A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir by Diakité Jason

Author:Diakité, Jason [Diakité, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781542016704
Published: 2020-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

One summer evening in downtown Charleston in 2015, twenty-one-year-old white man Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church, the same church that was founded by the revolutionary Denmark Vesey. He spent an hour praying with a small group of people and then shot and killed nine of them in cold blood.

Because they were black.

Another outbreak of the hatred that’s been tradition in the South for hundreds of years. The same hatred that kept my grandfather and father in check. The same hatred that makes my dad say to this day that he never wants to set foot in South Carolina again.

It’s not over; it hasn’t stopped. Hate dies hard here in the South, and it doesn’t seem to want to become part of the past. I am the most privileged of my grandfather’s lineage, which means that I am granted the luxury of the rich and the free: the ability to be a tourist in this landscape of pain and hopelessness. Maybe the fact is that my dad doesn’t want the floodgates of our family history—slavery, subservience, dysfunction, poverty, and hopelessness—to open and come back to haunt him.

It’s as if history freezes in the moment. History is what hurts. If you open it up for a closer look, you risk your own destruction.

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?”

In the wake of the mass murder at the AME Church in Charleston, a public debate arose about the fact that the Confederate flag still flew over the South Carolina statehouse.

“It’s not about a fucking flag,” Alluette exclaims when the topic comes up. “Technically, the slaves were freed a hundred and fifty years ago, but the injustice is still with us today. The structures that were created to keep black people on the outside of society are stronger than ever.”

White gold. King cotton. Bloody black backs constituted the basis for the economy of the United States, boll by boll. The suffering of slaves became songs that ended up belonging to everyone; their food became home cooking. Their fingers, vocal cords, and minds have participated in building this country. The white man brought nothing to the table but the whip, the rifle, and the Bible.

But the Confederate flag no longer flies over the South Carolina statehouse, and the statue of the little black boy no longer stands on the lawn at Erwinton Plantation. Micro-steps of progress.

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