The Summer of Red Drink: A Declaration

The red drink is older than the reason we think we are drinking it.

Before it was a Juneteenth toast, it was a welcome pour in Senegambia, where they call the hibiscus bissap. It is sobolo in Ghana. It is sorrel in the Caribbean, cold and spiced and served long. It crossed the ocean with our people and it stayed with us, because the plant is hearty and so are we. Red has always meant something on our table. Far more than vibrant decoration.

We are claiming this as The Summer of Red Drink.

1776 wasn't ours. 1863 was.

In 1776 this country declared its independence from Britain. Not from itself. Not from the auction block. Not from the plantation. We were not in that document. We were the labor it was written on top of. When the country lights its sky up this weekend, it is celebrating a freedom it kept for some and denied to the rest. It's because of this fact that I am calling for the Summer of Red Drink, because Juneteenth represents something far more meaningful to many Black Americans than the 4th of July.

Our freedom is still unfurling, in stages, and slowly. The uprisings of enslaved people throughout the 1800s. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The last Confederate holdout in Galveston, June 19, 1865. Two and a half years of people still enslaved after they were legally "set free," 13th Amendment aside. Two and a half years is a long time to owe someone their life. And the fight continues, after Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement. It still exists today. That gap is what we pour into. That gap exemplifies the red that we drink, for it represents not only blood spilled and lives lost, but the celebration of progress and the beauty of our communities. It calls us to keep marching and further building our legacy, building the table.

Toast. Pour. Organize.

We toast to how far we've come. To all who suffered horrifically inhuman indignities, but never lost their humanity and dignity. To the ones who built the wealth of this country (the very wealth that assisted in America's ability to declare itself free from Britain) and were then told they had none of their own. To every generation that was told to sit down and stood up anyway. To the ones who taught themselves to read at night. To the ones who kept the recipes, kept the language, kept the seeds, kept the songs. We are their answer. Raise the glass.

We pour to the lives lost. Not as a symbol. As a practice. For the ones who selected freedom in the depths of the ocean, the swamps, and the marshes. For the ones who did not make it out of the hold. For the ones who did not make it home from the field. For the ones who did not make it out of a traffic stop. For the ones whose names we know and the ones whose names we never will.

And we commune with red drink at the center as we organize around what is left to do. Freedom is not an anniversary. It is a practice. It is a set of choices we make with our money, our time, our tables, our children. The country is still not free of itself. Neither are we. The work is not done. It is not ours alone. But it is ours. Show up for it while you are pouring for it.

That is the shape of the season.

Silva is made for this table.

Rooted in inheritance, with an eye on what's next. It is unaged spirit distilled from Carolina Gold rice, the same grain West and Central African farmers built the Lowcountry economy on and were then written out of. The name is Sierra Leone Krio for silver. It is 90 proof, clean, faintly sweet, faintly herbal, and it belongs in a red drink glass. Not because we launched it there. Because that is where the tradition puts it. From the fields we cultivated to the tables we set.

Pour red. Pour free. Pour the way your ancestors would recognize and the way your descendants will remember with pride. Toast the ones who got us here. Pour for the ones who could not. Prepare for the ones coming next.

That is the whole assignment. Our tradition is not behind us. It is in the glass, and it is in the work. Both are still in front of us.

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Silva is available now at bottleshop.siwanispirits.com. Continental US shipping. Tag #SummerOfRedDrink so we can find each other at the table.