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In 1915, my grandfather was eight years old. He had already been working as a cotton picker for several years and would only spend one more year attending school. He would teach himself to read and write later, in his teens. That same year, The Birth of a Nation, a racist film praised by the Ku Klux Klan, was shown on screens all over the country and was, in fact, the first movie ever to be shown in the White House.
Lynchings were becoming ever more common, and acts of terror against black people increased dramatically. It was nothing out of the ordinary when approximately fifteen thousand people gathered in Waco, Texas, in May of 1916 to watch as an eighteen-year-old black man, Jesse Washington, was burned alive.
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.
There I am. The first day of my first year at Spyken. I’m sixteen. A few seats away from me is one of the three nonwhite people in the room. Wearing . . . yep, jeans and boots. With a shaved head. Shit, that’s him all right. The black Nazi.
What is your heritage? Where are you from . . . really? Where are your parents from? Are you Indian? Are you from Thailand? You’re Moroccan, aren’t you? Latin American, right? Are you from Colombia? You must be . . . a mulatto?
What if he dies today? What if his final moment comes so suddenly, on a gray Thursday afternoon in Malmö? I learned about how unexpectedly death can arrive when my friend Petar died in a car accident in 2004. We humans may have endless plans, schedules, ideas, and desires, but death can step right in and put an end to everything. In the middle of a sentence.
Suddenly I catch a glimpse of the love that once flourished between Mom and Dad. Once upon a time, they loved each other so passionately that they ignored all conventions, taboos, their own families’ wishes about marrying within your own race. They loved each other across the massive wall between black and white in 1960s America. So deep was their love that Mom gave up her job, her life, her friends, and her family and moved to Sweden—to be with Dad. To support him as he chased his dreams. If it hadn’t been for Mom’s courage, I never would have existed. If it hadn’t been for my parents’
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Items that were once slave food are now served as expensive delicacies in this splendid house, which evokes a plantation from the days of slavery with its great wooden columns and colored glass panes. The slave owners ate only the better parts of the animals. Whatever was left went to the slaves, who became so adept at preparing delicious food from the scanty bits rejected by their owners that their food culture, to this day, is called soul food.
Soul is the same as feeling, and the feeling has to be right, or else neither music nor food will work. It’s as if African American culture must rely upon an abstract ingredient in all its forms of expression in order to be complete.
The poorer you are, the worse nutrition you get. Like their forefathers, the descendants of slaves are at the bottom of the food hierarchy. The lack of nutritious food in the ghettos of certain American megacities is so serious that the phenomenon was given a name: food desert.
South Carolina was one of the first states to be colonized by Englishmen in the 1600s. Here they built stately houses and enormous fortunes. The fertile earth was perfect for cultivating cotton, rice, and indigo, which was prized for the blue dye that could be extracted from it.
Scandinavian colonialism and its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade is basically never discussed in Sweden, Norway, or Denmark. Least of all in the countries’ schoolbooks. 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?
Allendale, which has no shop that sells fruits or vegetables, no grocery store, and no hospital, does have two funeral homes, where business is booming. “All you gotta do in life is stay black and die,” as my great-grandmother used to say. Those are two things you can never get away from. Down here in the South, there’s a lot of blackness and death, something that’s clear even to a genealogy tourist like me.
“It’s cotton I picked in Allendale; it could be from a field where your forefathers slaved.” “God dammit,” he responds with disgust, “why don’t you throw that shit out? Would you bring back a piece of Auschwitz and give it to the family of a Holocaust survivor?”
The sun burns our necks even during our short walk across the bridge. Edmund Pettus, whose name still adorns the bridge, was a senior officer in the Confederate Army and also bore the title of Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
“It is important to remember why we had to march over the bridge. All the structures and injustices that made thousands of people willing to risk their lives and their security still exist today. Let the bridge bear its racist name so we never forget.”
So Dad worked his way through school to be able to fill the financial hole he created in the family home. He was finally accepted to Tuskegee and continued to work while he studied. He actually worked for Booker T. Washington himself, and he was also a laboratory assistant to George Washington Carver.”
“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. I still have that note that Becky wrote. That short smile and the note meant a lot to me. They gave me a little hope and reminded me that there were actually decent white people. Something I had almost stopped believing.”
As I stand outside the gates and watch the white families in their sun hats pass through the showy entryway into the flowery garden at Oak Alley Plantation, 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.
While Louisiana was under French rule, the slave laws followed Code Noir, which was a collection of laws instituted back in 1685 by the Sun King, Louis XIV. Among other things, it forbade the splitting up of slave families. The law provided slaves one day off a week and forbade torture or other cruel punishment. The slave owner was also required to educate his slaves in the Catholic faith. This completely changed when Louisiana was purchased by the United States in 1803.
“Dick Gregory said it best,” Don continues. “The white man lives in the penthouse, which is why more white people commit suicide than blacks do. You know, if you already live in the basement, there’s nowhere to jump from.”
Like original sin. With a black body comes great responsibility. You learn to smile wider, be friendlier and more responsible, work harder, and choose your words with much greater care. As if having black skin is a punishment. You are forced to carry the knowledge inside you that your worth and everything you’ve fought for can be taken away from you at any moment with a single word. Nigger.
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
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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.
