A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

Dad’s words echo what Kendrick Lamar says in “Mortal Man,” his beautiful expression of survivor’s guilt.

My dad is a Negro. Skin tone: coffee. He had me with a white woman, which makes me a mulatto. Skin tone: coffee with milk. If I have a child with a white woman, the child will be classified as a quadroon. Skin tone: 3 Musketeers nougat. If that child grows up and falls in love with a white person and they decide to have a baby, my grandchild will be called an octoroon. Skin tone: faded khakis. When they look at their hands, that child will probably see something very different from what I do now. Say that one-eighth black person also has a child with a white person. My great-grandchild will be a mustefino, quinteroon, or hexadecaroon with one-sixteenth black blood in their veins. Skin tone: butter. If this mustefino, in turn, becomes a parent with a white person—will their child still be black? 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. But millions of other people all over the world, too, would be counted as black due to their invisible blackness. Skin tone: parsnip. At the next stage, when our blood is one-sixty-fourth black, the journey of my descendants will finally reach Destination: white. For divided sixty-four times, the drop of black blood my dad cast ahead into future generations will finally be erased by white blood. In other words, it takes six generations to become white.

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.

The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Resignation and nihilism are an epidemic among young black people. Life is lived and extinguished daily under the mark of violence and drugs, in the relentless pursuit of money and the battle to survive. Of the nearly 2.2 million prisoners in the US, almost 40 percent are black. Nowhere is structural racism more evident than in the US prison system. Black people are five times more likely to end up behind bars than white people are.

Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” that poetic, brutal song about lynchings,

As I stand outside the gates and watch the white families in their sun hats pass through the showy entryway into the flowery garden at Oak Alley Plantation, I muse that the whitewashing of the bloody history of Louisiana and the USA is the greatest factor in why the inequalities are never evened out. The yoke of history can never be cast off if you don’t first recognize that history for what it was.

Children were always being sold. So people didn’t live in family groups, although adults and children lived under the same roof.” I am startled. This means the splitting up of the African American family was done systematically from the start. The dysfunctional situation many children grow up in, in places like South Central in Los Angeles, or the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, with absent fathers and defeated mothers, might have been created or imparted back in the time of slavery.

This completely changed when Louisiana was purchased by the United States in 1803. One difference was that the slaves were no longer allowed to become Christian. The slave owners believed that would lead to the slaves being humanized because they would be brothers in faith. Any sign of belief in God would bring strict punishment from the overseer.”

In two lifetimes, perhaps his great-grandchildren will be born with blue eyes and blinding-white skin. How will that drop of midnight, that melanin left in our line but watered down through the generations, reveal itself?