A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

“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.”

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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 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.”

The name of every single slave who lived at Whitney between 1752 and 1865, when slavery was abolished, is now carved in the shiny stone tablets we wander by in the humid air under the silvery Louisiana sky. Also, there are the names of the 2,200 slave children who died between 1823 and 1865—mostly of starvation, even though they were owned by one of the richest plantations in Louisiana.

“Eighty percent of the slaves suffered from PTSD,”

“You can imagine how difficult it must have been for people with heavy psychological burdens to be friendly and empathetic toward each other. They could increase the odds of survival if they informed or worked against each other, so oftentimes there wasn’t much solidarity among the slaves.”

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.”

close my eyes for a few seconds and imagine how the chirping of birds must have clashed with the whistle of the whip and the dull sound of flesh being torn from bone. How the odor of sweat and blood must have blended with the heavy aroma of orange blossoms and magnolia flowers. How the plantation owner’s wife and daughters must have trained themselves to shut out the sounds of suffering around them. How they must have sat with their embroidery, chatting about weekend trips to New Orleans or gossiping about the neighbors, their voices growing louder and louder each time the whip cracked in the yard.

I can’t believe they use the word “worker” instead of “slave” and serve cocktails instead of talking about what really happened on the plantation land two hundred years ago. How can people live with shutting out the truth generation after generation?

I think we’re all struck with the same feeling of incomprehension. How could this happen; how could it go on? How could this country be built in such a bloody manner?

“Black people have been suffering since we got to America, so we’re used to it. We learned to survive through the most obscene hardships one can imagine. But the white man isn’t prepared for that. He ain’t ready, and he don’t know what the fuck to do now that reality is biting him in the ass.”