by Jonathan Eig
On January 1, 1847, Henry Clay Jr. sent a letter from Mexico to his son in Kentucky. It read, in part, “John asks me to give his Xmas compliments to you. He is still with me and has turned out on the whole a very good boy. He thanks God that he is still safe as several of his black companions have been killed by the Mexicans.” Soon after writing the letter, while leading a charge of his regiment, Henry Clay Jr. was killed. John Henry Clay returned to Kentucky, still a slave.
It’s not clear when he was emancipated, but the 1870 U.S. Census shows John Clay as a married man, a laborer, father of four children, and the owner of property valued at $2,500. With his wife, Sallie, he would go on to have nine children, including Herman Heaton Clay, the grandfather of Muhammad Ali, born in 1876 in Louisville.
Herman Heaton Clay quit school after the third grade. He grew into a handsome man, strong and tall. In 1898, he married a woman named Priscilla Nather. They had a baby boy, but the marriage didn’t last. On November 4, 1900, while playing craps in an alley in Louisville, Herman Clay snatched a quarter from a man and refused to give it back. Later the same day, Herman presciently told his brother Cassius that anyone who bothered him about the money “was going to get hurt.” Herman and his brother were standing beside a telephone pole on the corner of 16th and Harney when they spotted Charles Dickey, a friend of the man who’d been robbed of the quarter. Dickey was twenty-five years old, an illiterate day laborer. He carried a cane with a heavily weighted handle as he approached the Clay brothers. Herman Clay had a gun. Cassius clutched a knife so Dickey could see it.
Dickey asked why Cassius had the knife.
“I had this knife before you came down here,” Herman’s brother said.
“You must have intended doing something with it . . . ,” Dickey replied.
According to witnesses, no further words were exchanged. Herman Clay turned, pulled his .38, and fired once, striking Dickey in the heart. “Death was instantaneous,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reported.
Herman ran from the scene of the crime but was quickly captured. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Shortly after his conviction, he and Priscilla divorced. After six years in the state penitentiary in Frankfort, Kentucky, Clay was paroled. Three years later, on December 30, 1909, he married Edith Greathouse. They went on to raise twelve children. Their first child, Everett Clay, went to prison for killing his wife with a razor and died behind bars. Their second child, Cassius Marcellus Clay, born November 11, 1912, became the father of Muhammad Ali.
Slavery was no abstraction to the black Clay family of the twentieth century. It had specific people attached to it. It had details. Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. inherited his name from two people, one black, one white. The black Cassius Clay was his uncle, who had stood by his brother Herman’s side the day Herman shot and killed a man. The white Cassius Clay was Senator Henry Clay’s cousin, born in 1810. The white Cassius Clay was a lawyer, soldier, publisher, politician, and critic of slavery. “For those who have respect for the laws of God, I have this argument,” he once said, presenting a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible. “For those who believe in the laws of man, I have this argument.” He set down a copy of the state constitution. “And for those who believe neither in the laws of God nor of man, I have this argument.” He set down a Bowie knife and two pistols. On another occasion, Clay was stabbed in the chest during a debate with a proslavery candidate for state office, but he survived the attack and stabbed the rival back.
The white Cassius Clay believed that enslavement was a moral evil, and he called for the gradual freeing of all slaves. Although he did not free all the slaves who belonged to his estate, his outspoken views made him a hero to many black men, enough so that a former slave named John Henry Clay would name one of his sons Cassius; Herman Heaton Clay, born a decade after slavery’s end, would do the same; and Cassius Marcellus Clay, born in 1912, would pass along the name one more time to his son born in 1942, the name enduring as the effects of slavery and racism continued to resound across the country, through Reconstruction, separate-but-equal, the birth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Jack Johnson, the Great Migration, Joe Louis, Marcus Garvey’s fight for black independence, World War II, Jackie Robinson, and the birth of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.
2
The Loudest Child
Muhammad Ali’s father fought only when he was drunk.
Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. was a man well known and not particularly well respected among his neighbors in the all-black West End section of Louisville. Cash, as everyone called him, dropped out of school after the eighth grade. He made a modest living as a sign painter.
At an age when most men settled down and started families, Cash wore shiny white shoes and tight pants and danced all night and deep into the morning at smoky jazz clubs and juke joints in the West End and Little Africa neighborhoods. He was six feet tall, muscular, and dark skinned, with a pencil-thin mustache. The women of the West End called him “Dark Gable,” only half-jokingly. Cash Clay boasted about his good looks, his powerful physique, the luxurious vibrato of his singing voice, and the beautiful billboards and signs he painted for local businesses, most of them black-owned. There was KING KARL’S THREE ROOMS OF FURNITURE on Market Street; A. B. HARRIS, M.D., DELIVERIES AND FEMALE DISORDERS on Dumesnil Street; and JOYCE’S BARBER SHOP on 13th Street. He painted Bible scenes on church walls, too. Compensation for a church job might be twenty-five dollars and a free chicken dinner, hardly enough to call a living, but there was something to be said for a black man in the South who could make his own way in the world, with his own hands and his own talent, without the permission or approbation of a white man. Cash had heard his father, Herman, preach about the dangers and indignities of working for the white man. A black man was better off on his own, Herman had always said.
Cash was far from famous, and even further from wealthy, but those painted signs provided independence as well as a degree of public recognition that he loved. People hired him not only for his excellent work but also for his gregariousness. “When Cassius is working on a sign, he has to stop a hundred times a day to talk to people he knows who were just passing by,” said Mel Davis, who hired Cash to paint a sign for his pawnbroker shop on Market Street. “You don’t want anybody else to do your sign painting for you, but you sure don’t want to pay Cassius by the hour.”
Cash insisted it wasn’t lack of talent or training that prevented him from gaining fame and fortune as a serious artist; it was Jim Crow America keeping him down, he said, referring to the so-called Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the southern United States.
When sober, Cash was enormously entertaining, liable to burst out in laughter or a few stanzas of Nat King Cole. When he drank — gin was his usual — he grew loud, obnoxiously opinionated, and frequently violent. “He couldn’t fight a lick,” one of his friends said. “But as soon as he’d have too many drinks, he’d take on anybody.”
Cash was in no hurry to settle down, and, given that his personality and income were both unsteady, women were not exactly begging him for commitment. Clay never would settle down — he would drink and chase women all his life — but he did eventually marry. He was walking home from work one day when he spotted a girl across the street. “You’re a beautiful lady!” he shouted, according to the story he would later tell his children.
Odessa Lee Grady was light skinned, round, and giggly, still enrolled at Central High School in Louisville. She was the granddaughter of Tom Morehead, a light-skinned black man who fought for the Union in the Civil War, rising from private to sergeant in one year of service. Morehead was the son of a white Kentuckian who married a slave named Dinah. Her other grandfather may also have been a white man — an Irish immigrant named Abe Grady — but the evidence supporting her Irish ancestry is shaky.
As a mere teenager, Odessa was probably unaware of Cash Clay’s reputation when the older man called to her
from across the street. Odessa was a churchgoer and a conscientious student, never the sort of girl who hung around nightclubs.
She was widely admired for her hard work and sunny demeanor. She grew up in Earlington, a small town in western Kentucky. When her coalminer father abandoned the family, Odessa was shipped off to Louisville to live with one of her aunts. To pay for clothes, Odessa worked after school as a cook for white families. No one recalled hearing her complain. Even so, for a teenaged girl living in the big city, away from her mother and father during the depths of the Great Depression, an early marriage to a handsome, confident older man who earned a decent income must have been tempting. After Odessa became pregnant, marriage probably seemed compulsory.
Cash and Odessa were opposites in many ways. He was rambunctious; she was gentle. He was tall and lean; she was short and plump. He railed against the injustices of racial discrimination; she smiled and suffered quietly. He was a Methodist who seldom worshiped; she was a Baptist who never missed a Sunday service at Mount Zion Church. He drank and stayed out late; she stayed home and cooked and cleaned. Yet for all their differences, Cash and Odessa both loved to laugh, and when Cash teased her or told her stories or burst into song, Odessa would release herself completely in a beautiful, high-pitched ripple that helped inspire her nickname: Bird.
They probably met in 1933 or 1934, given that Odessa said she was sixteen at the time of their introduction, but they didn’t marry until 1941. The wedding took place on June 25 in St. Louis, when Odessa was already about three months pregnant. On January 17, 1942, she delivered her first son. The six-pound, seven-ounce baby was born at Louisville City Hospital, well after the anticipated due date. Odessa said she endured a painful and protracted labor, which concluded only after a doctor used forceps to grab the baby boy by his big head and extract it from her womb. The forceps left a small rectangular mark on the boy’s right cheek that would remain throughout his life.
Cash favored the name Rudolph, for the Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino, but Odessa insisted that the child should have his father’s name, “the most beautiful name for a man I ever heard,” she said, a name rooted in the nation’s and family’s tortured history, and so they called him Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. On his birth certificate, the name was misspelled as “Cassuis,” but his parents either didn’t notice or didn’t care enough to have it corrected.
Cash and Odessa lived at 1121 West Oak Street, a block from the home where Odessa had been living, in an apartment that probably rented for six or seven dollars a month. The baby’s birth certificate indicated that Cash Clay worked for Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph, a suggestion that he was concerned enough about starting a family to secure a steady paycheck for the first and last time in his life.
Cassius Jr. was the loudest child in the hospital, his mother told journalists years later. “He cried so much he could touch off all the other babies in the ward,” Odessa said. “They would all be sleeping nice and quiet, and then Cassius would start screaming and hollering. And the next thing every baby in the ward would be screaming.”
Less than two years after the birth of Cassius Jr., Odessa and Cassius Sr. had another son. This time Cash got his way, and they named the baby Rudolph Arnett Clay. The Clay family purchased a cottage at 3302 Grand Avenue, in Louisville’s West End. It was a tiny box of a house, no more than eight hundred square feet, with two bedrooms and one bathroom. At one point, Cash painted the cottage pink — Odessa’s favorite color. Cash also built a goldfish pond and dug a vegetable garden in the backyard. Later, he constructed a small addition to the rear of the house so the boys could have more room to play. Cassius Jr. and little Rudy shared a room that was about twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, the wallpaper white with red roses. The boys slept side by side in twin beds. Cassius had the bed by the window, where the view was of the neighbor’s house, seventy-two inches away.
Their accommodations were modest, and most of their clothes came from Goodwill, including shoes that Cash would reinforce with cardboard linings. Even so, the Clay boys never set out to school haggard or hungry. The house smelled of paint from Cash’s large supply of paint cans and brushes. But the aroma of Odessa’s fine cooking often overwhelmed the paint fumes. Odessa cooked chili. She made fried chicken with green beans and potatoes. She mixed cabbage with carrots and onions and fried it up in oil until the aroma filled the house and floated out the windows so the boys could smell it in the yard. She baked chocolate cakes and made banana pudding. At one point, the family owned a pet chicken, and at another a black dog with a white tail named Rusty. As they got older, Cassius and Rudy would have electric train sets, motorized scooters, and bicycles.
Some of the roads in the West End were crudely paved, and some of the houses near the Clays’ cottage were mere shacks. But it was a far better neighborhood than nearby Little Africa, where outhouses and unpaved streets remained well into the middle of the twentieth century. Most of the Clays’ neighbors in the 1940s were solid earners: plumbers, schoolteachers, chauffeurs, Pullman porters, auto mechanics, and shop owners. “Of course, we knew everyone who lived in every house on the block,” recalled Georgia Powers, who grew up on Grand Avenue with the Clays and went on to become the first African American and first woman elected to the Kentucky State Senate. “There were thirteen teachers and three doctors — one was an M.D., one was a dentist, and one was a Ph.D. Joseph Ray was a banker, and he’d drive by in his black Cadillac and tip his hat and say, ‘Hello, Miss Georgia.’ It sent a message to all of us in the community.”
Black children from the West End were warned about venturing into poorer, more dangerous black neighborhoods, such as Little Africa or Smoke-town. They didn’t have to be warned about avoiding white neighborhoods. The West End offered a sense of security. “Our childhood was not difficult,” recalled Alice Kean Houston, who grew up two doors down from the Clays. “We had businesses and banks and movies. It wasn’t until we went outside that world that we recognized our world really was different.”
Odessa Clay recalled her first son’s early years in a biography written in pen on lined notebook paper, with fine penmanship but many errors in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. She composed the biography at the request of a magazine writer in 1966. “Cassius Jr’s life to me was an unusual one from other Children, and he is still unusual today,” Odessa wrote. “When a baby he would never sit down. When I would take him for a stroll in his stroller, he would always stand up and try to see everything. He tried to talk at a very early age. He tried so hard he learned to walk at 10 months old. When he was one year old he would love for some One to rock him to sleep, if not he would sit in a Chair and keep bomping his head on the back of the Chair until he would go to sleep. He did not want you to dress him or undress him. He would always crie. He wanted to feed himself when he was very young. At the age of 2 years old he always got up at 5 in the morning and throw everything Out of the Dresser’s drawer and leave the things in the middle of the floor. He loved to play in water. He loved to talks a lot and he love to eat, loved to climb up on things. He would not play with his toyes. He would take all the Pots and pan Out of the Cabienet and beat on them. He Could beat on anything and get rhythm. When a very small Child he walked upon his toes, By doing this he has Well developed Arch’s, and that is why he is so fast on his feet.”
As a baby, Cassius loved to eat but hated being fed. He insisted on handling the food himself, the bigger the mess he made the better. He had a massive appetite and grew big and strong and endlessly playful. He never walked when he could run and, in Odessa’s words, was in such a hurry that he contracted chicken pox and measles at the same time. His first word — and his only word, for many months — was “Gee.” He would look at his mother and say, “Gee! Gee!” He would look at his father and say, “Gee! Gee!” He would point to food and say, “Gee! Gee!” When he needed a new diaper, he announced it by declaring “Gee! Gee!” Naturally, Odessa and Cash began calling their little boy “Gee,” or som
etimes “Gee-Gee.” Odessa also called her son “Woody Baby,” a derivation of “Little Baby.” But “Gee-Gee” was the tag that really stuck, not only in the house and not only throughout his childhood, but all over the West End and throughout his life.
Cassius craved adventure. He crawled into the laundry machine, climbed into the sink, and chased the chicken around the yard. When he was one or two years old, he threw his first hard punch, accidentally hitting his mother in the mouth and knocking loose a tooth that her dentist would later remove. By the time he was three, Cassius was too big for his baby bed. Bus drivers would insist that Odessa pay a fare for the child, assuming the boy was at least five or six when he was only three or four and still eligible to ride for free. Never one to challenge authority, Odessa paid the driver without argument.
Odessa knew from the beginning that both her boys were precocious, but Cassius more so, with little regard for rules and no concern for punishment. His rebelliousness and swagger came from his father, just as much as his warmth and generosity came from his mother. When Rudy got in trouble, Cassius would warn his parents that Rudy was his baby and that no one was going to spank his baby. With that he would grab Rudy by the arm and hustle his brother off to their room.