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

The endless fields of cotton still needed to be harvested each season, and the hands that picked the cotton were still black. But when Grandpa was little, it wasn’t the whip that snapped over his back in the fields. In post-emancipation South Carolina, grinding poverty was far more effective than any whip.

Who am I? Who are my people? Where is my home?

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?

Dad has lots of friends, but really what he likes most of all is to have someone just listen to him. In that respect, I’m his favorite. He never runs out of lessons in life wisdom, and he always has something important to tell me, something he feels I need to know about life.

I’m sure Mom loves my sister more; they look just like each other. It doesn’t matter how much tenderness and attention Mom shows me; from the age of eight, my self-image tells me my skin color is something ugly. I have a hard time loving myself. This is the start of a drawn-out identity crisis. A process that will follow me through life like a shadow.

So Dad left Harlem for Copenhagen and then left Copenhagen for Sweden. As far as I know, he’s been registered at Lund University ever since. Fifty-five years later, he still pays the term fee and keeps his student union membership card in his wallet.

1986, when I look at the cover of Off the Wall and compare it to the picture that adorns Bad, I can clearly see that I’m not the only one trying to erase and escape my skin color.

The playground of Tunaskolan is for more than playing. The choir of bullies might start droning on at any moment. The tiniest mistake I make, the tiniest misstep, and I’ll hear those words again. There is nothing I can do to bring down or disturb the pigmentocracy that rules the classroom, the halls, the gym, the cafeteria, the schoolyard, or the hockey field.

He writes that a person’s identity “is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it . . . and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.”

blatte

It’s the city I visited on so many summer vacations. But rap music helps me see New York through brand-new eyes. The things that draw me now aren’t blueberry bubblegum and robot toys but the voices of the ghetto.

Thinkin’ of a master plan Cuz ain’t nuthin but sweat inside my hand So I dig into my pocket, all my money is spent So I dig deeper but still comin’ up with lint

Or KRS-One about Cedar Park.

They were unattainable, the gods of eighties pop culture, in contrast to the hip-hop stars who were accessible to me in a totally different way. Their pride in where they came from and the color of their skin; their cocky attitude toward the oppressive, racist system; their stories of the vulnerability experienced by citizens of American ghettos; their message of freeing yourself, resisting, holding your head high, waking up .

“Tuck your shirt in and pull those pants up. Don’t walk around looking like a street nigger, Jason.”

in modern-day Sweden, the word isn’t so different: neger. It’s taken time for me to learn to bear my color. I get better at it every day. Or so I tell myself.

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.

I am fascinated that white men considered black blood to be so powerful that, in their pursuit of power over the world around them, they invented this race poetry.

During long winters in Stockholm, you often encounter a warning sign that reads “Rasrisk.” It means that you should look out for snow falling from roofs, but it could also be interpreted as “race warning.”

“Always treat people with respect,” Don might say. “Especially those you suspect don’t agree with you, or even like you. You’ll come out ahead in the long run. Conduct yourself with self-respect.”

“Never be silent, Jason. If someone says something you don’t agree with, challenge them. You need to stand up for yourself. Always.”

Amiralsgatan.

“Because they were black. And just like when I was young, the rule still applies: if you’re black, your life is worth less than if you’re white. That whole goddamn country is built on that rule.”

African American Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “the value gap” in his book Democracy in Black: race relations in the US are built upon a chronic undervaluation of black bodies in comparison to white ones, and this disparity in value undermines all the civil-rights progress that was made in the last century.

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

“We were well known, and a destination for foodies from all over the country,” she says, bringing her glass of wine to her lips for a nonchalant sip. “But now they’re going to build a luxury hotel, so there’s no room for black-owned businesses.”

Segregation and racism are not only part of the economy—they’re even in our food. We eat nutrient-poor, chemical-filled food. No wonder we get diabetes, ADHD, ADD, and high blood pressure at higher rates. No wonder we become overweight and drained of energy.”

food desert. A food desert is any area where it’s impossible to buy fresh fruits or vegetables within a one-mile radius.

we’ve gone from an America of prosperity and freedom to a part of the country seldom seen in the movies: the poor, forgotten America.

“It’s all the steroids and hormones she gets from what she eats. You don’t get that fat otherwise.”

I’d rather see the movie Fat Asses. There’s a film that needs to be made. My people shouldn’t look like this.”

In his book Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, American travel writer Paul Theroux describes Allendale as a ghost town: “Poor, neglected, hopeless-looking, a vivid failure.”

Almost the entire population is African American, and almost half live under the poverty level. If you take a closer look at the poorest places in the US, it’s clear that they are primarily inhabited by people with black skin.

The number of people living in extreme poverty in the US—that is, those who live on under two dollars per day—has doubled in recent years, and Allendale is far from alone in being like a ghost town: abandoned, hopeless, poor, and black.

How many slaves changed owners in the Swedish Saint Barthélemy? How many suffered on the journey across the Atlantic in shackles made of Swedish iron? How many were born in the Danish Caribbean or kidnapped to be shipped on Danish vessels? How many slaves were fed rations of dried Norwegian cod in the New World?

This is one of the strangest and most powerful experiences of my life. It’s like I’m communicating with my genetic memory. I have found another shard for my mosaic, a vital link to my history. This is the feeling I came to Allendale to find. An ounce of understanding for what my forefathers suffered.

“These black people just hate each other. They’ll sit next to each other in church on Sunday, but come Monday, they got no love, no love for their neighbor. Poverty’s eaten up their morals and minds. All they think about is how everyone else has got it better, and they hate each other for it.”

Roy C. Hammond wrote and created music because he had to, not just to survive financially but because his soul demanded it.

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.

“All you gotta do in life is stay black and die,” as my great-grandmother used to say.

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.

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, that both the enslaved and the enslavers were ruined by this cruel system. Blacks were treated like animals and whites turned into animals.

How much mental gymnastics did it take to paint a picture of a reality where it was morally justified to kill and rape for your daily bread and your lifestyle and then pray piously to Jesus every Sunday?

Adam Hochschild writes in his book Bury the Chains that the idea that it was wrong to own slaves was about as foreign in the early 1800s as if someone today claimed it was morally reprehensible to own a car.

journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his article “The Case for Reparations” that in the United States in the nineteenth century, aspiring to be able to afford slaves was as natural as saving up for a house or a condo today.

This man fought for what he believed in. The right to own other humans, the right to own slaves. A loyal gentleman . . . a true Christian . . .

One summer evening in downtown Charleston in 2015, twenty-one-year-old white man Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church, the same church that was founded by the revolutionary Denmark Vesey. He spent an hour praying with a small group of people and then shot and killed nine of them in cold blood.

I am the most privileged of my grandfather’s lineage, which means that I am granted the luxury of the rich and the free: the ability to be a tourist in this landscape of pain and hopelessness. Maybe the fact is that my dad doesn’t want the floodgates of our family history—slavery, subservience, dysfunction, poverty, and hopelessness—to open and come back to haunt him.