A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

by Jason Timbuktu Diakité

You have to understand, son, that this was 1965, the height of the civil rights movement. Black Panthers, Martin Luther King. The year Malcolm X was shot. Did I ever tell you your aunt and your cousins were at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm was shot by Elijah Muhammad’s henchmen? Sai and Bibi were probably too little to remember, but your aunt Chinyelu remembers. Her husband at the time, John Farris, was one of Malcolm’s bodyguards. It was a terrible time. Black heroes were being murdered. Kennedy had been assassinated too, and the police and the Ku Klux Klan were terrorizing black people all over the country. I felt so fucking resigned after Malcolm was killed. I tried to drive uptown to Washington Heights to rescue your aunt from the chaos. But it was impossible to get through the traffic. It was late, late at night before I got hold of Chinyelu. She couldn’t believe it—that Malcolm X had been murdered. She was heartbroken and shaken. She’d been sitting there with Sai and Bibi, and she still hadn’t recovered from the shock of what might have happened to her children if the killers had aimed their weapons at the audience.”