The coolest person I’ve ever known was my childhood babysitter, Karla. She was a high school student, then a college student, she drove a Mustang and her boyfriend was a lifeguard at the pool, the good pool with the jumbo Fun Dips at the snack shack—Fun Dip is cocaine for children—she watched 90210 and introduced me to In Living Color and let me borrow her zines and taught me to braid my hair.
Karla was also the only Black teenager in town, her family the only Black family I knew of in my Dallas suburb. She came to our neighborhood named after a former plantation and gunned her engine every time she pulled out to leave tire marks at the entrance, thick streaks of rubber that marked her presence there, and one summer, she told me all about her trip to Atlanta for Freaknik.
It sounded so fun! Like MTV Spring Break except cooler, a kind of HBCU spring break celebration held in the mecca of African-American culture, Atlanta, at a time when the rap scene was exploding in the mainstream. If it was possible for Karla to get cooler, stories about Freaknik did it, because spring break on TV looked dumb, I’d already spent enough time in Florida to be unimpressed by drunk sunburnt white boys. But Freaknik sounded awesome, like everything about Karla it seemed fun and cool and like a big adventure.
A 2015 oral history of Freaknik brought a lot of memories of Karla back, and now the nostalgia wheel turns once again because a documentary about Freaknik is coming to Hulu on March 21. I enjoy the sub-genre of true crime that details the rise and fall of cultural phenomena, like the dueling Woodstock 99 documentaries, or the multiple Fyre Fest documentaries—why don’t we have like three of these about the Gathering of the Juggalos yet?—and all the shenanigans that went on. Frankly, it’s past time the genre shone some light on a Black cultural event like Freaknik.
All I ever knew of Freaknik was what Karla told me about her one trip there as a college freshman, later that year my family relocated to Illinois, and I never saw Karla again (I can only assume she remains the coolest person in the entire world). I hope she got to go to Freaknik more than the one time, though, because I still remember how her face lit up talking about it. Looking back, she was explaining to a 9-year-old a life-changing experience she had. Even I, unformed and uncool as I was, could understand she had the time of her life that week in Atlanta. Now, I think back on it and can see how something like Freaknik offered a community and connection she probably didn’t have in our predominately white suburb.
So I am super interested in Freaknik: The Wildest Party Never Told (awkward title, though), both to learn the cultural history of this specific event, but also to see if anything recounted in the doc matches with my memory of Karla’s stories, if I’ve inflated those memories because everything about Karla is tinted rose gold in my mind. She had a huge impact on me—reading by the pool with Karla is a big reason I am a life-long reader—but she was also just a 19-year-old girl figuring out her own place in the world, and Freaknik was fun stories to me, but obviously personal and important to her. This documentary is a chance to glean the context I never could as a kid, an official record overlaid on my memories of Karla, the coolest person ever.
