At Home with Muhammad Ali

by Hana Ali

  He turned to me and reached for the box. I placed it on the pillow in his lap and helped him open it. His eyes brightened when he saw the first picture: all of his children gathered around him on the front lawn at Fremont Place. I helped him turn the page. He pointed to an old photo of himself standing victorious over Sonny Liston.

  “I just turned twenty-two,” he said softly. “I predicted I’d be the heavyweight champ by the time I was twenty-one. I missed by one week.”

  He flipped through the pages and stopped at the picture of himself with Mom, Laila, and me sitting on the steps of Fremont Place.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “Home, in Los Angeles.”

  “Is she still married?”

  “No, Carl got leukemia and passed away several years ago, remember? It happened when I was still living in Michigan.”

  After I came back from the funeral, Dad asked me to call my mother. He wanted me to tell her he still loved her.

  “Mom, Daddy wants me to tell you he still loves you.”

  “Tell him I still love him too . . .”

  It was a call I’d make many times over the years.

  For a moment, I was tempted to tell him about the letters—that Mom had finally read them—but I didn’t. His eyes were closed now.

  “Daddy,” I said softly, “what do you want me to say to the world on your behalf—is there any message you want me to write?” He knew I was planning to write a book featuring some of his recordings. I’d been reading him random pages over the phone.

  His eyes opened, as if charged by a divine spark, and they beamed that old familiar twinkle.

  “I was a baaaad nigga! And I’m still ‘The Greatest’!”

  “Daddy, I can’t say that!”

  “Yes, you can—they’ll laugh. They’ll think it’s funny.”

  In the end, I never asked my father about the letters. He had made peace with that time in his life long ago. I didn’t want to stir his ghosts.

  39

  My siblings only spent three summers at Fremont Place before my parents’ divorce. After my father married Lonnie, they both moved to his house in Berrien Springs, Michigan, where Dad continued his tradition of bringing all his children together for summers. The location had changed, but the adventures continued. We would swim in the outdoor Olympic-size pool and play tennis. We would roll around in the golf cart, crushing Lonnie’s tulips and rose bushes—she was probably sorry she bought it in the first place, after we got ahold of the keys. There was no golf course, but it was needed to get around eighty-eight acres of land.

  Sometimes it was Dad who was the ringleader. He’d slam his foot on the gas and shout, “I KILLLLLLLL!” Dashing across the lawn, just as he did when we were little girls sitting in the back of his Rolls with its top down. We all screamed, squeezing the rails beside our seats, even though we were only going ten miles an hour.

  Only four of us fit on the cart at once, so we took turns, each ride more exciting than the last. Then we went inside and watched movies. The Lone Ranger, Flashdance, and one of my father’s favorites, Blacula, a 1970s incarnation of Dracula. As we watched, and when it was over, Dad always terrorized us, holding out his arms, making faces, and following us around the room, limping and growling as we screamed—making great memories together.

  When we argued, he’d sit us all on the sofa and say, “You’re sisters. You’re supposed to love and protect each other, not fuss and fight . . .”

  He was always teaching us about the ways of the world and making sure we learned from mistakes, be they ours or his.

  “Do you remember Elijah Muhammad before he died?” he asked my sister Maryum on one of his recordings when she was a little girl.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “He used to teach that white people are devils. Now his son, Wallace Muhammad, teaches that they aren’t devils, it’s not a person’s skin color that makes them a devil . . . it’s the way they think. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Maryum. “I always knew that . . .”

  It was my father’s dream to have all of his children living under one roof with him.

  A couple years after Dad moved to Michigan, I remember visiting one spring when I was twelve or thirteen. Laila usually stayed at the house with Lonnie when Dad and I took long walks up Kephart Lane, the road leading to the main highway from his property. Dad liked to see how far he could walk before getting tired. He never really spoke about his health, other than to say it was a test from God: “To remind me and the world that I’m just a man like everyone else.”

  As the years passed and his disease progressed, he never let the effects of Parkinson’s get the best of him. His mind and spirit remained unaffected.

  Several years ago, Lonnie told my father about a friend of theirs who had recently been diagnosed with the disease.

  “He isn’t taking it well,” she said. “What advice can you give him, Muhammad? How do you handle it so well after all these years?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think about it. Do people know I have it?”

  “Yeah, people know you have it.” She laughed.

  “Oh,” he said. “Do you have anything sweet in the kitchen?”

  That was the secret to his success—the essence of his spirit. He kept things simple and never woke up thinking about Parkinson’s. The world may have labeled him sick, but he never labeled himself like that. He lived his life one day at a time until, eventually, Parkinson’s became an afterthought.

  When we reached the end of Kephart Lane, a couple miles outside the gates of my father’s farm, we stopped at the corner burger stand and ordered his favorite meal: a cheeseburger with mustard and onions, and a vanilla milkshake.

  After eating, he’d call Lonnie on the pay phone and have her pick us up. I remember the cool feeling of the air conditioner on my skin as we entered the gate, passing the large white sign that once read: “Muhammad Ali Farms.” Sometimes we’d get out at the gate and walk back up to the house, admiring the scenery along the way.

  As we made the five-minute walk back one day, sipping on our vanilla shakes, Dad stopped and slowly waved his hand across the vast land. “Isn’t this beautiful?” he said, his bright eyes blinking rapidly. “I’ve got eighty-eight acres—eighty-eight acres! I could build a house for each of my children here.” His eyes widened as he visualized his dream. “I’d give each of you five acres; that’s a lot of land.” He looked at me for approval.

  “That’s more than enough,” I told him.

  “We could all live here together,” he dreamed.

  It was a beautiful idea. But knowing that my father, who had given so much to so many, possessed such a pure and sweet dream, one I knew would not come true, broke my heart.

  Several years later, when I was twenty-four, I moved to Michigan to be geographically closer to him. It was a special time. I learned so much about him. I lived with him for a year, then I moved into a house I bought in Saint Joseph—a ten-minute drive away. I had the pleasure of seeing my father’s face nearly every day for the six years I lived there.

  I cherish the memories we made in that time. We wrote a book, The Soul of a Butterfly. We stayed up late watching his old fights and documentaries about him. We watched Elvis Presley and Clint Eastwood movies. Blue Hawaii, Viva Las Vegas, Pale Rider, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Westerns were always Dad’s favorites, but he also loved watching his movie, The Greatest.

  We took long drives around the neighborhood, and sometimes we drove as far as Chicago to visit my twin sisters, Jamillah and Rasheda, and we’d go to the mosque to pray. As we cruised down the highway, Dad would press his face against the window, waiting for drivers to recognize that it was Muhammad Ali in the car they were passing. When they noticed him, as they always did, he’d smile and wave contentedly. Sometimes he’d gesture for them to pull over onto the side of the road, where he would sign autographs, shake hands, and take pictures.

  Some m
ornings I’d wake up at 5 a.m. and find my father downstairs in the kitchen, looking through the cabinets—searching for sweets. Any cake or pie with vanilla ice cream was his favorite. Mostly I only found the evidence that he’d been there; the trail of cookie crumbs leading from the kitchen over to the couch and back up the stairs. My father’s sleeping habits had been the same since his training days. He rose before the sun for prayer, sat up for a while snacking on fruit and watching television, then he headed back upstairs to sleep.

  Every morning, Dad would sit at the kitchen island and eat his breakfast, telling jokes to the house and grounds staff: Andy, Mike, Joel, Greg, and Coleen. After eating, we’d walk or drive the golf cart up the driveway to his office, where the office staff, Deborah, Kim, Andrea, and David, were always happy to see him. He’d sit at his desk all day working on his papers and fan mail, just as he did when I was a little girl.

  Once we drove the golf cart to McDonald’s in the middle of the night for ice cream and cheeseburgers. His order was always the same: vanilla ice cream and two Quarter Pounders with nothing but cheese, mustard, and onions.

  I organized his briefcase for his travels and sometimes went with him on trips. One of the most memorable was our visit to Bloomington, Indiana, in September of 2003, for the World Peace Conference. After I read a speech on behalf of my father at the “Let Peace Begin with Me” ceremony, the Dalai Lama gave Dad a scarf symbolizing friendship. Then they planted a peace tree together.

  Dad was still traveling the world, but mostly we took trips to Barnes & Noble, bought books, and hung out at home, trading jokes and performing magic tricks for each other. We talked about all sorts of things, from life and death to past wives and family secrets.

  Dad liked to go out and just sit and work in his motorhome sometimes. I remember him carrying all of his books and notepads out the back door into the motorhome, which was parked in the driveway. Dad couldn’t drive anymore. Lonnie bought it to provide a place for him to rest when they traveled to Chicago or Louisville, and for when he attended Asaad’s (his son with Lonnie) baseball games—which was often.

  Sometimes the old memories came back, of me sitting on his lap, pretending I was driving as we circled the block around Fremont Place. Occasionally honking the horn and speaking into the radio walkie-talkie: “Clear the roads . . . This is the BIG BOPPER!”

  My little hands on top of his, gripping the big steering wheel, thinking I was in control of the vehicle.

  “That’s it, Hana,” he’d say. “You’re a good driver! The best driver in the world . . .” I was five years old at the time.

  Of all the precious moments I spent with my father, my most cherished memories of my time living with him in Michigan are simply sitting beside him as he quietly worked at his desk beneath a dim light, helping him organize his papers and religious pamphlets. I’d read him the Quran and repeat his favorite passages to him. “If all the oceans were ink and all of the trees were pens, it still would not be enough to write the knowledge that God has.”

  I remember sitting with him in complete silence and feeling something divine. He was so peaceful, loving, and forgiving. I could feel a heavenly presence. It made me feel safe, blessed, and grateful for the gift of simply being with him.

  My father’s farm on Kephart Lane will always hold a special place in my heart. I spent the first few years of my life there—playing in the sun and running around the open fields, where I first learned to walk, fascinated by the butterflies and bees. I loved watching lightning bugs in the night sky and splashing my hands in the pond Dad had built for Mom’s white ducks.

  We lived in the coach house above the garage, and members of my father’s entourage occupied the main house. Dad always liked small, cozy spaces. The coach house was like a little oasis that provided privacy for my parents, though Daddy never seemed to need it.

  Several farm horses ran freely across the meadow by day, and a herd of Black Angus cattle grazed on the vast pastures along the river that circled the property. The geese and ducks my mother raised swam in the ponds searching for food, while the fighting cocks my father admired flew up into the trees and eventually disappeared. I was too young to remember the chicken coop and the rows of hens sitting on their nests laying eggs that rolled down into baskets below, but they’re captured in old photographs and my mother’s memories.

  In those early years, we split our time between the Woodlawn house in Chicago, Dad’s training camp in Deer Lake, and the farm in Michigan. By my third birthday, Mom was filling her decorating book with drawings, measurements, and furniture clippings for the house on Fremont Place. She still has the binder today. Among other things, both Mom and Dad had enough of the cold winters and were looking forward to moving to Los Angeles. And for a long while that was the last I had seen of the farm.

  My visit to Michigan at twenty-four was a two-week trip that resulted in a six-year stay, and they would be the most cherished and blessed years of my life. The things I witnessed, the adventures Dad and I went on, the lessons learned, the little battles I fought for him, watching him throw punches into the air, probably dreaming he was in the boxing ring, as he napped on the sofa, snoring like a grizzly bear. The jokes and laughter. The ups and downs. The changing of the seasons. The bond we shared will always be with me.

  But all that’s another story.

  I only moved back to Los Angeles permanently after Lonnie bought two new houses, one in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the other in my father’s hometown, Louisville, Kentucky. They kept the farm, but Lonnie moved my father around according to the weather, so he started to spend less time in Michigan. He ended up spending most of his time at the house in Scottsdale. He said the farm was his favorite property. He missed the green grass and trees and spring flowers. But Arizona grew on him.

  “The only thing it’s missing is color,” he once said.

  With Lonnie flying him between his three properties, I saw less of my father. So I decided to move back to Los Angeles. At least then I could drive over to Arizona to visit him.

  The time of seeing him every day had come to an end. But our private little moments will live in my heart forever.

  40

  As my father put all of the tapes back into his briefcase that afternoon in 1998 in his hotel room, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wonderful was coming.

  “These will be yours one day,” he had said, placing his attaché case back beside his chair. Ironically, my favorite recording—a modest one that explained why he had made them—was on a tape in that pile before me, but I wouldn’t hear it for another five years.

  It wasn’t until 2003, while we were writing his book The Soul of a Butterfly, that I went home with a case full of precious memories, and my life hasn’t been the same since.

  Summer of 2003

  When bedtime stories failed to work their magic, my father often coaxed me to sleep at night by singing a song. A couple of his favorites were Chuck Berry’s “School Days” and the Shirelles’ “Dedicated to the One I Love.” The first time I listened to the tape in question was the day after my father officially gave them to me. I had stayed up all night engrossed in the past—laughing and crying, learning and remembering. The next morning, I grabbed a random cassette to listen to in the car.

  I was driving up Hilltop Road, from my house in Saint Joseph, on the way to my father’s farm in Berrien Springs. It was 75 degrees in Michigan that day, and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. With the windows rolled down, I put in the tape. As I listened, time rolled back.

  All of the feelings I had felt five years earlier, in my father’s hotel room, came rushing over me like a tidal wave of love. My mind flooded. I had been met with such memories before, but this was different. There was something special about this recording. He was talking about how beautiful and fleeting life was and explained why he took the time to make all the recordings in the first place. Mostly it felt like a message of love from a father to his daughter, reaching across the barriers of t
ime.

  Hearing my father’s old familiar voice from the past, speaking to me in the present, as my three-year-old self sat listening beside him, sent chills through me. It wasn’t the sound of us singing together that moved me. It was the love in my father’s voice when he explained how happy I made him. But most of all, it was his closing words that took my breath away.

  “My sweet Hana—my love.”

  I pulled off the road and listened to the tape again. I treasured this recording for its message and the way my father’s words made me feel when he spoke them, but to know that he had recorded it especially for me made it extraordinary. I rushed to my father’s house to tell him what I had discovered. I couldn’t wait to see him, to kiss him, to hug him—to place his sweet, angelic face in my hands and thank him from the depths of my heart for this immeasurable gift.

  When I reached the tall iron gates at the end of Kephart Lane that secured my father’s estate, I entered my code, pulled up the flowery driveway, and parked outside his office. The golf cart was there; he had driven up from the house. I walked through the glass doors, down the hall, past the little kitchen and the framed signatures of the Supreme Court justices who overturned his conviction: Warren E. Burger, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, John M. Harlan II, William J. Brennan Jr., Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun.

  Dad was sitting behind his desk, just as he had every morning at Fremont Place when I was a little girl. He must have just arrived. Everything on the table was neatly stacked in front of him. All his notes, pens, markers, and books were just as we had left them the night before. As I walked into the room, he looked up at me with his gentle eyes.

  “Maaaaaan!” I shouted, imitating the camaraderie he shared with friends long ago. “Awwww, Maaaaaan! You were a baaaaaad maaaaaan!”

  “Maaaaaan! Maaaan!” he shot back. “Aw, Maaaaaan!”

  I laughed out loud as we both chanted back and forth, “Maaaaaan! Awwww, Maaaan!”