Chabo's Journal: Its Juneteenth! Bring an appetite & wear an old uniform!

Note: This is a continuation of a series of stories written by a central Texas police officer named "Darth Tang", which are being archived by Chabo, with no editing. Read more about this project.

This story was originally posted on June 17, 2006.

It's a wonderful day! From shift start at 10pm until near midnight, skilled cooks will be pressing upon us chicken (fried & roasted), pork ribs in garlic sauce, ham hocks in black pepper baste cooked until the meat is hard & cracking, beef ribs in green butter, fried catfish breaded with dark cornbread, hush puppies dark & hard on the outside & soft golden on the inside, corn on the cob, fresh-baked bread (white & corn bread), greens of various sorts, and more kinds of pie & cobbler than you can count.

And then, like a prize for a hearty appetite, after the honest citizens have retired to their beds, the riff-raff will have consumed enough malt beverages decanted from chilled forty ounce containers to enter the playing field. The 911 boards will light up and, and it will be rocks & beer bottles coming in, and bean-bags fired in rely; mad dashes across city parks, chaotic melees and desperate brawls, bodies slamming onto patrol car trunks and into ballistic plastic back seats.

At the jails, negotiations about prisoner injuries and discussions about charges and arresting officers; orders by radio & phone sorting out who writes what on whom, and then quickly back out into the night for another load.

Its hot runs across the dark town, the road in miniature on the dash-board TV screen, the rear end walking on a fast turn and the shot-like slams of car doors as back-up officers bail out to join the fray.

Around four-thirty the last of the knuckleheads are home, hiding, or muttering dark imprecations to one another in the holding tanks, and the units rally in Report Writing, where handcuffs are sorted out and returned to their proper holders, expended OC canisters are turned in for fresh, and paperwork is written, printed, & turned into the sergeant for review. Stories will be told, disparate bits of incidents will be fitted together to reconstruct the whole, and scrapes & bruises examined, discussed, and occasionally documented.

Shift's end at 6am will see the squad gathered in the parking lot on tailgates, telling tales and working over reheated (or cold) portions left over from the shift's start.

Good times, good people.

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what the fuck is juneteenth?

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It's more or less the day Texan slaves were told they were free.

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Pretty much, except that it was across a lot of the Gulf states. I understand its largely died out outside of Texas, and in Texas its only celebrated in some areas.