A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

Micro-steps of progress.

Alluette says, “You know, I’d like to make a movie called Being Black in America Is Hazardous to Your Health.”

“I mean, can you imagine what it must have been like for a young, pregnant black girl in South Carolina a hundred and fifty years ago? You had absolutely no rights. You don’t know if your child is going to be strung up in a tree, sold, or just worn out in a cotton field. Now, that’s trauma. And now, my government spends billions of dollars a day fighting terrorism on the other side of the world. Well, fuck, we’ve been terrorized all along. Who’s fighting the terrorism African Americans have been dealing with in this country for four centuries?”

Depending on what happens in your home, it may be the only spot on earth where you are at peace, or it may be the very place that has the power to destroy you.

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.’”

“Our sergeant was white. He was more upset than any of us black folks. We were used to it, of course. But then and there, I decided to leave the army. There’s no point in sacrificing your life for a country that isn’t grateful.

The food that was served to the whites had been made by black hands, I think. Essentially, all the food served in the South was prepared by black cooks. How come it was fine to eat a fish fried by a black person, but you couldn’t eat it next to a black person?

“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.”

Obi was only eighteen months old when my grandmother put him and his big sister, Nana, on a boat in New York. Their destination was Enugu, Nigeria. Their father, Balfour Linton, the Pan-Africanist who was my grandmother’s second husband, had died just six months earlier from complications after an illness.

And I knew who she was right away, even though I hadn’t seen her in so long. I was seventeen, Jason. That woman was my mother. She asked how I was. And that was all. No tearful mother-and-son reunion—not a chance, with that woman. She was hardcore, Madame.”

The pain on Obi’s face is so clear that it’s like it happened yesterday.

They radiate hopelessness.

The African American population puts up with structural obstacles, racism, poverty, and oppression, but then something happens—often police violence—and it’s the last straw. This sort of unrest has occurred with such frequency in the country’s history that there’s even a name for it: “race riots.”

rage at the incessant pressure people are forced to endure, brought forth by slavery, government oppression, and systematic terror that continues century after century.

I wonder, as I scan the atrium, how people in here reacted while the riots raged on outside. What did they talk about? Did any of the students leave the safety of their school and join the despairing masses in the streets?

“They were criminals,” Obi says firmly. “If you want rights, you don’t go out breaking shop windows, looting stores, and setting the cars of hardworking people on fire.”

“Your dad should live here.” Obi nods. “Close to his family. Either that, or you have to give him a grandbaby. Make him a kid. Remember what I’m telling you. Loneliness is a killer.”

I sigh inwardly. To base your view of the world on misinformation, racism, and ignorance—but, right now, I don’t have the energy to try to pull off my uncle’s Bible-size blinders.

How much money does this guy bring in by begging between the lanes of cars? Does he have enough to pay rent—if he even has anywhere to live?

How the hell does he stand it? A Lund guy like me surely would have just laid down to die. Have I ever had to fight so hard for something? I imagine that, just a year ago, bullets were whizzing past the ears of this veteran.

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.

But it’s there, in the space between—between races, between colors, between the narrative—that I have built myself a place to live. In the in-between-ness.

Here in Harlem, they created their future. But maybe, once you’ve experienced true poverty, you can never quite escape it.

In the past forty years, the prison population has increased by 500 percent, and today, in actual numbers, the country has the most imprisoned people in the world.

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...

Nowhere is structural racism more evident than in the US prison system. Black people are five times more likely to end up...

“Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you until they vomit you or bus...

This internal cultural hierarchy, born among the plantation slaves, still permeates African American culture. Yet this mentality was and is a prevailing survival strategy for many African Americans.

“Urban renewal means Negro removal,” as James Baldwin put it.

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.

‘That music is from New Orleans, and it is a city steeped in sin and depravity and symbolizes everything that keeps our people down.’

They lynched a man in front of our church one day, and my father said that this is what can happen to you if you strike back. Always turn the other cheek, or even better, turn your back and run in the opposite direction.

The smile Gloria Ray got from Becky was heartwarming. She was starving for warmth and kindness from the other students. The few white students who supported the black students also had to endure bullying and threats.

“I sent a note to Becky during the next class and asked if I could say hi to her next time. She wrote back and asked me not to because she didn’t dare risk the safety or reputation of her family.

Gloria and those of her friends who remained at the school learned not to cry and not to let their faces reflect either pain or grief.

The black people who live here carry the inherited hopelessness I’ve read so much about in books and witnessed in Alabama and South Carolina.

The fact that so many have been robbed of their civil rights and the opportunity for decent employment is evidence that many states in the US still have an oppressed lower class not unlike the one that existed during the time of slavery.

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.

It’s a slap in the face to those who died, bled, and toiled on these grounds, who brought in the money that allowed the house to be built and silk to be imported for the dresses.

“Eighty percent of the slaves suffered from PTSD,” our guide Cheryl continues loudly. “You can imagine how difficult it must have been for people with heavy psychological burdens to be friendly and empathetic toward each other.

“A slave woman could not under any circumstances say no to a man. Rape was systematic and happened more or less every day. The rule was, if your mother was a slave, you were automatically a slave, no matter how light your skin was.

How can people live with shutting out the truth generation after generation?

How could this happen; how could it go on? How could this country be built in such a bloody manner?

The Eurocentric history I was educated in begins when the Europeans arrived in Africa but explains nothing about what life was like, about the societies, cultures, and traditions that flourished and developed before the colonizers landed.

Very little is said about these nameless people’s origins and lives; instead, they’re measured by the value or burden they will become to those of us in the rich part of the world.

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?

I don’t know if it’s my own talent for self-pity I see in him that makes me feel this mixture of scorn and sadness, or if it’s just my grief at watching Dad waste away before my eyes while nothing and no one, least of all he himself, can do anything to stop it.

“We never had a chance, man, never. Not to this day. We were pickers, man. My grandmother, my aunts, my uncles . . . We only earned a little over fifty dollars in a whole year. That’s how it was, in the forties.” Dad whistles, shakes his head, and looks at me. “You see, Jason, fifty fucking dollars . . . If that ain’t slavery, I don’t know what is.”

We found ourselves in the midst of what Eddie Glaude calls an “opportunity desert” in his book Democracy in Black.