by Glenn Stout
A plane comes out of the sky. It is early Wednesday morning, 2:30 or thereabouts, but a motorcade occupies the ramp, waiting for the plane to land. It is a large motorcade, indeed a presidential one, comprising about 50 cars, engines running, lights throwing spinning shadows. When the plane lands, a trim figure in a suit descends the air stairs, then steps onto a red carpet that’s been rolled out for him. He is not a large man, but he has a certain coiled swagger, as though a red carpet stretches before him no matter where he goes. He also has his own armed security force, men with a coiled swagger all their own.
Barack Obama will not be attending Ali’s funeral because, now in the last year of his presidency, he is going to his older daughter’s high school graduation. But Recep Tayyip Erdogan, president of Turkey, has come to Louisville bearing gifts. He has brought a piece of fabric said to be from the Kaaba, the cubelike shrine at the center of Mecca, and therefore at the very heart of Islam. He wants to drape it over Ali’s casket at Thursday’s jenazah. He is not so different from the multitudes who have made pilgrimages to Ali’s funeral. He wants to bring something of himself to Ali; he wants to establish his connection to Ali; he wants to celebrate Ali, and therefore celebrate himself and his people. On the other hand, he is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a powerful man for whom the funeral represents not just an occasion but an opportunity. He is, his representatives insist, the leader of the Islamic world. And he wants a platform at the jenazah commensurate with his exalted position.
Seven years earlier, Lonnie Ali saw the funeral of Michael Jackson and knew she didn’t want her husband’s funeral to be like that—a funeral in which the mourners seemed to have an individual stake. She envisioned something very different, a funeral in the spirit of Muhammad Ali and for the spirit of Muhammad Ali, in which believers gather only to pray the fallen hero to paradise. In that way, the funeral would be similar in spirit to the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca required of all observant Muslims. There would be no distinctions made between rich and poor or black and white, nor would there be special accommodations made for the exercise of political power, since all are equal in the eyes of God.
And so it is that by the time the sun rises on Thursday, the atmosphere of the north wing of the exhibition hall at the Kentucky Exposition Center is already charged with a mixture of devotion and conflict. The security teams assigned to the jenazah from the U.S. Secret Service and the Louisville Metro Police don’t like the hall, for precisely the same reasons that Zaid Shakir and Timothy Gianotti do—because it is vast, and flat, with no “advantage points” should the presence of Muhammad Ali’s body inspire a free-for-all. The believers begin arriving when the officers do, forming a line at 6 in the morning, and by the time Zaid Shakir begins the jenazah six hours later, standing next to the casket in which lies the body of Muhammad Ali, there are thousands on hand to join him in prayer. They are black and they are white; they are Muslim and they are non-Muslim; they are members of Ali’s family and they are members of the family of the famous; and they have made the Kentucky Exposition Center into an impromptu temple when the president of Turkey arrives with his security team.
Erdogan has indeed come with his gift, the piece of cloth from the sacred Kaaba. But the gift has been refused because it came with conditions, and the men around him are determined to see those conditions met. They form a phalanx around their president, and they begin elbowing and muscling their way to the body of Muhammad Ali. They are invited to sit in the VIP section, with the American politicians and sports figures, but no, they seek a position not only of prominence but of proximity so they can grace Ali’s casket with the cloth from the Kaaba. The standing room–only crowd responds to the jostling as crowds do, with an electric sense of unease; the Louisville police officer who has been standing alone in front of the casket is joined by seven of his colleagues, who form a line of their own. The two phalanxes meet; there is talk of the body being evacuated; and then Timothy Gianotti steps forward, to remind Erdogan’s men of the spirit of the hajj. It is a moment of uncertainty that turns out to be a moment of truth, for Erdogan withdraws. He leaves the hall; he leaves Louisville; and the plane on which he came returns to the sky.
That night, visitors come to Porter’s, one after another. Ali is in a closed casket set in a private room, and they each receive a prescribed amount of time to visit with him. Louis Farrakhan goes first, with representatives from the Nation of Islam; they get half an hour. Next come the children, for an hour. Then comes Rahman Ali, in the grip of the same disease that shackled his brother. When he was a young man, he had a sharply chiseled face; now it is wide, almost burgeoning, like Muhammad’s. He has an hour at Porter’s, but he is a man inclined to show up and to leave unexpectedly, and he doesn’t take all of the allotted time. Ali is alone as the funeral home clears out; then four men open the casket and take a last look. It is not out of love, or the impulse that takes over in mythology, when mortals make the mistake of sneaking one final glimpse at the gods. It is a matter of duty. They have to turn his body so that when he’s in the ground at Cave Hill, feet to the north and head to the south, he’s lying on his right side, with his face facing east. Woody Porter, Jeff Gardner, Zaid Shakir, and Timothy Gianotti: they all have a hand in it; they all turn him and rig the casket so he stays turned. And they see him. He had an unusual face for a man universally considered handsome—it was round and soft, lacking in sharp edges and more notable for its skin than its bones. He rarely called himself handsome; he called himself pretty, and he was right. “I’m a bad man,” he said, yet he never gave up the face of a beloved child until his face gave up on him. It is the pampered softness that left him, and as he lies in his casket, it’s been replaced by a turbaned hauteur and that ineradicable shine. When the four men finish their work, they become the last men on earth to see his face; and when they close the lid, they know that no human being will see Muhammad Ali again.
There is a prayer service Friday morning, led by Zaid Shakir, and then the pallbearers take the casket to the shiny black hearse. There are 10 of them, because of the mass of what they’re carrying, and they all have one thing in common: they’ve been chosen. Some are relatives, mostly from the Clay side; some are famous, Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis and Will Smith; and one has been chosen to be a pallbearer because Ali chose him to be his friend. John Ramsey was just a fan when he met Ali; a worshipful young man in his twenties goaded by friends to approach Ali at a party. He went with his Howard Cosell impression, to which Ali responded: “Howard Cosell gets paid for that. What’s your excuse?” Later, he looked at Ramsey and said: “I like you. Write down your number. I’ll come see you some time.” Two weeks later, Ramsey’s mother told him to get the door, and it was Ali. They’d been friends ever since, and Ramsey, who has a sports talk show on Louisville radio and has never quite been able to extinguish the light of worship in his face, has always wondered why. He traveled with Ali; he gave Ali his meds and buttoned his shirts; and seeing how Ali acted with other people—and the people to whom he gave his attention—has led him to one conclusion: Ali chose Ramsey to be his friend because Ali saw that Ramsey needed to be his friend. Ali responded to the need in people and people responded to the need in Ali, and what Ramsey can’t help thinking as he meets Mike Tyson in the morning, and sits in a car in the funeral procession in the unlikely company of Lennox Lewis and Will Smith, is that they must have needed him too.
There are 17 vehicles in the procession. The hearse is three vehicles from the lead; Lonnie’s SUV is three from the hearse, behind the imams and the pallbearers. She is in the first family car, with Asaad, her sister Marilyn, and her nephew. And so others in the procession see them before she does: the people. It is not merely a crowd lined up along Bardstown Road; it is her husband’s dream of crowds. Not dozens, not hundreds, but thousands upon thousands, giving voice to billions, in an incessant cheer that echoes over the miles. Ali! Ali! Ali!
At first Yolanda Williams thinks it will go away—that they will go away—when they ge
t past the exit of A. D. Porter, and then again when they leave Bardstown Road and get on the highway. But the chant keeps getting louder, the crowd keeps growing thicker, until Lonnie Ali at last surrenders, to them, to him, and to their need for one another.
The route to Cave Hill is 23 miles long, and the procession takes two hours to complete it. They go on the highway, they stop in front of the Muhammad Ali Center, they loop through downtown Louisville on Muhammad Ali Boulevard, and then they head west, to the home where he grew up. He never stopped visiting the old street. He used to ask Ramsey to drive there, and when he saw men hanging around on the corner, he’d roll down his window and say, “I’ll still whip all you n—s.” They’d stop and do a double take, then cry, “Ali!” They are all here now, all the men from the neighborhood, all the women and the children, all the babies, all of black Louisville celebrating his return and laying their final claim on him. Lonnie had asked Kelly Jones and security consultant Jim Cain whether the procession could stop in front of his old house, painted pink; they said yes, for 15 seconds, fearing that they would be overwhelmed. But now they have to stop. They have no choice. When they make the left onto Grand Avenue, they are enveloped not by a crowd but by a populace, not by people but by a people, and they feel the tug of humanity itself, this warring entity made up of hands, tears, laughter, dancing, music, signs, babies, wheelchairs, voices raised in a two-syllable chant, an articulated roar: AH-LEEEEEE. Lonnie rolls down her window. Even Will Smith rolls down his window, saying, “Muhammad wouldn’t want us to be in a bubble!” More hands, outstretched, imploring; and now kisses.
And then tears. They all cry, even the hard ones, especially the hard ones, Bob Gunnell, Mike Tyson, and, yes, Lonnie, crying for him, crying for them, crying for the crowd touching their cars and piling roses on Ali’s hearse, but also crying for themselves, the certain knowledge that for as long as they live they will never live through something like this again, nor feel quite so alive. The procession starts moving again, the police officer who stood alone in front of Ali’s casket at the jenazah now at the front, in a “piercing” car that parts the waters and allows Ali passage home, down Broadway, where this man who dreamed of crowds also dreamed of flight.
Maggie Cassaro’s mother died unexpectedly the previous September. Grief-stricken, the artist wanted to do something special for her, so she collected roses and scattered their petals over the entrance of her house. The sidewalk, the path to the porch, the porch itself: all graced by a gust of roses. When Ali died, Cassaro called Cave Hill to ask permission to dress its venerable gates. The office told her to call Boxcar. She did, and the Boxcar folks called Lonnie. They’d heard dozens of similar offers and requests from people wanting to participate in some way in Ali’s funeral. Maggie Cassaro’s was the only one Lonnie accepted, the only one that made her cry.
An average rose has 44 petals. With the help of the old-line Louisville florist Nanz & Kraft, Cassaro bagged some 88,000 of them. Now, as the procession makes its way toward Cave Hill, Cassaro is one of the multitudes at the gates, tending to a drift of red and pink snowflakes on a 90-degree day in June. There are roses everywhere in Louisville, roses in the streets, roses on Ali’s hearse, roses still in people’s hands. But Cave Hill was swept by bomb-sniffing dogs at 6 in the morning. All of its employees are employed on this day, many of them posted at the perimeter to make sure nobody gets over the cemetery walls. It is shut down and sealed tight, and as Ali enters a place he will never leave, the petals piled at the gate linger like Louisville’s last kiss.
They dug the hole the day before. It is usually a job for four, but this time it was a job for all of the men in Cave Hill’s excavation crew so all eight could one day tell their children they dug Muhammad Ali’s grave. They cut the hole with a sod knife and dug it out with a backhoe, one man after another working the controls. They gave way to a two-man team from a local manufacturer of funeral vaults, who brought Ali’s vault to the cemetery on the back of a flatbed truck, then lowered it into the ground with a winch. It was—is—a basic vault, black with silver highlights, set in a hole 63 inches deep and 36 inches wide, from which has been displaced a hillock of earth and to which a hillock of earth is waiting patiently to return.
It is easy to get lost at Cave Hill Cemetery, with its 16 miles of coiled roads, so as soon as the gates are closed, Gwen Mooney goes to the head of the funeral procession. She knows the way to Section U. Not only has the procession been returned to a world of quiet and privacy, but the mourners have been introduced to their own fatigue. In their black sunglasses and black clothes, they emerge from their cars into the sun and listen to Zaid Shakir say prayers at the graveside. Up on the hill, the excavation crew and the two men from the vault manufacturer stand ready to go to work, close enough to see but too far away to listen, until they are summoned to the burial. At many funerals, the family leaves before the casket is lowered into the ground, the vault sealed, and the hole filled back up with dirt. At Ali’s funeral, however, the family is determined to see the whole thing through because of what it owes Allah and because of what it owes Muhammad Ali. The family members cannot bear to leave him to unseen mercies, so they witness the Cave Hill crew lower him into the grave, then a man named Ricky Barnett use a small crane to seal the vault with a 1,000-pound concrete lid swinging from short chains. The lid makes the vault airtight and virtually waterproof, transforming it into an underground tomb that exists in contradiction of God’s will. But God is merciful, as long as his mercy is not flaunted, and now Zaid Shakir picks up a handful of dirt and tosses it onto the casket of Muhammad Ali. It makes a thumping, rattling sound.
“From this earth we have created you,” Shakir says.
The second handful:
“To this earth we return you.”
And then the third:
“From this earth we will resurrect you.”
As Muhammad Ali died, Shakir told him what to say to God. He does the same now that Ali’s body has been laid to rest and his soul has been released to face the questioning of angels. He addresses him directly: “Muhammad Ali, say Allah is Lord . . .” But now there is work to be done, and he is not alone. He watches Mike Tyson take off his suit jacket and grab one of three gleaming new stainless steel shovels that Cave Hill has provided for the occasion. Tyson digs, hard, and then turns one shovelful of dirt into the grave, and then another. His contribution is not ceremonial; he does not hand over the shovel; he begins to sweat, and then Shakir hears that sound, the unmistakable uuungh of Mike Tyson getting to work. He thinks, I have to keep up with Mike Tyson . . . but that’s what they all think as they grab shovels and sweat through their clothes in the heat and keep working until the vault is covered and all that is to be seen of Muhammad Ali is a layer of Louisville earth, even though they still smell roses.
Then they go. Fifteen thousand ticket holders are waiting for them at the Yum Center, along with Bill Clinton and the other eulogists; the famous friends; the honored guests; the convocation of all-timers hanging out in the University of Louisville locker room pressed into service as a green room. Kareem and Beckham, Jim Brown, George Foreman and Sugar Ray Leonard . . . But as the mourners leave the mortal remains of Muhammad Ali to the backhoe and the shovels, three men in suits and ties stay behind until the work is done. Todd Kessinger, Brian Roggenkamp, and Jon Lesher. A week ago, they were the only ones left in the hospital room after Muhammad Ali died. Now they’re the only ones left at his grave. It has been an easy week for them in many ways; no one has been killed since June 2. But the next morning, Kessinger will go back to work and find that he has to investigate the murder of a woman named Jacoya Mangrum, killed at 4 in the morning on June 11, 2016, in a world without Ali.
It is tempting, when paying a visit, to believe that Ali has been set free—to believe that he exists in the beauty of the setting, in the sun in the sky and the wind in the magnolia tree that overhangs his grave, instead of in the ground. But he has been there a year now. He is at the bottom of a hole d
ug by eight men sharing a backhoe. He is in a vault, black with silver highlights, manufactured less than two miles away and then sealed, in front of his family, by a man who lowered a 1,000-pound lid with a crane. He is in a casket made of African mahogany, with each plank 4 to 6 inches thick, so that the casket weighs 700 pounds, empty. Still very clean, he is perfumed and wrapped in three pieces of linen tied together with linen strips. Only his face shows, but it is facing east, toward Mecca, because before his casket was closed for the last time, four men—two of them Muslim and two of them Christian—turned him on his right side. The vault is airtight, and in his veins there are traces of the fluid used to embalm him, not desirable by Islamic standards but also not forbidden. Time conquers everything, and the elements will eventually have their way with his body, and him, as Allah intended.
And because Muhammad Ali is still there, so is the woman born Yolanda Williams, known to all as Lonnie. She visits, knowing she was right all along: it’s not only a beautiful site, it’s the right site for Muhammad. It is secluded and it is peaceful, but above all it is welcoming, with two benches made from the same black African granite out of which his stone was cut. She sits on them, hoping to get the chance to speak to him. So many people think she took care of him. What they don’t know—what they can never understand—is that he took care of her. He was always with her; he has always been with her. She met him when she was a child, so when she says that losing him was like losing a child, she says, in nearly the same breath, that losing him was like losing a father. A father, a husband, a child: a totality. He raised me, she says. And so one afternoon, as she approaches with trembling the anniversary of his death, she goes to see Muhammad again. It’s Derby weekend in Louisville, so Maggie Cassaro gets to the grave before Lonnie does, dressing the lot in a flutter of rose petals in the shape of a horse collar. It overwhelms Lonnie, but then so much does since she lost her husband. She insists that people don’t know her, “ol’ Lonnie.” But she is the beneficiary of one kindness after another. She and Muhammad were optimists, she says. He not only never complained about his condition, he never complained about anything. And he never talked about death; he talked only—and incessantly—of the afterlife. She is an optimist still, for all her tears. She still cries easily. But she doesn’t cry often at the grave because she doesn’t get a chance to. She goes there to have time alone with Muhammad, but then he is never alone. He was a warrior and a will-o’-the-wisp; a praying man and a trickster; a magician who always had mischief on his mind, and he is making mischief still. Time alone with Muhammad Ali? Lonnie doesn’t get five minutes. She doesn’t get two minutes. She doesn’t get a minute, before someone comes and visits his grave. She’s supposed to have the last word. But the last word is written now for all to see, atop the shiny black stone quarried from Africa, and she can’t complain if she has to share it:
