A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Maya Angelou

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?

Can’t I have many origins, identities, homes?

Perhaps that question unites us: Where is my home?

In 1973, my dad’s film For Personal Reasons won an award at the Grenoble short-film festival in France. The movie is about a man who decides to murder a police officer out of sheer despair over the oppression he is forced to live with. As a twelve-year-old, I mostly thought it was cool that my dad had made a movie with shooting in it, and that Morgan Freeman’s brother played the lead role. But twenty-eight years later, I wander through Dad’s old neighborhood and realize how much Du Bois’s double consciousness has marked black America. How can you survive as a black person in the United States? How can you bear being constantly slapped in the face by the hand of society, being held in its stranglehold, without wanting to grab the first weapon you find and strike back full force?

As the old men chat, I think about the human need to experience life with others. The joy in Earl’s and Dad’s faces, because each can bear witness to the other’s past.

Their short exchange strikes a chord in me. It’s easier to dehumanize people if you never sit in the same room or take a meal under the same roof with them.

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.

For the tour guides to wear those wide period dresses that the slave owners’ daughter and wives wore while the slaves were whipped behind the house is like going on a guided tour of Auschwitz led by someone in an SS uniform. I feel only anger, disgust, and hatred.

She speaks in a loud, clear voice and tells us that Whitney opened to the public the year before, and it’s the only one in the country that exclusively tells the story of plantation life from the perspective of the slaves.

I am just as far removed from the suffering that hides in the creation of my iPhone, my shirts, my plastic bowls from IKEA, the wine and espresso I drink, and the chocolate and bananas I eat. Is my ignorance and guilt as great, my blinders as thick, as those of people in the past? Did they even know what lay behind the dearly acquired bowl of sugar on their table or the cotton of their tablecloths? Are we as a species eternally condemned to be blind to the suffering of our fellow humans, or the inevitable cost of our comfort?

When I meet Don’s moist eyes, I think about how every human, from the time they’re born until the time they die, is a universe of memories, dreams, plans, sorrows, desires, and convictions. In listening to Dad’s and Don’s testimonies and stories, I am given the opportunity to remember what I never had to suffer through. I am grateful, so fervently grateful, that my gathering tears retreat, and instead I find I want to break out in the hugest smile I can.

All these identities belong to me. I’ve gone from being half to double, and in that seemingly tiny semantic shift lies one of my greatest strides of identity. Doubleness is infinitely better than halfness.