A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

As I created my identity, it became a patchwork quilt, a mosaic of irregular shards and pieces I meticulously tried to meld together into Jason Michael Bosak Diakité. I was never American, never Swedish, never white but never black either. I was a no-man’s-land in the world. I have a complex system of roots that branches across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras. I am Jason, son of the black Madubuko Diakité and the white Elaine Bosak. I am all the countries my forefathers came from and were shipped to in chains. I am all the colors and shades of their skin. I am their rage and their longing, their hardships, successes, and dreams. I am the intersection of Slovakia, Germany, France, Africa, South Carolina. Of white, black, and Cherokee. I am the meeting of Bosak, Schneidmüller, Hauser, Privat, Robinson, Davis, and Miller. The sum of Mom’s Slavic German roots and Dad’s African ones molded in the social democracy of Sweden. Must I have just one home? Must I have just one origin? Is that to make it easier for those around me, or to flat out appease them? To make it simpler for them to put a label on me, measure me, place me, fence me in, and judge me? Is that why I have spent so much time tormenting myself with these questions of identity? So I can give a simple answer when someone asks where I come from?

The question is, what happens faster—the wind eroding a cliff, or cultures and attitudes shifting in the rural South?”

We’ve forgotten how important silence can be. It’s room to let our thoughts settle. Usually, we talk our way through everything and think about it later. Maybe that’s why we so often say things we come to regret.

They inherit hopelessness.

She made sure that food was on the table at the same time every day. The food part was important, you know. Anyone who gives you food is also giving you love.

You have to understand, son, that this was 1965, the height of the civil rights movement. Black Panthers, Martin Luther King. The year Malcolm X was shot. Did I ever tell you your aunt and your cousins were at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm was shot by Elijah Muhammad’s henchmen? Sai and Bibi were probably too little to remember, but your aunt Chinyelu remembers. Her husband at the time, John Farris, was one of Malcolm’s bodyguards. It was a terrible time. Black heroes were being murdered. Kennedy had been assassinated too, and the police and the Ku Klux Klan were terrorizing black people all over the country. I felt so fucking resigned after Malcolm was killed. I tried to drive uptown to Washington Heights to rescue your aunt from the chaos. But it was impossible to get through the traffic. It was late, late at night before I got hold of Chinyelu. She couldn’t believe it—that Malcolm X had been murdered. She was heartbroken and shaken. She’d been sitting there with Sai and Bibi, and she still hadn’t recovered from the shock of what might have happened to her children if the killers had aimed their weapons at the audience.”

The memories haunt me full force. As if I was saving them until I got strong enough to handle it, to feel them again.

Mulatto. A word I’ve never called myself. The word that means “mule.” I have a hard time identifying with a word coined by those who owned my forefathers. Those who would have been happy to own me today, if humankind had found a cure for, an immunity to, that unavoidable force: change.

In Louisiana, according to a law in place until 1983, a person was black if their blood was one-thirty-second or more black. This means that, from a racial-ethnicity point of view, former prime minister of Sweden Fredrik Reinfeldt would have had to sit in the back of the bus thanks to his great-great-grandfather.

Thomas Jefferson had six children with his slave Sally Hemings. She was a quadroon. That is to say, a very light-skinned woman. Thomas Jefferson allowed two of these children to flee north from his plantation, Monticello. One of the most powerful men in the US didn’t even dare to immediately free his own children, whom society considered black—slaves, even though they were octoroons.

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old boy who was visiting family in Mississippi when he was accused of flirting with a white woman who worked in a store—when, in fact, all he did was talk to her. The woman’s husband and his brother beat Till up and poked out his eye before shooting him in the head. Then they tied a seventy-pound fan blade around his neck with barbed wire and threw him in the Tallahatchie River where his mangled, swollen corpse was found three days later. The attackers confessed to the newspapers what they’d done, but they were acquitted by the all-white jury.

Man, I remember sitting in my car in Santa Monica in the early sixties. A blue Plymouth. I just wanted to dig the ocean and the sun, you know, California’s beautiful. It must have been eight in the morning, and the Pacific Ocean is gorgeous at that hour. Out of nowhere, a patrol car rolled up and parked behind me. The officer knocked on my window. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘What do you think, I’m lookin’ at the ocean and takin’ it easy in my car. It’s a free country, isn’t it?’ ‘Oh, you think it’s a free country, huh?’ the cop replied. He went to get his partner, and they dragged me out of the car and beat me up. They hauled me into the station and held me for six hours. It was fucking afternoon by the time they let me out, and I had to walk all the way back to my car. But I learned my lesson. It sure as hell wasn’t, isn’t, a free country. Man, I’m tellin’ you.” He smacks his lips in distaste. It occurs to me that it’s not bitterness that makes him look down and speak more quietly but a sort of aching resignation.

It occurs to me that it’s not bitterness that makes him look down and speak more quietly but a sort of aching resignation.

American society is a minefield for black people. There’s a reason the US has the largest prison population in the world. Man, not even China has more incarcerated people than the US, and there are almost 1.4 billion Chinese.

“And add to that the internalized self-hatred and hopelessness,” Don goes on, “and it leads to what Bama the Village Poet sang about. ‘Ghettos of the mind.’

They’ve survived the trials that took the lives of many others where they came from, and soon they’ll reach the last stop. These once confused, angry, sad, and defiant old men. But now they can laugh at how crazy the world is and just enjoy the fact that they have each other and that there are witnesses to how hellish, strange, and maybe wonderful life as a black person has been.

Dad tells me about his grief when Grandpa died. Just three weeks before that, his mother had passed away unexpectedly. As soon as he got back to Sweden after the funeral, the news reached him that Grandpa had passed as well. But he was out of money and couldn’t make the trip back across the Atlantic to attend his father’s funeral. He still carries the pain of that with him.

“I even recall the time there was a Ku Klux Klan meeting on the army base,”

Soul is the same as feeling, and the feeling has to be right, or else neither music nor food will work.

when I respond with a “That’s really tragic,” she punctuates it with a loud, “Who you tellin’!” Not like a question, more like an amen or a now you get what I mean. She speaks in headlines.

The poorer you are, the worse nutrition you get. Like their forefathers, the descendants of slaves are at the bottom of the food hierarchy. The lack of nutritious food in the ghettos of certain American megacities is so serious that the phenomenon was given a name: food desert. A food desert is any area where it’s impossible to buy fresh fruits or vegetables within a one-mile radius. In certain cities in the United States, the radius is as large as ten miles. The limited access residents of the ghetto have to cars and public transportation makes access to nutritious, wholesome food even more difficult. If you add in the proliferation of fast-food chains in these areas, the spread of conditions like obesity and diabetes is unavoidable. A lemon at Whole Foods costs more than a hamburger at a fast-food restaurant. These food deserts are found in Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis, Detroit, Camden, and dozens of other cities around the country.

In my grandfather’s day, one hundred pounds of cotton would bring about fifty cents. A really good picker could pick three or four times their weight in cotton, but one hundred pounds was the average. It takes about seventy bolls like the one I just picked to make a pound. So Grandpa and his fellow pickers had to pick around seven thousand bolls a day.

An ounce of understanding for what my forefathers suffered. I hear your blues.

But here, as everywhere, life and death run their course. Death might even be greedier here among the poor and hopeless ruins of Allendale.

Majestic oak trees with thick trunks and long branches crooked with age make the run-down shacks look even more fragile and tumbledown. Black men have been hanged on some of these branches, I think as we travel down the pitted, cracked road.

“More young people than old ones are buried here these days. Drugs and guns. Generations of inherited poverty and hopelessness have destroyed people’s souls. Their ability to love themselves and their neighbors has been seriously compromised. We keep very busy; every Saturday and Sunday, we bury someone. Must be three or four funerals a week.”

Allendale, which has no shop that sells fruits or vegetables, no grocery store, and no hospital, does have two funeral homes, where business is booming.

Cornel West, in his formidable book Race Matters, describes this poverty and oppression: Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophical doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world. Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others.

Perhaps suffering isn’t just a fate; maybe it’s an identity. Maybe you’re in greater social danger if you read books and dream of getting an education than if you just stand around a street corner all day in a size-XXXL T-shirt, without any plans or any hope for a brighter tomorrow.

History is what hurts. If you open it up for a closer look, you risk your own destruction.

“It’s cotton I picked in Allendale; it could be from a field where your forefathers slaved.” “God dammit,” he responds with disgust, “why don’t you throw that shit out? Would you bring back a piece of Auschwitz and give it to the family of a Holocaust survivor?”

“What psychologist gives us therapy? PTSD, my ass. We’re all suffering from it. It’s become part of our DNA.”

It’s as if the ability to find humor in sadness has immunized him against becoming bitter.

“One thing’s for sure. We fought for our country, and several of my friends died for these United States. In 1952, I was back in the States on a military base in South Carolina. Some of my friends and I were gonna go to Georgia. We drove, in uniform, of course. Then we stopped at some diner somewhere on the border between South Carolina and Georgia. No sooner did we set foot in the restaurant than a woman came up to the highest-ranking man in our group and said, ‘White in front, black around back.’ ‘You cannot be serious,’ said the sergeant. ‘Are you telling me these soldiers who just got back from defending this country can’t sit here?’ ‘White in front, black around back,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t believe it,’ was all he could say. Over and over again. ‘I can’t believe this is what we fought for.’”

Juanetta looks around, fixing her eyes on each one of us, and then she says, “If you constantly tell a child it’s good-for-nothing, lazy, thieving, and ugly. If you hit that child and treat it without respect its whole life. What kind of person will it become? What do you think that child will do? We are that child. Four hundred years of abuse, pain, and murder have made us what we are today. Beautiful, terrible, dysfunctional, and strong.”

The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.

In the few photos I’ve seen of BM, she’s always wearing a fur. As if she never allowed her picture to be taken in the summer. Wearing a fur was important to BM. It signaled her status, showed that she was someone. It’s all the more important for someone without social standing to bear status symbols. My equally poor grandfather did the same, after all. Wide-brimmed hats, shiny shoes, razor-sharp creases pressed into his pants, ironed shirts. Each time I see a picture of my grandfather or great-grandmother, I think of my own vanity and proclivity to wear what I consider to be nice clothes.

The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

In 1984, the east-west 125th Street, also known as the main drag of Harlem, was christened Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Three years later, the north-south Lenox Avenue was given the official extra name of Malcolm X Boulevard. In the time it takes for the light to turn green at that intersection, it strikes me: they did come together after all. Those two schools of revolution. Malcolm’s “strike back with power” attitude and Martin’s “love your enemies” strategy. Both giants were shot to death at the age of thirty-nine.

Dad’s paradoxical tug-of-war is between the fact that oppression drove him out of America and that, even so, he feels most alive right here on the cracked asphalt of Harlem.

Was that why she always kept a rabbit’s foot in her handbag? Maybe Jesus wasn’t enough of a savior. Superstition and the supernatural were always with her. A rabbit’s foot for luck. That’s why Dad always has a horseshoe on the wall at home and one in the trunk of his car. Survival, for a poor black person in the United States, was such a long shot that magic became a deciding factor.

Sunday, May 5, 1963, was the last day in the series of demonstrations by children against racism and segregation in these very neighborhoods in downtown Birmingham. The first day, hundreds of children were arrested. The prison cells were filled with children, from first graders to high school students. On the second day, the demonstrators—children—were bruised by water cannons and attacked by angry police dogs. But that didn’t scare off the demonstrators, whose marches became known as the Children’s Crusade. Children continued to demonstrate the next day. On the fourth day, the march led to the prison where all the children who had been previously arrested were being held. Only then did the local politicians agree to sit down at the negotiating table, and a few days later, they reached an agreement stating that the city’s public transportation would not be segregated by race, and that the imprisoned children would be released. The protesters, however, ended up expelled from school. The courage shown by Birmingham’s children gave the civil rights movement national support and international attention. Just as I helped myself to the last bite of deep-fried cutlet and gulped down the last drops of bottomless iced tea, one of the older white men bends down toward a black boy sitting in a high chair at what looks like the grandparents’ table. “You’re a beautiful little boy, aren’t you? Yes, you are. He’s a precious one.” He beams at an older black woman who was certainly in elem...

Just five months after the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, the usually quiet Sunday routine was broken by a powerful explosion. A six-feet-wide hole in the church’s rear wall was torn open, several of the stained-glass windows were blown out, cars that were parked closest to the church were completely destroyed, and the windows in the buildings in the nearby neighborhood shook so violently that many were shattered. After the dust had settled, twenty injured people were found in and around the church. Survivors searched the church’s basement, and there they found the burned, broken bodies of four young girls. Before the sun went down, two more black children were murdered. Riots broke out. Birmingham burned. The Ku Klux Klan had carried out the bombing, part of their mission to spread death and terror among African Americans throughout the entire nation. The bomb attack on Sunday, September 15, 1963, is a permanent fixture in the people of Birmingham’s consciousness and in the collective memory of the United States. I find it hard to imagine the chaos of the bombing as I stand in front of the church, more than a half century later.

We move the car to the main street and take the symbolic walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In 1965, the bridge was the scene of three significant demonstrations. The first march was brutally suppressed by the police before the protesters were able to cross the bridge, which forever gave the day the name “Bloody Sunday.” Photographs of an unconscious Amelia Boynton Robinson, an activist and one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, were published worldwide. Boynton Robinson was one of the initiators of the demonstration. She was 104 years old when she passed away in August 2015. During the last month of her life, she walked arm in arm with President Obama over the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody march.

The second demonstration in Selma also failed to make it across the bridge. But the third march, in which up to eight thousand people from all over the United States participated—white, black, indigenous, Latino, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish—the protesters managed to cross the bridge. During the five days that followed, they continued to march over fifty miles to Montgomery. When the march finally reached Alabama’s capital, it had swelled to twenty-five thousand participants. Martin Luther King stood on the stairs to the imposing white capitol building and spoke. The sun burns our necks even during our short walk across the bridge. Edmund Pettus, whose name still adorns the bridge, was a senior officer in the Confederate Army and also bore the title of Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The woman who works in the souvenir shop next to the bridge shakes her head when discussing the questionable naming of the bridge, but she sees a point in not changing it. “It is important to remember why we had to march over the bridge.

As we drive along this highway, heading toward one of America’s oldest and most renowned African American universities, Tuskegee University, it strikes me that I’m in a black Chevrolet with two white women. How unthinkable this had been when Dad was young.

“I remember it well, the morning when we opened the big gates to Central High School and went in as the first black students in a formerly all-white school,” Gloria continues almost dreamily. “After two hours, an anxious teacher came into our classroom and said that a mob had formed around the school. We were all terrified, hearing the chants from the mob surrounding the building. ‘Race integration is Communism,’ ‘go home niggers,’ ‘no niggers in our schools.’ They even hung black dolls from the big trees outside the school.”

Then there were nine black students left, and they came to be called the Little Rock Nine. “The day after the angry mob forced us to flee from school, my dad sent a telegram to President Eisenhower, and that same evening, a soldier came knocking and delivered the president’s answer: he promised to send soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division, the ‘Screaming Eagles.’ The day after that, we were picked up by a military convoy, and when we arrived at the school, the soldiers formed a corridor through the mob. The soldiers had bayonets on their rifles. I had never seen a bayonet before. Each of us then got a soldier as a personal escort who followed us throughout the school day, throughout the lessons and on the break periods. That’s how it was for the entire year. The Screaming Eagles stayed until December and were then replaced by regular army troops.” Gloria tells me how, during that year, things were thrown at her in the corridor, and how she was called ugly names. Urine was poured in her locker so often that they couldn’t get the smell out. One of the Little Rock Nine boys once had a brick thrown at his head and was knocked unconscious. The soldier escorts weren’t allowed to enter the locker rooms, where the white boys could scare the shit out of the black students. The terror was constant. “One day in the cafeteria, a white boy spit in my friend Minnie Jean’s bowl of chili. It was the final straw for her. She threw the dish at the boy. She was suspended but still remai...

Before the next school year, however, Governor Orval Faubus decided to close all the high schools throughout Little Rock. Better to have closed schools than to allow black students to be educated among whites. Gloria Ray and her seven remaining comrades were not allowed to continue on at Central High. In 1958, the governor ranked as one of America’s ten most admired men in a Gallup poll.

“One of the most uplifting events in my life was Obama’s installation as president in Washington. All nine students from Little Rock were invited. My son came along. It was one of the proudest moments in America’s history, especially for its black inhabitants. Huge crowds, cheering . . . the atmosphere was electric. That day, it felt like color didn’t matter: we were just Americans. They say that the police did not arrest a single person in Washington that day.” “Did you think that Martin Luther King’s dream was realized?” I wonder. “In some ways, it was, that day. Finally proof that we can actually see past skin color. I am so happy to have experienced that moment, even if that was the only time.” Gloria clasps hands over her stomach and straightens her back. She is proud and grateful for her life, after all she has gone through. “I wish my parents had witnessed the day when a black man was elected president of the United States. Who during my dad’s lifetime could even have believed it?