A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir Read online

  PRAISE FOR A DROP OF MIDNIGHT

  “Jason’s book is both inspirational and important. His story goes from Harlem to Lund across to Nigeria and all the way to South Carolina. It’s multicultural, covering race, identity, and family. It’s deeply personal and at the same time a very inspiring story that we can all learn from.”

  —Marcus Samuelsson, James Beard Award–winning chef and author of, among others, The Red Rooster Cookbook and the New York Times bestseller Yes, Chef: A Memoir

  “Diakité’s family background is so staggering and fascinating I found myself thinking about it as though it were fiction. From the cotton cultivations in South Carolina to the father and his siblings who were sent to Nigeria by a distant and cold mother—to racism, from slavery in the nineteenth century to the racial slurs and institutionalized racism that the child Jason was subjected to over one hundred years later.”

  —Expressen

  Text copyright © 2016 by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Rachel Willson-Broyles

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as En Droppe Midnatt by Albert Bonniers Förlag in Sweden in 2016. Translated from Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2020.

  Paid In Full Words and Music by Eric Barrier and William Griffin

  Copyright © 1987 UNIVERSAL - SONGS OF POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL, INC. and ROBERT HILL MUSIC

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by UNIVERSAL - SONGS OF POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL, INC.

  All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  Peter Piper Words and Music by Darryl McDaniels and Joseph Simmons

  Copyright © 1986 PROTOONS, INC.

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by UNIVERSAL MUSIC CORP.

  All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)

  Words and Music by Duke Ellington and Irving Mills

  Copyright © 1932 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and EMI Mills Music, Inc. in the U.S.A.

  Copyright Renewed

  All Rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219 Rights for the world outside the U.S.A. Administered by EMI Mills Music, Inc. (Publishing) and Alfred Music (Print) International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

  I Know You Got Soul Words and Music by BOB BYRD, JAMES BROWN and CHARLES BOBBITT

  Copyright © 1971 (Renewed) CRITED MUSIC, INC.

  All Rights on behalf of CRITED MUSIC, INC. Administered by WARNER-TAMERLANE PUBLISHING CORP.

  All Rights Reserved Used By Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

  Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud Words and Music by JAMES BROWN and ALFRED JAMES ELLIS

  Copyright © 1968 (Renewed) DYNATONE PUBLISHING COMPANY All Rights Administered by UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC.

  All Rights Reserved Used By Permission of ALFRED MUSIC

  Who’s That Knocking by The Genies

  Copyright 1959 (Renewed) TIME MUSIC

  All Rights Reserved Used By Permission of TIME MUSIC

  Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542017077 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542017076 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542016704 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542016703 (paperback)

  Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo

  Cover illustrated by Ronald Wimberly

  First edition

  Libation

  To my forefathers and foremothers

  I stand on the shoulders of your sacrifices and your resolute courage.

  Ubuntu

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  IT AIN’T WHERE YOU FROM IT’S WHERE YOU AT

  COUSIN WILLIE

  HARLEM, GEORGIA

  THE CHOIR SINGS

  NEW GODS

  RACE POETRY

  STATUE FRANK

  GRANDPA AND MALCOLM

  FORT CAMPBELL

  THE RED SUITCASE

  DON’T LEAVE ME

  ALLENDALE

  JIMMY, JUANETTA & JOAQUIN

  UNCLE OBI

  THE RABBIT’S FOOT

  CHURCH SUNDAY

  FATHER’S DAY

  WHITNEY PLANTATION

  THE DAY WILL SURELY COME

  PICKING THE PIN

  A GOOD JOB

  SOLOMON’S SONG

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  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

  IT AIN’T WHERE YOU FROM IT’S WHERE YOU AT

  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.

  My grandfather, Solomon Warren Robinson, known as Silas, sure could dance and sure knew how to dress. During the week, he was a waiter on the Pullman train between New York and Philadelphia. He never missed a day of work. No cold, no aching joints, swollen feet, or existential crises could keep him from fulfilling his duty.

  Silas was born in the small town of Allendale in the subtropical state of South Carolina. His mother and his twin brother died during the birth. Silas and his older brother, Wade, grew up in the home of their maternal aunt. He never knew his father. When he was nine, his aunt’s gruff husband declared that there was no point in sending a little nigger to school.

  “Books are worthless. If you’re going to live here, you’ll work and contribute to the household.”

  Grandpa quit school in the third grade. He had been born in 1907, and slavery had in theory been abolished more than forty years earlier, but in 1896, the court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson established “separate but equal” as the law of the land, and American apartheid was a fact.

  The plantations and estates around Allendale remained standing proudly—monumental reminders that nothing had truly changed. 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.

  The only belonging I have of my grandfather’s is a sandy-colored trench coat. It’s so worn with time I have to be extremely careful when I put it on. The lining is falling to pieces, and the pockets are full of holes. But when Silas bought it, it was an investment. He worked hard for every cent. The only money he had was what he saved from his jobs as a cotton picker, a shoe shiner, a waiter. It was just enough for food and lodging.

  The coat must have been important to him. In it, he was no longer one of the barefoot, rag-clad black bodies working themselves to death in the fields of the South. I can picture Grandpa sizing up the coat in the mirror and feeling pride swell in his chest. I can picture it matching his shiny shoes and wide-brimmed hat. He always dressed elegantly as a signal to all he passed on the Harlem boulevards: here comes a sophisticated big-city man who has managed to move up in the world. Up, north, away from the muddy cotton fields—up to the stable pavements of Harlem at the age of thirteen.

  The coat. Woven of the same cotton he and all his family before him were forced to pick from dawn to dusk.

  In my spacious apartment in central Stockholm, far from the segregated world where Grandpa grew up, the coat prompts me to wonder: Who am I? Who are my people? Where is my home?

  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.

  Where was I supposed to start? As I created my identity, it became a patchwork quilt, a mosaic of irregular shards and pieces I meticulously tried to meld together into Jason Michael Bosak Diakité. 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, measure me, place me, fenc
e me in, and judge me?

  Is that why I have spent so much time tormenting myself with these questions of identity? So I can give a simple answer when someone asks where I come from?

  Maybe. It’s human nature to want clear answers. Obvious boundaries between good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, friend and enemy, “us” and “them.” As if humans cannot exist otherwise.

  Can’t I have many origins, identities, homes?

  I believed for a long time that I didn’t have a choice because that was just how the world, and people, worked. I imagined that if you were Swedish, you were white, the same as if you came from Scranton, Pennsylvania, like my mother. But if you were from Harlem, you were black, like Dad and his family.

  The phrase “nigger shit” was hurled after me time and again on the playground in elementary school. My uncle shouts, “Hey, Puerto Rico!” every time we meet. I’m often asked if I’m from Morocco, Thailand, India, Ecuador, Cuba, or Ethiopia.

  “Jason—isn’t that Arabic for ‘Jesus’?” asked one middle-aged man in the small Swedish town of Harlösa.

  My name signals, to Swedes, that I am something different. That I’m not one of us.

  “‘Diakité,’ what kind of name is that?” asked the cashier at a department store in New York.

  Only, she pronounced it like “the architect.”

  “‘Diakité’ comes from the Fula people, or Fulani, as they’re also called,” I responded, glad that she was curious. “The name is as common in Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, The Gambia, and Nigeria as ‘Williams’ or ‘Jones’ are in the US.”

  The cashier just shrugged.

  All those hours I spent, as a nine-year-old, staring at the white flecks on the back of my right hand, thinking maybe there was something white under my brown skin. Maybe the white spots would grow and make me into who I wanted to be. White?

  I also remember the contagious beats of hip-hop and the cocky pride in having black skin. Public Enemy’s and Boogie Down Productions’ powerful messages of standing up against the system and being proud of who you are and where you’re from.

  I remember the most glaring moment when I felt like an outsider, when I truly felt I would never be accepted as “one of us” by my fellow Swedes—despite all the awards, praise, applause, gold records, and the love of fans: I was on the second floor of the Parliament House in Stockholm, just about to give my acceptance speech for the 5i12 Movement’s anti-racism prize. My legs, hands, and vocal cords trembling, I stood before the cameras and the microphones, before the gathered politicians, journalists, and friends, and my speech became a desperate plea for acceptance. For Sweden to be my home.

  One week earlier, I had released a song called “Svarta duvor och vita liljor” (“Black Doves and White Lilies”) together with rap group Kartellen. In one line I rap, “beat Jimmie blue and yellow and hoist him up the flagpole”—a metaphor for what I think of Jimmie Åkesson and his Sweden Democrat party, who demanded the right to determine who and what is Swedish. The song unleashed a flood of threats and hate on social media. The newspapers called it a threat to democracy. As a result, the speaker of parliament boycotted the awards ceremony and exiled us to a tiny room on the second floor.

  I’m not sure I’d ever felt so unwelcome in this place I thought was my homeland. I was born here, I speak the language fluently, I carry Swedish culture within me.

  I have been steeped in the quintessentially Swedish experience. I’ve laughed at the comedy of Hasse and Tage; sung Bellman’s epistles at the top of my lungs; read about Nils Holgersson and his wonderful adventures in Sweden; hopped like a frog around midsummer poles; eaten falafel in Malmö; learned to recite the list of kings; plodded through Strindberg’s The People of Hemsö; cursed the weather with Persian cab drivers; jumped the turnstiles in the subway; and danced to schlager stars Herreys and Carola. I have run up the Brösarp hills and puked in the park on Walpurgis Night. I’ve been enchanted by the northern lights and drained of blood by mosquitoes during the long, bright nights of the midnight sun.

  Yet I have always carried around the nagging feeling that I am only a guest in someone else’s home. May I really open the fridge and help myself to whatever I find? I have to be careful not to knock over someone’s vase or accidentally break something fragile. May I have permission to stay here as long as I like? Will the color of my skin always follow me like a shadow that can be turned against me at any moment, can become the only thing that defines me? Can I manage not to be reduced to Other?

  Who am I?

  Grandpa always dressed impeccably and held his head high. He used lye in his hair to burn out his curls and make it straight, make himself whiter. But did he ever dream of something bigger than his life as a waiter? If he did, what dream twinkled there on the horizon? What sorts of questions nagged at Grandpa? Did he wonder who he was during his long Sunday walks along the broad avenues of Harlem? Was Grandpa ever ashamed of his golden-brown skin and his simple upbringing? What fears did he carry with him?

  Standing before the mirror in my home in Stockholm, wearing Grandpa’s worn coat, I realize that I need to travel to the places where he grew up. I have to find this last bit of mortar to secure the mosaic of my identity. I have to go to the place where he was born. I have to go to South Carolina.

  COUSIN WILLIE

  I rub at my eye for a long time to get the last of the grit that lingers just where my eyelid ends and the bridge of my nose begins, grit left behind by an insufficient amount of sleep. I lay in bed with my laptop on my belly until four in the morning, trying and failing to settle down enough to fall asleep. It’s getting harder and harder to tear myself away from the internet. Hours trickle by as I surf everything from music blogs to auction sites to news outlets.

  Now it’s just past eleven a.m., and I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my robe, my computer once again on and casting its white glow over me. Winter refuses to release Stockholm from its grip. It’s February 2015. Gray. The world seems to be living under a thick wool blanket of low-hanging clouds. Last February, I counted only two afternoons when those of us in the North could see blue sky. It’s the same story this year. The feeling of endless winter is amplified when I open a window to air the place out. The cold quickly finds its way into my kitchen. I hug myself, rubbing my shoulders, and search for an old clip on my computer. The grainy black-and-white video shows blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson II soulfully singing “Nine Below Zero” to an all-white audience.

  She wait till it got nine below zero, and put me down for another man

  Sonny Boy rocks back and forth in time with the music, takes out his harmonica, and makes it sound more sincere than the most achingly sad lament. I get up and close the window; a more thorough airing out will have to wait until the sun finds its way back to these northerly latitudes and thaws some of the frost on the ground and the people.

  I’m going to need a cup of coffee to deal with this morning. Although it’s almost midday, there are hardly any people on the sidewalk below my window. Sweden still hasn’t chanced waking from its hibernation.

  As Sonny Boy’s song fades out, I realize I need something a little peppier, so I put on D’Angelo’s new album Black Messiah.

  When I hear the first lines of “Ain’t That Easy,” I feel warmth spread through the room.

  My one-year-old nephew has fallen ill with a type of arthritis. He’s been in the hospital for several weeks, and my family is just about falling apart. My seasonal depression is exacerbated by the fact that I haven’t written a song in almost six months. I’m lost. Last month I turned forty.

  What have I accomplished in life, really? Sure, I’ve had a few magical concerts and memories. But 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. My writer’s block and my failed marriage are crystal clear signs my life is heading down the wrong track. I firmly believed my only chance of security was a home, a relationship, a family I created. But it seems that on the road of love, I’m a helplessly bad driver.