Book excerpt: Kumbayah...The Juneteenth Story is a fictional, two-act play that addresses a factual and traumatic event - the rape of emancipation against African people who were held as captives in the United States. Lewis, is a brilliant young slave who is about to turn twenty-one years old. As a birthday present, Mastah Turner has promised Lewis his freedom. In 1863, while on a cattle-selling trip in Galveston, Texas for the ailing Mastah Turner, Lewis learns that President Abraham Lincoln has freed the slaves. As he returns to the plantation, exuberant over the news of freedom, Lewis is stopped by Pattyrollers (slave catchers). Since Lewis knows the guarded secret, fatality becomes inevitable. Over the next two and a half years, his mythical spirit (perhaps interpreted by devout storytellers as John De Conqueror) soars over the earth and through the skies as an eagle serving as a "protector" to his people. Finally, word of freedom gets delivered to the Texas captives via General Gordon Granger who issues the mandate on June 19, 1865... thus the term Juneteenth.