
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