At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  I see the playground and the swing set where I used to sit in my father’s lap, my little hands wrapped around his, as we soared in the sunset.

  I remember a time when my parents were still in love. A time when they rode their horses together. Mom’s Missouri Fox Trotter and Dad’s Clydesdale. A time when she sat ringside at his training camp, watching him spar. A time when they would lie on the sofa together in my father’s log cabin, looking out the window at the stars. She’s smiling at something he’s said or done. Gazing up at him lovingly as she rested in his arms. This was a look he could count on. A look that said, I’ll always be here for you. But that was another time. When happily ever after was still in their eyes.

  12

  Four things define my early life: my father, popsicles, Wonder Woman, and my mother’s closet. And I was determined to have my way with all four of them, every day. Which had everything to do with how well I got along with the adults around me—particularly the governesses.

  I never understood the difference between a nanny and a governess. Mom just said they were live-in care providers. According to the dictionary, a governess is a woman employed to teach and train children in a private household. Traditionally, they taught reading, writing, and arithmetic to children under their care. They also taught the “accomplishments” expected of middle-class women, such as French, the piano, and painting.

  While we had tap, ballet, and piano lessons, we never learned French, and it wasn’t the governess or the nannies who taught us decorum. That all came from my mother, and the grooming classes she enrolled Laila and I in during the summer. You know, the type that taught young ladies how to sit up straight, cross their legs, and the difference between a salad and a dinner fork. I think my mother was hoping the classes would wash away all the masculine habits I had picked up from hanging out with my father every day—the sorts of things that men get away with but young ladies are judged for, such as wiping my nose without a tissue, eating with my hands, making snorting sounds when trying to clear my throat and nose. Fortunately, Barbizon, a modeling and finishing school for young ladies, successfully polished my manners, teaching me poise and charm by the age of twelve. But all that would come later.

  My first babysitter was an elderly black woman named Gertrude. She was from Louisville but relocated to Chicago, where we lived at the time, to take care of me. Gertrude and my paternal grandmother were friends; she was also the mother of Mama Bird’s minister, Reverend Simms. I was too young to remember her. I’m told she was a sweet, grandmotherly woman who always wore a white dress that resembled a nurse’s uniform and was very attentive to my needs.

  My parents hired Gertrude when I was six months old, a few months before their wedding on June 19, 1977. She bathed me, read me stories, changed my diapers, and curled my hair the first year of my life. Mom says she disturbed my sleeping patterns by picking me up every time I made the slightest whimper during the night. Mom had moved out of the condo on Hyde Park and we were living in the Woodlawn house by then, occasionally driving down to the farm in Michigan where Dad sometimes trained for a fight.

  Gertrude would pick me up and walk around the house comforting me before taking me back to my crib, where she would sing lullabies as she rocked me to sleep. Before then, I slept in my parents’ bedroom. One of my favorite photos is of me sleeping with my father when I was five months old, curled up under his chin.

  “Gertrude was a good nanny and she loved you dearly,” my mother once said. “The perfect kind of person you’d want to take care of your kids. But she became overly attached to you.”

  Gertrude wanted to take me everywhere with her, even to church on Sundays. Since my father was a Muslim, taking me to church was out of the question.

  “I can’t leave the baby,” said Gertrude. And she stopped going to Sunday Mass.

  “She even stopped going to get her hair done, because we wouldn’t let her take you,” said Mom. “So she started wearing wigs. Then, because of the wigs, her hair started to fall out. Her attachment to you was becoming unhealthy. It wasn’t good for her, and eventually we had to let her go.”

  A few months before Gertrude was dismissed, she finally got to bring me to church with her. In May 1977, we all flew to Louisville to visit Mama Bird after Dad’s fight against Alfredo Evangelista. Gertrude’s son, Reverend Simms, was giving the sermon, and out of respect for the woman who’d taken care of his newborn baby, Dad accepted her invitation. He even let Gertrude keep me with her in the front row, next to her family and my grandmother, while he and Mom found seats farther back in the crowded cathedral.

  Gertrude and me.

  In the middle of the sermon, Gertrude caught the holy ghost and, along with every other member in the room, threw her hands up in the air, praising Jesus—which was typical of Southern black churches. All my parents could see was me in my yellow ruffled dress raised above the crowd, like baby Simba in The Lion King, amid a sea of praising hands.

  Around this time Dad had appeared on The Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson, to promote his film The Greatest, in which he played himself. But it was the fight that Johnny seemed to be most interested in. He wanted to know why my father hadn’t looked like “the Muhammad Ali of old” in the ring that night.

  “Let’s be honest,” said Mr. Carson. “That wasn’t your best fight. You’ve boxed a lot better than that, haven’t you?”

  “Well,” said Dad, “we all look a lot different as time goes by . . . We all change.” He smiled mischievously at Johnny. “You used to look so nice on television,” he said. “You were thinner. The wrinkles weren’t there, your hair was black. Now you look like an old man.” He reached over and touched Johnny’s arm, smiling.

  “I know your style,” said Johnny, laughing. “I knew you were going to turn this whole thing around on me.”

  “We all change,” Dad said again.

  “You did lay a pretty good one on Howard Cosell [the sports commentator] the other night before the fight,” said Johnny. “Cosell said, ‘Don’t you have a little unnatural wrinkle around your stomach?’ And you looked at the top of his head [at his toupee] and said, ‘Well, a lot of us carry around things that are unnatural.’”

  They both laughed.

  “No, but I saw the fight,” said Johnny in a more serious tone. “A lot of people think you’re the best fighter in the world, but you were covering up a lot during that fight. What was the strategy there?”

  “This boy was twenty-two years old. I’m thirty-five, thirteen years older . . . I won the title fourteen years ago. It’s a miracle just to still be on top right now.”

  “Did you think he was good?” asked Johnny.

  “I know he was. I was in there fifteen rounds with him . . . The man was good. He had a lot of energy, he was young . . . You can never tell what’s going to happen in a heavyweight fight . . .”

  There was a lot going on for my father in 1977. He fought Alfredo Evangelista on May 16th and Earnie Shavers, who he said was the hardest hitter, on September 19th. He had a movie, The Greatest, to promote and a fast-approaching wedding to plan for. He was marrying my mother on June 19th. Having Gertrude around was a tremendous help to them both.

  I don’t know what became of Gertrude or how my mother letting her go affected her. But in all the photos I have of us together, her arms are wrapped around me and she’s smiling. Although I was too young to remember her, I’m grateful for the love she felt and gave me.

  Our first live-in caregiver was Janet, but she was only temporary and lacked etiquette, so my mother never referred to her as a governess. But from my third to fourth birthday, she had the same duties as Gertrude. Every morning Janet would dress me and Laila, who had been born eighteen months after me, feed us breakfast, and then put us to bed at night—all the things parents usually did.

  Like my father and I, Janet had a sweet tooth. She let me eat as many popsicles as I wanted, but there weren’t many left after she opened the box. Other than that, I have no complaint
s about her. She spent most of her free time in her bedroom on the telephone.

  I don’t remember much about Janet other than she was a short, heavyset, jolly lady who was always smiling and talking to her boyfriend, and occasionally calling down to my father on the intercom, offering to come collect me if I became too distracting: “Muhammad, if Hana gets in your way, let me know and I’ll come get her.”

  “Okay . . .”

  A tempting offer, I’m sure. I was high-spirited and always up to something: jumping on the sofa; tugging at my father’s arm as he wrote; getting ink stains on his white shirt, my pajamas, and his desk as I climbed on his lap and scribbled on his pages. I was trying to copy his cursive handwriting. He didn’t get angry. He just signed and dated the sheets I drew on, then put them in the hand-carved chest next to his desk, the one Mom brought home from Asia. It sits in my office now. I remember Dad looking in that chest every morning before opening his safe. I discovered why a few years ago, after I brought it home with me. It had been stored in Grandma’s garage after we left Fremont. When I opened it, the smell of cedarwood and pine surprised me. The chest was so old, yet it looked and smelled so new. If it hadn’t been for the large black writing on the edge of the wood, I wouldn’t have remembered it belonged to my father: Left 42, Around 2 times, Right 99, Left 55. It was the combination to his safe.

  Dad was always forgetting such things, so he’d write important dates and telephone numbers on the inside of cabinets and his desk drawer—a habit he never stopped.

  “I’m going to show them to you when you’re a big girl,” he said, putting the pages I scribbled on into his chest. And he did. He never minded my rambunctious behavior or my relentless begging for a sip of his coffee every morning as he worked.

  “I want some toffee, Daddy . . .”

  “Listen to this, Hana,” he’d say into the recorder, speaking to my future self, as my three-year-old self sat listening beside him. “You don’t say coffee, Hana—you say toffee . . .”

  On some occasions, he’d be on the phone as his recorder captured me pleading in the background: “I want some toffee, Daddy . . .”

  “No, you can’t have any more,” he’d say, placing one hand over the bottom receiver and moving the coffee with his other.

  No matter how much I harassed him, how much noise I made or trouble I caused, he never called for help or sent me away.

  Mom finally let Janet go in the summer of 1980. She wasn’t happy with her poor use of language. My mother feared that, being so young and impressionable, Laila and I would pick up on her lingo. Mom’s sisters, my aunties Diane and Michelle, helped as she searched for a governess.

  Diane was exuberant, fun, and affectionate. She stroked my hair until I fell asleep at night and tickled me awake in the morning. She was also a firm disciplinarian. When people asked me why I gave them such a hard time but always listened to Auntie Diane, I looked at them wide-eyed and said, “Because she hits!”

  Diane moved into Fremont in 1980, a few months after they all got back from Hong Kong. She had just left her husband after discovering, in the most unusual way, he was unfaithful. Already suspicious of him, she went to see a psychic, who confirmed her husband was having an affair with not just one but two women at work.

  “Can you believe it?” she said to my mother. “They even have the same name, Becky Lue and Becky Sue . . .”

  Diane was only supposed to be at Fremont a few months, until she found her own place, but ended up staying two years. She traveled the world with my parents, went to dinners and events with them, and helped with Laila and me in her spare time. Diane was very different from my mother. She was the kind of person who’d get down in the mud and get her hands dirty. She smoked cigarettes and used profanities. She liked to sit up late talking and telling stories and jokes that her grandmother had told her. My father was always eager to listen.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, I’m tired of running around in circles,” said Diane. “Shut up before I nail your other foot to the floor.”

  They both laughed.

  “Tell me another one,” said Dad.

  “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, what’s wrong with Daddy?” said Diane. “Shut up and keep digging!”

  “That’s a good one,” said Dad. “Shut up and keep digging—that’s a good one.” He laughed again.

  While Diane was with us she took a job at the Dorothy Kirby Center in Los Angeles, where therapists rehabilitate kids for their crimes. She asked my father to come to the center’s Halloween party to meet the troubled youth. He went and brought Laila and me with him—wearing nothing but our shirts. He did that often, just picked us up in whatever we had on and walked out of the house. When Mom arrived, she and Diane found something to wrap around our bare bottoms.

  Diane especially loved to tell me the story about the time she flipped my father onto his back. “I came home from work one night,” she said. “Your father was lying on the sofa in your mother’s office.”

  “Mom had an office?”

  “Yeah,” said Diane. “It was on the second floor at the top of the back stairs.”

  “I don’t remember it.” I said.

  “That’s because you were always downstairs in your father’s office,” she laughed. “But your mother converted the small room that used to be the maid’s quarters into her workplace. She used it for organizing bills and reading mostly.”

  I remember the bathroom across the hall from Mom’s office. Dad was always rushing me to the small sink to rinse my hand, knee, or chin after I had cut or bruised myself on the floor. Or bumped into a wall, running through the house while playing hide and seek with him and Laila.

  “As I was saying,” said Diane, “I came home from work one night and your father was in your mother’s office stretched out on the sofa, resting his cheek on the palm of his hand—pouting and sighing.” He was trying to get my mother’s attention. She was sitting at her desk with her back to him, reading a book. When Dad was bored, he’d go looking for my mother. If she was busy, it would become sort of a game between them, him trying to get her attention as she turned up her chin, ignoring him.

  “Diane!” Dad said as she walked past the room. “Where are you coming from?”

  “I just got off work.”

  “Tell me, Diane,” he said, “you can’t weigh more than 130 pounds. How will you defend yourself if one of those teenage boys tries to attack you?”

  “Get up and I’ll show you,” she said.

  She told him to stand behind her, spread his feet, and put his arm around her neck. He did as she said. Then she warned him to brace for impact. He laughed. In a split second, she pulled his arm forward using her back as leverage and flipped him over her shoulder back onto the sofa. He lay there in shock, wide-eyed, with his legs and arms bent, frozen in the air—in a claw-like position.

  “That’s how I’d do it,” she said.

  Mom, still reading her book, was pressing her lips and covering her face, trying not to let him see her laughing.

  “I see you, Veronica.” He smiled, now sitting upright on the sofa. “I knew I could get your attention.”

  They all burst into laughter.

  Diane was so playful, nurturing, and attentive. I don’t know why she never had children of her own. She was a fun auntie. And great company for my father. Dad was usually in his office when she got home from work, sitting behind his desk with a coffee in one hand and the phone in his other. He was always calling to check the time, as though he knew he was running out of it, and adjusting his watch by the second.

  “At the tone, the time will be 5:35 p.m. and twenty seconds.”

  Dad liked plain watches with large numbers he could easily read. I remember my father’s hands, how he always had ink stains on his fingers from writing long hours in his lined yellow notepad. I wonder if I was in the room—playing on the floor or sitting on his lap—when he was writing his letters to my mother. They weren’t all dated, but the first letter was written on January 8, 1983, one y
ear before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome, which wasn’t supposed to progress like the disease.

  “It’s God’s will,” he said to the doctors, family, friends, and the world. “I’m being punished for my sins now so I can spend eternity in heaven.”

  Dad always believed his Parkinson’s was a punishment and at the same time a blessing. He thought God gave it to him to show him and the world that it wasn’t Muhammad Ali but God who was the greatest. He spent hours in his office reading the Quran and the Bible, looking for contradictions and making comparisons, wondering how with so much fame and admiration he’d make it into heaven.

  “The Quran says you have to be humble to enter the gates of heaven,” he said to Diane as they sat in his office one night. “I have the most recognized face in the world. People are always catering to me. I can drop a pen on the floor and everyone in the room rushes to pick it up for me. This is why I have to work at staying humble.”

  The next evening Diane walked into my father’s office after work, eating a fruit salad. Like the night before, the fire was crackling and Dad was sitting behind his desk sipping coffee and reading his Quran.

  “Watcha eating?” he asked.

  “Fruit salad.”

  “Got any more?”

  “Yeah, I’ll get you a bowl,” she said, heading back to the kitchen.

  When Dad was finished, he slid his plate across his desk, as if to inform her she could take it to the kitchen.

  Diane gave him a look.

  “Oh!” he said, jumping up from behind his desk. He carried the plate over to her, where she was sitting on the sofa, and handed it to her. Diane smiled and put her plate on top of the one in his hand.