So Many Years: A Juneteenth Story
by Anne Wynter; illus. by Jerome Pumphrey
Preschool, Primary    Clarion/HarperCollins    32 pp.
5/25    9780063081147    $19.99

This look at Juneteenth celebrations through the years opens in 1872, seven years after the first Juneteenth on June 19, 1865, when a major general in the Union army told enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, that they were free. Wynter begins with a series of thoughtful questions such as “How would you dress after so many years of mending your clothes with rags?” and “How would you eat after so many years of making your meals from scraps?” Answers come through Pumphrey’s vibrant acrylic and digital illustrations that show a formerly enslaved family trading in the tattered clothes of bondage for fine garments and lesser cuts of meat such as pigs’ feet for fried chicken and ham. In spare, lyrical text, the book showcases commemorations over nearly 130 years. On the cover and in one internal image, a pair of black hands in silhouette holds up a globe encircling free Black people. Similar hands are used in images that depict an enslaved person sewing and cooking. All of the images of the enslaved are presented as silhouettes. Wynter revisits the family from 1872 at the end of the book. “Oh, how you would celebrate…so many years…of a life, fully yours…fully free.” An informative author’s note provides more historical detail (though the phrasing that “most” enslaved people had no say over their lives when in fact none had say is illusory and unfortunate), and the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” are appended.

From the ">May/June 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.