At an early age, Clay appears to have learned how to block these chaotic incidents out of his mind; even after he had become perhaps the most visible and press-friendly figure on earth, he avoided probing questions about his father. He would joke about his father having an eye for other women—“My daddy is a playboy. He’s always wearing white shoes and pink pants and blue shirts and he says he’ll never get old”—but he would not let the discussion get much deeper than that. “It always seemed to me that Ali suffered a great psychological wound when he was a kid because of his father and that as a result he really shut down,” one of Ali’s closest friends said. “In many ways, as brilliant and charming as he is, Muhammad is an arrested adolescent. There is a lot of pain there. And though he’s always tried to put it behind him, shove it out of his mind, a lot of that pain comes from his father, the drinking, the occasional violence, the harangues.”
CASSIS’S FATHER DID WORK HARD TO EARN A LIVING FOR HIS family, and there was a time in Louisville when his signs were everywhere:
JOYCE’S BARBER SHOP
KING KARL’S THREE ROOMS OF FURNITURE
A. B. HARRIS, M.D.: DELIVERIES AND FEMALE DISORDERS
But Clay senior was a resentful artisan. His greatest frustration was that he could not earn his living painting murals and canvases. He was not exceptionally talented—his landscapes were garish, his religious paintings just a step above kitsch—but he had not had any training, either. Clay senior quit school in the ninth grade, a circumstance he blamed, with good reason, on the limited opportunities for blacks. He would often tell his children that the white man had kept him down, had prevented him from being a real artist, from expressing himself. He was never subtle about his distrust of whites. And while he would one day accuse the Nation of Islam of “brainwashing” and fleecing his sons, he often went on at the dinner table and in the bars about the need for black self-determination. He deeply admired Marcus Garvey, the leading black nationalist after World War I and one of the ideological forebears of Elijah Muhammad. He was never a member of a Garvey organization, but like many blacks in the twenties, he admired Garvey’s calls for racial pride and black self-sufficiency, if not, perhaps, the idea of a return to Africa.
Like any black child of his generation, Cassius Clay learned quickly that if he strayed outside his neighborhood—to the white neighborhood of Portland, say—he would hear the calls of “nigger” and “nigger go home.” It did not require his father’s dinner-table speeches to make him race-conscious at an early age. Kentucky was, and remains, a complicated border state. It did not secede during the Civil War, though the majority sympathized with the Confederacy. Kentucky lived under Jim Crow, if not as severely as did Mississippi or Alabama. Downtown, blacks were limited to the stores on Walnut Street between Fifth and Tenth. Hotels were segregated. Schools were de facto segregated, though there were slight signs of mixing even before Brown v. Board of Education. There were “white stores” and “Negro stores,” “white parks” and “Negro parks.” At most of the big movie theaters in town, like the Savoy, whites sat in the orchestra and blacks in the balcony; the rest—Loew’s, the Mary Anderson, the Brown, the Strand, the Kentucky—were for whites only; the Lyric was for blacks. On public transport, blacks sat in the back, whites in the front. Chickasaw Park was black, Shawnee Park was mixed, and the rest were white. “That was just the way we lived,” said Beverly Edwards, another of Cassius’s schoolmates, “Kentucky is known as the Gateway to the South, but we weren’t too much different than the Deep South as far as race was concerned.”
BIyden Jackson, a black writer from Louisville, was in his forties when Clay was a child. He wrote that under Jim Crow it was only “through a veil I could perceive the forbidden city, the Louisville where white folks lived. It was the Louisville of the downtown hotels, the lower floors of the big movie houses, the high schools I read about in the daily newspapers, the restricted haunts I sometimes passed, like the white restaurants and country clubs, the other side of windows in the banks, and, of course, the inner sanctums of offices where I could go only as a humble client or menial custodian. On my side of the veil everything was black: the homes, the people, the churches, the schools, the Negro park with Negro park police.… I knew that there were two Louisvilles and, in America, two Americas. I knew, also, which of the Americas was mine. I knew there were things I was not supposed to do, honors I was not supposed to seek, people to whom I was never supposed to speak, and even thoughts that I was never supposed to think. I was a Negro.” So, yes, Cassius Clay had certain advantages that other black children did not, but those advantages were as to nothing compared to the liberties he was denied.
When he was four years old, Cassius asked his mother, “Mama, when you get on the bus, do people think you’re a white lady or a colored lady?” When he was five he asked his father, “Daddy, I go to the grocery and the grocery man is white. I go to the drugstore and the drugstore man’s white. The bus driver’s white. What do the colored people do?” Cassius was wounded by the accumulated slights of mid-century American apartheid: the sight of his mother being turned away for a drink of water at a luncheonette downtown, whites cutting in front of them in lines at the Kentucky State Fair as if by divine right, the sense of shame when his mother went across town to clean floors and toilets for white families. The Clays’ standing in the black middle class did nothing to save them from those indignities. Clay used to say that from the age of ten he would lie in bed at night and cry as he wondered why his race had to suffer so.
The racial incident that would mark Cassius most deeply was the murder of a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till in the summer of 1955, an event that helped trigger the civil rights movement. Emmett Till lived in Chicago, but often spent summers with relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi. The state was a center of reaction against the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and integration generally. Mississippi’s two senators, James O. Eastland and John Stennis, were among the most virulent racists in Washington, and the governor, J. P. Coleman, declared that blacks were not fit to vote. More than five hundred blacks were lynched in Mississippi since officials began keeping records in 1882. Emmett’s summer trips made his mother so nervous that she repeatedly instructed her son in the racial etiquette of the Jim Crow South, the need to answer whites with “yassuh” and “nawsuh.” Purely out of fear, she tried to instill in him the entire lexicon of bowing and scraping that was disappearing among the new generation that had grown up in northern cities like Chicago.
In late August, Emmett Till arrived in Money. One day, outside a grocery store, he told some of his friends about his integrated school back home in Chicago and pulled a picture from his wallet of his white girlfriend. One of the local kids pointed out that there was a white cashier inside the store and dared Emmett to go inside and talk to her. Emmett did just that, and, as he was coming back out, said, “Bye, baby.” A few days later, the cashier’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J. W. Milam, broke into the house of Till’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, and dragged the boy out of his bed and into the night. They beat him terribly, pistol-whipping him, and demanded that he admit what he had done and beg forgiveness. Till refused and they shot him in the head. With a length of barbed wire, they tied a heavy cotton-gin fan around his neck, and then threw the body in the Tallahatchie River. The black press, including Jet and The Chicago Defender, ran pictures of Till’s mutilated face, and the white media covered the trial as well. The presence of the press, however, did nothing to ensure justice. An all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam after deliberating for just sixty-seven minutes. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” one juror said, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.”
Like so many others, Clay senior was enraged by the incident. He told his sons about it and made sure they saw the photographs. Cassius absorbed the crime on a personal level: Till was just a year older than he. The murder helped reinforce in him the sense that a black boy from Louisville was going
out into a world that would deny him, rebuff him, even hate him. Sometimes, especially early in his career, reporters would ask Clay why he became a fighter and the answer would come without hesitation. “I started boxing because I thought this was the fastest way for a black person to make it in this country,” he said. “I was not that bright and quick in school, couldn’t be a football or a basketball player ’cause you have to go to college and get all kinds of degrees and pass examinations. A boxer can just go into a gym, jump around, turn professional, win a fight, get a break, and he is in the ring. If he’s good enough he makes more money than ballplayers make all their lives.…”
“I saw there was no future in getting a high school education or even a college education,” he told another writer. “There was no future ’cause I knew too many that had ’em and were laying around on the corners. A boxer has something to do every day. Go to the gym, put on the gloves, and box.… There wasn’t nothing to do in the streets. The kids would throw rocks and stand under the streetlights all night, running in and out of the juke joints and smoking and slipping off drinking, nothing to do. I tried it a little bit, used to try, wasn’t nothing else to do till boxing.”
IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES, ELIJAH MUHAMMAD’S LIEUTENANTS arranged a book deal. The time was right, they decided, for an autobiography of Muhammad Ali, and so, led by Elijah Muhammad’s son and Ali’s manager, Herbert Muhammad, the Muslims sold the book to Random House for a quarter million dollars (world rights included). They selected as ghostwriter Richard Durham, the editor of the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. Durham was not himself a Muslim—his politics were, if anything, Marxist. Durham was a talented writer, but at the same time he was obliged to do for Ali what Parson Weems had done for George Washington. Just as Weems had described a mythical Washington chopping down cherry trees and hurling coins across the Potomac to highlight moral purity and awesome physicality, Durham made Ali out to be a champion fueled almost solely by anger and racial injustice. Ali’s early financial backers, the Louisville Sponsoring Group, were portrayed as a bloody-minded band of white businessmen who regarded their charge as little more than a property to exploit, a Churchill Downs thoroughbred with strong legs and good teeth. Most famously, the book, titled The Greatest, had Ali hurling his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River after returning from Rome, so disgusted was he after being turned away at a restaurant and harassed by a white motorcycle gang.
There was, of course, a great deal of truth in the book. There was, however, never any white motorcycle gang incident, and Clay did not throw away his medal, he lost it. Nor was Clay much of an activist until years later. At the one civil rights demonstration he attended in Louisville in the late fifties, a white woman dumped a bucket of water on the marchers, soaking Clay completely. “That’s the last one of these I’m coming to,” he said, and, for a long while, kept his promise. Like the autobiographies of Joe Louis and Jack Johnson, The Greatest mixes fact and folklore—in this case folklore in the service of Elijah Muhammad’s agenda.
In writing the Ali autobiography and myth, Durham had limited creative independence. This was a crucial document for the Nation of Islam. In the early days of the Nation, Elijah Muhammad had declared boxing to be an especially unworthy diversion, an ugly spectacle of white men watching black men beat themselves silly, but in Ali he had his shining prince, an outsized symbol of Muslim manhood, a living recruitment poster. Toni Morrison, who was an editor at Random House before she left the company to work full-time as a novelist, was stunned by the way Herbert Muhammad would constantly demand changes in the manuscript—especially changes that made it seem that the pivotal player in the rise of Ali was, invariably, Herbert Muhammad. Ali was never particularly given to cursing, but Herbert disallowed rough language entirely. All the locker-room stuff was forbidden. At one point, in an early draft, Ali’s first wife, Sonji, tells Ali he has to be firmer with the Muslims and says, “You the champ, mutha-fucker!” Well, out that went, of course.
“My anxiety on the Ali project was always Herbert, who threatened at every moment to do something awful,” Morrison said. “In the end, the book was more accurate than not. But it gathered to itself some disbelief because after a while Ali stopped doing publicity for it. He wanted to do signings in urban stores, but the stores were terrified that their places would be overrun by black barbarians. Imagine! They kept wanting Ali to go out to the suburbs and he didn’t want to do that.
“As for the gold medal story, Ali came to deny it was true when the book came out. I think it was at a press conference where he was asked about the medal and he said, ‘I don’t remember where I put that.’ He also said he hadn’t read the book. So he, in a sense, discredited the book in a way that was unfair to the stories he had told Richard in the first place or to the stories Richard may have invented to make a point.”
“The story about the Olympic medal wasn’t true, but we had to take it on faith,” said James Silberman, who was editor in chief at Random House at the time. “After some time, as happens with people, Ali came to believe it. When he was young he took everything with a wink, even the facts of his own life.”
Although The Greatest strained the limits of belief as it tried to create a kind of Paul Bunyan story for the Nation of Islam, there really is a creation myth in the boxing career of Cassius Clay. The myth also has the virtue of being true. It is the story of the stolen bicycle.
On an October afternoon in 1954, when Cassius was twelve years old, he and one of his friends rode their bicycles to the Columbia Auditorium, which was hosting its annual convention of the Louisville Service Club, a bazaar held by black merchants. The boys were interested mainly in the free popcorn and ice cream the merchants were handing out and a way to kill the day. Cassius was especially eager to show off his new bike, a sixty-dollar red-and-white Schwinn. The two boys wandered around the booths for a few hours, stuffed themselves, and then decided to head back home. It was getting late. But when they walked back to where they’d left their bikes, the new Schwinn was gone.
Cassius was in tears. Someone told him that there was a police officer in the basement of the building, where there was a boxing gym, the Columbia Gym. Cassius walked down to the basement, furious, wanting a statewide manhunt for his bike and threatening to beat all hell out of the kid who had stolen it.
The officer, a white-haired man named Joe Martin, smiled as Cassius made his threats. Martin waited him out. He had nowhere special to go. Martin was an easygoing man. His friends called him Sergeant as a joke: after twenty-five years on the job he had never felt like taking the sergeant’s exam. He lived well, driving a Cadillac around town and taking an annual vacation in Florida. On the beat he emptied parking meters. In his spare time he ran the gym and produced a local amateur boxing program called Tomorrow’s Champions, which was broadcast Saturday afternoons on the local NBC affiliate, WAVE-TV.
After listening a long while to Cassius’s loud oaths of revenge, Martin said, “Well, do you know how to fight?”
“No,” Cassius said, “but I’d fight anyway.”
Martin said that perhaps the best thing to do would be to come around to the gym.
“Why don’t you learn something about fighting before you go making any hasty challenges?”
Soon Cassius started coming to Martin’s gym on South Fourth Street, and after six weeks of learning the rudiments of boxing, he fought his first bout. The opponent was another stripling, named Ronnie O’Keefe. Each boy weighed eighty-nine pounds. The bout lasted three rounds, each round a minute long. The boys wore big fourteen-ounce gloves and flailed away at each other until they both had headaches. Cassius got in a few more blows and was awarded a split decision. He greeted the announcement by shouting to all that he would soon be “the greatest of all time.”
At first, Cassius “didn’t know a left hook from a kick in the ass,” Martin said later, but as he grew bigger and stronger, as he gained a sense of the ring, he began to develop the style of fighting that would inf
uriate purists. Much like Sugar Ray Robinson, Clay carried his hands low, snaked out his left jab, and circled the ring on his toes. His greatest defense was his quickness, his uncanny ability to gauge an opponent’s punch and lean just far enough away from it to avoid getting hit—and then strike back. Clay had remarkable eyes. They seemed never to close, never to blink, never to tip off an opponent. They were eyes that took everything in. And the instant his eyes registered an opening, an opportunity for mayhem, his hands reacted in kind. This much was there almost from the start. Martin also saw that Clay was not merely quick, but brave, cool in a crisis. Even among professional fighters, danger often reduces a man to his most foolish instincts: danger caused Floyd Patterson to wade thoughtlessly into Sonny Liston’s straight left hands; danger forced George Foreman to panic and flail away at Muhammad Ali until there was no strength left in his arms. A true fighter can think in a crisis, and this, too, was an ability that Clay showed very early on. “Cassius really knew how to fight when he was in trouble,” Martin told Jack Olsen, author of Black Is Best. “He never panicked or forgot what I’d taught him. When he’d get hit he wouldn’t get mad and wade in, the way some boys do. He’d take a good punch and then he’d go right back to boxing, box his way out of it, the way I taught him.”
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