A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

His shoes were always shined. Even in the autumn of his old age, when he’d lost all his hair. As the cancer in his prostate consumed his organs ever faster. As he spent his days waiting for the end in his favorite sunken red chair with the plastic cover, his shoes were always shined.

first lines

I spent my entire upbringing in the southern Swedish city of Lund searching for an answer. An unambiguous, coherent image of who I was. I wished for white skin, a people, an origin, a collective narrative, and a history. A homeland.

I was never American, never Swedish, never white but never black either. I was a no-man’s-land in the world.

I have a complex system of roots that branches across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras. I am Jason, son of the black Madubuko Diakité and the white Elaine Bosak. I am all the countries my forefathers came from and were shipped to in chains. I am all the colors and shades of their skin. I am their rage and their longing, their hardships, successes, and dreams. I am the intersection of Slovakia, Germany, France, Africa, South Carolina. Of white, black, and Cherokee. I am the meeting of Bosak, Schneidmüller, Hauser, Privat, Robinson, Davis, and Miller. The sum of Mom’s Slavic German roots and Dad’s African ones molded in the social democracy of Sweden.

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,...

the phrase “life is short” is starting to feel inadequate. Life is also long. What should I do with the rest of my years? I’ve dedicated my life to my career. For the past twenty years, that’s been my excuse for everything and my absolute number-one priority. I prioritized music over my family, friends, and relationships. Now it feels like that career, and my accompanying self-image, are dissolving like a veil of smoke in a sudden breeze.

The question is, what happens faster—the wind eroding a cliff, or cultures and attitudes shifting in the rural South?”

But for me, it’s important to find my roots. Since I was eight or nine, I’ve wondered who I really am, or rather, what I am. I’m not white or black; I’m not American or Swedish. I’m rootless. It hurts me that Dad doesn’t want to, or can’t, see how complex the question of identity has been in my life. It’s like he doesn’t understand how impossible it’s been for me to maneuver through a world where I have so often been considered neither black enough to be black nor white enough to be white. Maybe he thinks that the safe streets of Lund have spared me from learning what racism feels like.

We’ve forgotten how important silence can be. It’s room to let our thoughts settle.

“Just keep telling your story,” I say in an impatient tone that’s almost exclusively reserved for my father. A tone I suspect says a lot about my opinions on his choice of topic and likely leaves tiny scars inside both him and me. Papercuts on our souls. But I can’t stop myself.

‘You shouldn’t be so naïve,’ he said. Your dad taught me that. That it’s healthier not to be so trusting. But it also made me feel afraid, like I constantly had to be on guard. I think that sort of fear can attract misfortune somehow.

I don’t know what comes first: Do I fall in love with the color of my skin and with hip-hop as a result, or is it the music I love first, and the color of my skin as a result?

“I’m looking for a rapper,” Jenny says. “Someone to hold the mic and rap during my gigs. You look like a rapper, so you should start rapping.” She looks at me cheerfully. “OK,” I say without considering what this means or how it should be done.

That’s all it takes for my new identity to become real. I write rap lyrics; thus, I am a rapper. Rap ergo sum.

I’m overwhelmed with sympathy for him, and it strikes me that the guilt-trip is an inherited sin. As far back as I can remember, my dad has called, emailed, and texted the very same sentence to me: Come home. I’m lonely and I miss you. He must have inherited it from Grandpa. We’re linked together by an invisible chain of behavior that’s been hammered into us by our parents.

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

Double oppression: from the outside, in the form of poverty and structural obstacles, as well as from the inside: the incessant self-contempt that turns one’s gaze to the ground and serves as a constant reminder to be submissive.

I expect many people who flee their homes and are forced to live the rest of their lives in unfamiliar places never manage to get over the desire to return, while someone who migrates in the hopes of finding a better life never wants to go back. 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.

“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.”

Eternally a visitor in my family’s hometown, I trot around the wide boulevards full of a peculiar sensation. Harlem makes me feel just as white as a lecture hall at Lund University made me feel black. 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.

Dad’s paradoxical tug-of-war is between the fact that oppression drove him out of America and that, even so, he feels most alive right here on the cracked asphalt of Harlem.

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 unconscious man’s slack body on the broken steps is in stark contrast to the leafy green vegetation around the buildings. It strikes me that the psychosocial consequences of poverty make the state of things look more like an illness than a socioeconomic condition.

His once raven-black eyes have grown ice-blue with age. The melanin—the amino acid that gives color to skin, eyes, and hair, and whose natural quantity in a body determines whether that person should be considered black or white—is decreasing in Dad’s body. 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? It occurs to me that I might be the last in our family to care about my skin color, which spaces I’m welcome in, who might hate or try to degrade me based on the way I look. The last one to struggle with, experience, and be marked by what life as a nonwhite person is like.

It sits deep within Dad, this guilt and sorrow over abandoning his father, my grandfather. I realize that this scenario is only repeating itself. All the times Dad has called and texted me, wondering when I’ll return home to him. All the times he’s said he misses me and wants me to come home and be beside him. What Dad is doing is sowing the same guilt in my chest as his own dad planted in him. It’s sprouting inside me as well. I can’t live with the idea that I will bear that guilt, that chafing conscience, for the rest of my life. The chain of guilt and dysfunction that has run through our family for generations and centuries must be broken.

Until today, I’ve thought I must defend myself against Dad’s guilt-trips to keep myself from becoming like him. But now I realize that empathy might be the key that unlocks the chain of guilt once and for all.

Grandpa Silas told my dad that a person should always have a dollar in his pocket. With a dollar in your pocket, you still had a chance. Hope, made of green paper. I seldom carry cash in Stockholm. But I always keep a dollar in my wallet. My lucky dollar.

Dad has always told me I must never forget that the world will judge me based on the color of my skin. My constant counterargument was that Dad’s worldview is too black and white, but I have been reminded that I’m not white more times than I can ever forget.

Skin color is more than just a broad palette of pigmentation. It’s much more than the melanin that gives my skin its reddish-brown color. I look like I do because of the way my great-grandmother’s Cherokee blood mixed with my paternal grandfather’s yellow-brown skin, my paternal grandmother’s deep-chocolate color, my maternal grandmother’s milk-white German heritage, and my maternal grandfather’s Slovak origins. The part of me that’s descended from African slaves, and which makes my skin anything but white and my hair not totally straight, is what cries out the loudest. It’s those drops of midnight that make all the difference. It’s what strangers’ eyes notice first, what may prompt them to form preconceived notions about who I am and what I’m like. Indeed, many of my most painful childhood memories are related to not being accepted for who I am.

That shame, or the memory of it, is still crystal clear within me. It’s like a thistle in my chest that sometimes pokes me and stings for a while, but for the most part, it rests there, safely surrounded by flesh. My blackness is like water that has been filtered through generations of bodies and now rests in my hands, my belly, my forehead, my ass. It’s always with me, and one fine day, I will send it onward to yet another generation, which in turn will be able to influence what it means to live a life bearing these drops of midnight.

For most of my life, I have proclaimed myself half American, half Swedish, half white, half black. But now I choose to say I’m both white and black, both Swedish and American. German, French, Slovak, African, Cherokee. 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.

I wonder what Grandpa would have said about my search for my roots. Who are my people? Where is my home? Probably: “Son, don’t think about that nonsense. Get yourself a good job, put food on the table, and look sharp.” I double-knot the short, wide green-and-white tie around my neck, put on the worn coat and my freshly polished brown leather shoes, and go out.

final lines

I’ve realized recently that my feelings of otherness and homelessness are stronger in Sweden than in the United States. All I can think of now is when and how Amelie, Maxime, and I can move back across the Atlantic. Every inch of me is longing to reverse the migration of my parents.

Yes, the brutal structures of racism and oppression and the culturally ingrained segregationist attitudes are much more visceral in the States, and the scars run deeper. But still, I’m rarely the only person of color in the room. Blackness is not alien to Americans in the same way it is to Swedes.