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We’ve forgotten how important silence can be. It’s room to let our thoughts settle.
“I’ll say it again, folks who give you food are good people.
I realize, too, that this must be the sort of experience that has caused him and his friends to see the world in black and white. That never let them forget the difference in living conditions that come with having black skin. My experiences with racism in Sweden pale in comparison to the lack of rights black people in the United States endure.
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? 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.
At the next stage, when our blood is one-sixty-fourth black, the journey of my descendants will finally reach Destination: white. For divided sixty-four times, the drop of black blood my dad cast ahead into future generations will finally be erased by white blood. In other words, it takes six generations to become white. Skin tone: wet cotton.
I’ve never thanked him for allowing me to grow up with a mom and a dad, unlike so many of my friends who grew up without their fathers around.
My thoughts are whirling like a centrifuge in my lowered head, coming out equal parts prayer and incantation: Dad, don’t leave me. I won’t be able to finish building the bridge from Skåne to Harlem without your help. If you disappear now, my link to Africa, to the United States, to my black skin, will be forever severed. And part of me will disappear too. Don’t sentence me to wander forever rootless in this place I haven’t managed to make my home. How am I supposed to fill in all the gaps in my history without you, without your memories and experiences, your stories, your thoughts, your
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Cotton picked by my forefathers’ hands was spun in the textile factories of central Sweden and worn on Swedish bodies. More than half of the cotton imported to Sweden in the 1800s came from this very place. Slave-picked bolls became the frills adorning Swedish kings.
My little paper bag is full of the white cloud tufts when I return to the road. My shoes are covered in mud, but this small, symbolic moment spent picking is my only way to contact my ancestors. I will put the cotton clouds in a jar and place it on my desk as a constant reminder of where my family’s journey to Sweden once began.
“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.”
Black men have been hanged on some of these branches, I think as we travel down the pitted, cracked
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.
Hate dies hard here in the South, and it doesn’t seem to want to become part of the past.
When I get home from my trip and enthusiastically hand a glass
jar to Dad in his apartment in Malmö, he will ask, “What is this?” “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?”
White youths often teased us because they knew we did not dare to do anything back. To this day, I worry every time my children visit the United States. There, they’re just black. The term ‘common sense’ is much more complex for a black person than a white person. We need to practice a higher level of awareness.”
The important thing is that y’all are here, and that here at Whitney, we tell history the way it actually was. The plantation was originally called Habitation Haydel, and it was founded by the German immigrant Ambroise Heidel in 1752. He bought the land and started planting indigo. Later on, his son switched the primary crop to sugarcane.
“Boy, I’m tellin’ you.” “Yeah, ain’t nothing new about that.” “The Man got it all figured out.” “You didn’t have to go all the way there to tell me that.” Resignation
Don, Dad, and Casey are all born of a reality I will never completely be able to understand, no matter how many journeys I make. The great difference between them and me is that I grew up believing that I have certain rights that no one can take away from me, while they grew up with the certainty that society would never lift a finger to help them—in fact, society would destroy them for the tiniest misstep.
To Dad, she said, “I want you to grow up proud. Proud of your African heritage.” When Dad wondered what their African heritage was, she said, “Your origin is the life our people lived before the white man tore us away from the soil of Africa and shipped us across the Atlantic in chains. Your heritage is the history
of the African people, and who we were when we built the empire. We are a proud people with a proud history and strong cultures. It is our duty to learn who we are so we will know where to go in life. The segregated United States is no place for my children. So you will grow up in Africa instead.”
Bama the Village Poet expresses exactly this internalized oppression of the inhabitants of the ghetto. Maybe the ghetto lives in the hearts and souls of its residents. It becomes more than just a physical location made of asphalt, brick, and concrete. It becomes a mentality, a culture that keeps people in place, their heads bowed, with an invisible hand.
In the end, resignation and oppression become part of their DNA. In the end, people submit to the situation. Just as the slaves on the plantation
In Grandpa’s world, there was no such thing as an existential crisis. Anxiety and depression were something for the more privileged classes. He was a breadwinner. He served food to restaurant tables and, in so doing, put food on the home table as well.
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...
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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.
