Stories with freedom’s ring

Retired librarian Barbara Clark remembers when a young boy came to her for a book about “Lincoln’s constipation.” What he meant, of course, was the Emancipation Proclamation.

And there was the day her great-grandmother Winnie Carter Henderson, a slight woman with silver-gray hair and chestnut-brown skin, sat in a rocker and began her personal account of freedom with, “I must have been 4 or 5 years old the day the soldiers came.”

Clark, a storyteller, will share tales of laughter and tears Saturday at the California African American Museum in celebration of Juneteenth, commemorating the end of slavery.

There were more white men than her great-grandmother had ever seen, Clark says. “As the soldiers came, her mother was scared and shoved her on the floor in a corner and told her to be quiet.” Soldiers ordered the slaves to be called in from the fields, to wash up in the horse trough then be seated in the dining room, where one soldier stood and said, “Today you are free.”

A graduate of Howard University and USC (master’s in library science), Clark, 70, worked 32 years as a librarian and area manager for the city of Los Angeles’ library system. She began storytelling upon retirement in 1996.

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California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park. 1:30-2:30 p.m. Saturday. Free; parking, $6. (213) 744-7432.

Other free Juneteenth celebrations:

* Martin Luther King Jr. Park, 1950 Lemon St., Long Beach. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. (562) 570-4405.

* William Grant Still Arts Center, 2520 S. West View St., L.A. Noon-6 p.m. Saturday. (323) 734-1164.