by Glenn Stout
There is nobody watching. There is nobody cheering. There are no crowds. It is early on Sunday morning, and three vehicles are making their way to the airport. One is a white hearse containing a travel casket draped with a funeral cloth provided by Zaid Shakir, black and stitched in gold with Islamic verses. The two others are a police car and a black SUV. The vehicle at the front of the procession carries a detail from the local police; the one in the rear carries the three homicide detectives from Louisville. It is so quiet that the men who make up this cortege of strangers share a sense of disbelief—surely they will be discovered, set upon. They are not. They make it to the airport, where a chartered jet is waiting. They drive right on the tarmac, right up to the cargo hold. A few of Ali’s friends are on hand to help the undertakers, the police, and the flight crew load the sheathed casket on the plane; they put their hands on it, on him, then go up the stairs to join the living. The police car, the SUV, and the hearse begin to leave; the plane prepares for takeoff. But as it does, the driver of the hearse sees a squabble of television trucks speeding onto the tarmac. They come to a stop at the same time their quarry lifts into the sky.
The plane is a 737 leased from the San Francisco Giants. It is the large plane the man in the hold wanted it to be. There are not quite 30 passengers. Although they are scattered around the cabin, they all have something in common. It is no accident that they are together; it is no surprise that they are here. To the extent that they know one another, they know one another because for years they were bound to the same secret: long before Muhammad Ali died, they were chosen to lay him to rest.
Lonnie sits in the front of the plane with his children and grandchildren, many of them wearing shirts proclaiming her husband THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME. Some of the family is not on the charter, and when Lonnie tried to make plane and hotel reservations for them while she was still in Arizona, she received the first inkling that the size and scope of the funeral might exceed her expectations: “What is going on in Louisville?” the travel agent said. “Why is it so difficult to find flights into Louisville?”
“Well, my husband died,” Lonnie said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the travel agent said, as though Lonnie had spoken a non sequitur. “Yeah, but what is going on there?”
Lonnie never informed the agent that her husband happened to be Muhammad Ali. But that’s Lonnie. Though her face is gaunt with strain and she walks with a slight limp, she still has the freckles and talent for rolling her eyes that identify her for what she was, is, and always will be: Yolanda Williams, the girl from the neighborhood. She was 6 years old when she met Cassius Clay; he was 21, and about to become the heavyweight champion of the world. She lived across the street from his parents; his mother and her mother were friends. She is living proof of how important Louisville remained to him, because one of the many things she wound up doing for him was keeping Louisville in his life. When Lonnie calls herself a “Louisville girl,” she means that she is at once a Southern girl and a Catholic-school girl, not to mention a girl Ali recognized early on for having good sense. She refers to herself as “ol’ Lonnie”; she insists she and Ali were nothing more and nothing less than normal people, despite her husband being the most famous man in the world. Her father had polio, so even Ali’s Parkinson’s disease seemed normal to her. From personal experience, she knew he belonged to anyone who asked for his autograph, but it was hard to fathom he belonged to everyone. And when he spoke of holding his memorial service in an arena or a stadium, she’d say, “Yeah, right, Muhammad.” This is not to say she isn’t consumed by a sense of mission as she sits on the plane. She is, but it’s the mission of a Louisville girl who wants to take Muhammad Ali home.
In the Quran, it is written that all is written—“nothing will happen to us except what Allah has decreed for us.” And so it is with Ali, in the most literal sense. There is a book, called The Book, that is the chronicle of his death, foretold. It is a compilation of sorts, drawing upon the expertise of lawyers, cops, clerics, masters of the mortuary arts. It was written by Bob Gunnell. Eight years ago, when the Alis were looking for someone to plan Muhammad’s funeral, they chose Gunnell, a Louisville public relations man who would later start his own firm, BoxcarPR, and who had no experience in event planning. They were comfortable with the Louisville guy, though in fact Gunnell began as a country boy from Eminence, Kentucky. He found out what kind of stage he was about to occupy when he was watching Michael Jackson’s funeral in 2009. Lonnie called and said, “Bob, I don’t want the funeral to be like this. We want it to be in the Muslim tradition. It needs to be carried out to Muhammad’s wishes, to the T.”
Gunnell and his associate at Boxcar, Danielle Rudy Davis, completed three drafts of The Book before submitting it for approval, and when they did, Ali reviewed and initialed each page. There were 169 of them. In addition, there was a sheaf of nondisclosure agreements, several of which have been signed by passengers on the flight from Phoenix to Louisville. Jeff Gardner, in his suit and tie; Todd Kessinger and his crew, in their dress blues; Zaid Shakir and Timothy Gianotti; Gunnell himself: they were all bound to secrecy, and The Book is called The Book because under no circumstance is there to exist—and be available to prying eyes—a document titled “The Funeral of Muhammad Ali.”
And yet who knows what God’s own book looks like, how many second thoughts and scratch-outs complicate its pages? The Book might be stored in Boxcar’s safe, but it is always and forever subject to revision. Five days before Ali was admitted to Scottsdale Osborn, Gunnell had the meeting with Lonnie, and he had to halve his estimate of the crowd. Yesterday, not long after Ali’s body was purified by Ahmad Ewais, Gunnell met Lonnie in the shoe section of Nordstrom, and they came to what seemed a final plan for the week to come. And yet . . . who knows what awaits them in Louisville? The Book, in its present iteration, is based on an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people attending Ali’s memorial. But Gunnell, here on the plane, in one of the suits he bought at Nordstrom, can’t help but be haunted by a conversation he’d had with Matt Lauer the day Ali died. Lauer had been the first newsman to know that death was imminent, and in one of their conversations, Gunnell had asked how big he thought the funeral was going to be. Lauer’s answer: “Think Nelson Mandela.”
“We have to have an emergency meeting,” Shakir says to Gunnell. They are still in the air. It’s a three-hour flight, and there is still time before they touch ground. Yet there is a sense of urgency. It is Sunday; when the plane lands, the death of Muhammad Ali, still a private event, becomes a public one. Gunnell has already directed the Boxcar staff to clear hotels and event halls all over Louisville, and Boxcar and Lonnie have been overwhelmed by the inquiries they’ve received from celebrities and world leaders. One of them has been from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who wants to join the ranks of eulogists at Ali’s public memorial service.
Ali selected his eulogists long ago, and Erdogan was not among them. But when Lonnie suggests maybe he should be able to pray or read from the Quran at the Islamic prayer service known as the jenazah, Gunnell reminds her the jenazah, at least as envisioned in The Book, is supposed to be a small and private affair, open only to family and friends. So the question is not how big the funeral is going to be, nor how many famous people can be accommodated, but to whom does Muhammad Ali belong?
He had that kind of soul, the kind people claim for themselves, so burying him requires sorting through any number of constituencies. He was a husband and a father. He was a citizen of Louisville; he was a citizen of the world. He was a proud black man who held the truth of his own beauty self-evident; he was offered—especially in his later years when he had been made safe by silence—as the embodiment of postracial possibility. He became a global figure not when he became heavyweight champion of the world but when he changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, exchanging the name of a proud young man for a name that made his people proud. He was a Muslim, devout and conservative, and he was a celebrity who ten
ded to speak of himself in superlatives. He never stopped calling himself The Greatest and he never stopped saying God is great, and he somehow reconciled those assertions.
It is easy to say that Ali belongs to everyone. It might even be true. But on the plane, Shakir sits with Lonnie Ali and Bob Gunnell and says that he belongs to the people who need him, and the people who need him are Muslims and African Americans. He belongs to Allah, yes, but he belongs to Allah because he belongs to the people. If you deny the people the chance to pray for him—well, it will do damage not only to them but to him. He is not just here to be celebrated; he is crossing over, and so he is here to be ferried, by many hands. Allah needs his soul; therefore the people need his body, to pray for his soul’s release.
The plane flies into Louisville, and when it lands, and the passengers begin their restless stirring, Lonnie stands up. She is a soft-spoken woman but also a plainspoken one, and now she makes an announcement that sounds like a statement of general principle: “You can all sit down. Ali goes first.”
It is a windy day in Louisville, and the wind keeps peeling the black and gold funeral cloth off the casket as it is unloaded from the cargo hold of the plane and loaded in the back of a black hearse. The mayor, Greg Fischer, is waiting in Louisville, along with a crescent-shaped formation of eight black SUVs, containing a full security contingent run by Kelly Jones, the head of special ops for the Louisville Metro Police. There are helicopters in Louisville, taking soundless footage, and there are jangled nerves in Louisville, and on the way to the funeral home, Jones sees people in cars pulling out their phones and taking photographs, so he orders the procession to start running lights.
Woody Porter is waiting for Lonnie at the second of the A. D. Porter Funeral Home locations, away from downtown. Porter is the scion of four generations of African American funeral directors. He is bald-headed and dapper, and though he is hobbled by diabetes and knows how to lower his voice in reverence when called upon to do so, he is a beaming presence with a wheezy laugh—an ebullient undertaker. He buried both of Muhammad’s parents and Lonnie’s mother, and when Ali used the visitation of Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. as an opportunity to hand out Islamic literature at the head of the casket, Porter knew Ali well enough to say, “Ali, sit down. You don’t have to stand during your father’s visitation.” Lonnie trusts him because he is family and can make her laugh.
Eight years earlier, he went with Jeff Gardner to Ali’s Louisville home for a preliminary meeting about Ali’s funeral. When Zaid Shakir and Timothy Gianotti explained to him that Ali, as an observant Muslim, should be buried in as plain a casket as possible, Porter turned to Ali and said, “Ali, what do you want—metal or wood?” Ali answered, “Wood.” Porter stayed on Lonnie for a long time to go ahead and buy the casket, and when she did, it stayed at A. D. Porter for nearly four years. Now, as he waits for Lonnie, the casket waits for Ali.
The casket is not overly embellished, in accordance with the Alis’ wishes. But neither is it a pine box; neither is it anything less than what Porter calls “one beautiful piece of furniture.” He had to order a custom casket, given Ali’s size—or, in Porter’s words, his length. It is made of African mahogany, each plank 4 to 6 inches thick, so that the entire wooden box weighs 700 pounds, empty.
After Ali arrives at A. D. Porter Southeast, Porter helps move his body from the shipping casket to the casket he has prepared for him. So do Jeff Gardner, Zaid Shakir, Timothy Gianotti, and Ali’s youngest son, Asaad. Porter sees Ali’s face and thinks, He looks good. Ali looks good! When Lonnie and Asaad are about to have their own private visitation with him, Lonnie’s first quiet time with her husband since his death, Porter asks her whether she wants to see him. Gardner opens the casket for her, and she beholds her husband’s face. He was always so careful about his face, and now, yes, it shines. But she can’t bring herself to call it beautiful, because it is shadowed by the fact that she will never see it again.
When Todd Kessinger returns to work on Monday, he checks to see what has happened in his absence. As the detective in charge of the homicide department, he has been busy because Louisville has been bloody; indeed, the city in 2016 is in the middle of a record run of murders. But the last killing had occurred on June 2, when a 21-year-old named Maulik Patel was shot on his way home from a gas station. There has not been another since Ali died, and Kessinger begins to count the days of grace.
At 9:04, the sun sets and Ramadan begins.
The champ had a persistent dream—he is running on Broadway in downtown Louisville, and all of the city has turned out for him, chanting a name meant to be chanted, “Ali! Ali! Ali!” until at last the chant gives him wings, and he takes a step into the air and begins to fly. But Broadway, in downtown Louisville, does not end in sky; it ends in Cave Hill Cemetery, where he will be buried.
Cave Hill is an elaborate historical cemetery, a rolling and well-tended garden the first graves of which were dug in 1848 and out of which grow the granite monuments of the families who made their names during Louisville’s industrial heyday. It is white, in terms of the impression left by its pale stone flora, and also white in terms of its venerable clientele—as white, indeed, as the suit coat of one of its most famous inhabitants, Colonel Sanders. It is home to 6,100 Union soldiers and 228 Confederate ones, all interred under the flags of their respective nations. It is heartbreakingly beautiful and beautifully heartbreaking, a dream not of eternal life but rather of eternal status, and eight years before Ali’s death, Lonnie visited with Woody Porter and bought a 12-grave lot in Section U, on a hill positioned between the maintenance shed and the pond set aside for the scattering of ashen remains. While it might be tempting to ascribe symbolic significance to the Alis’ deciding to settle forever among those whose homes their ancestors could only have visited by way of the back door, Lonnie, forever of Louisville, keeps it simple: “It was either Cave Hill or Mecca.”
Now, on Tuesday, Lonnie returns with a contingent of advisers, not only Woody Porter but also Bob Gunnell, Jeff Gardner, Zaid Shakir, and Timothy Gianotti. A funeral tent stands upon the real estate the Alis have already purchased, but Lonnie has come to entertain an offer: would she like to move? She meets with Gwen Mooney, a friendly and forthcoming woman who gives off the impression that she is continually pinching herself out of disbelief that she runs a place as charming as Cave Hill. Mooney says she is simply making sure there is no room for regret, but at the same time she frets that the lot Lonnie has selected is not the most desirable one available—and so she offers her a lot near Cave Hill’s Broadway gate, off one of the circular avenues that have traditionally provided the cemetery’s most prestigious addresses. Shaded with old trees, it is, Mooney says, sacred ground, a place untouched by backhoe or spade—until now. No burials have occurred here; no burials have been allowed here, but for Ali, Cave Hill is willing not only to make an exception but to make an exception that will cost no more than Section U.
Lonnie says no—no, no, as briskly as that. It is not simply that she prefers the seclusion of the lot she has already purchased, or that Zaid Shakir is on hand to tell her that the prescribed orientation of Ali’s body, with his feet to the north and his head to the south, is more easily attained on the little hill by the scattering pond. It is that Ali needs to go where Ali died believing he was going to go. Her plans are his plans; years ago, he came here with Lonnie, staying in the car as she showed him the lot, and the lot is where she will come for peace, if peace ever comes.
They go from Cave Hill to the Kentucky Fairgrounds, where the jenazah is to be held Thursday—the jenazah, the prayer service now with a life of its own, having gone from something unplanned to something aswirl with unreconciled energies. The body will be there. In a closed coffin, under the black and gold cloth . . . but the body will be there, it has to be there, in a room among the faithful, all of whom will have unrestricted access. At the fairgrounds, there is an arena called Freedom Hall, where the Louisville Cardinals used to play basketball and where Ca
ssius Clay had his first professional fight. It is the venue Lonnie’s security consultants have suggested, because they can control the access points. But for Zaid Shakir it is still not big enough for Ali—and so fairgrounds officials show him the commercial exhibition hall next door. It is vast and it is the color of linen, with high ceilings held up by graceful columns, and as soon as Shakir sees it he thinks:
This looks like a mosque.
They don’t sleep. Nobody does—Bob Gunnell and his staff have set up a “war room” in the Marriott in downtown Louisville, where the people never stop calling and the phones never stop ringing and the adrenaline never stops surging. They don’t sleep because they can’t sleep, and no matter when Gunnell finally collapses into his hotel-room bed, he starts his day by checking in with Lonnie at sunrise.
On most days, they face the dawn before Louisville does. On Wednesday, however, Gunnell texts Lonnie at 6 a.m. with news of something that started happening in the smallest hours of the morning. They’d gone to sleep expecting the KFC Yum Center, the big downtown arena, to start distributing tickets at 10 for the Friday memorial service. The tickets are free, but anybody who wants them has to get in line and pick them up in person. Now Gunnell wakes up to the news that there is a line at the Yum Center—a line that started forming at 4 in the morning; a line that extends over the Clark Memorial Bridge on Second Avenue, all the way to Indiana; a line that is forcing Mayor Fischer to open the Yum Center’s ticket windows immediately. Gunnell sends Lonnie a text, and she answers: Did I read this right? He calls her back. Yes, he says. All the way to Indiana.
The windows open, and in about 45 minutes 15,000 tickets are gone. And Lonnie has to smile because it has such an Ali-esque ring to it. Even when I died, the people lined up all the way to Indiana. She is not happy; happy is not the word for what she is feeling, and won’t be for a long time. But something is going on, a fulfillment of what she thought was fantasy. Muhammad had told her the truth. The man who dreamed of crowds knew they were coming for him, and now here they came.
