by Jonathan Eig
Do you think that colored folks
Are just second-class fools?
26
Martyr
Ali was broke. He was behind on alimony and facing criminal charges for failing to pay his ex-wife. He was squabbling with his parents. His own lawyer was suing him, claiming that Ali owed $284,615 in legal fees for the work that had gone into keeping him out of jail on draft-dodging charges.
Still, the stress didn’t seem to get to him. With no fights to promote, no training schedule to follow, and no entourage accompanying him, he was free to lavish attention on his new wife. Belinda supported Ali’s decision to buck the draft, even if it meant jail time for him and poverty for them both. They were still getting to know each other. They were adjusting to sharing space in the same house. Belinda had been trained at the Muhammad University of Islam to be a housewife, and now she put those skills to use, cooking every night for her husband and washing and ironing his clothes. “She was like a giddy little schoolgirl,” said Charlotte Waddell, Ali’s cousin, who lived in the basement of the newlyweds’ home. “They were always joking and laughing, watching TV all the time, eating popcorn.”
Muhammad and Belinda adored Westerns, and they pretended to be cowboys sometimes. “You better get out of town, Belinda,” Ali would say, “and your horse better be fast.” Belinda would give her husband a hard stare, put her hands on her hips, where her imaginary pistol was holstered, and answer, “Naw, cuz I’m about to draw!” One night, Belinda was asleep on the sofa when she heard the door open and a man’s voice say, “Hey, you better get out of town before sunrise.” The voice was familiar but it wasn’t Ali’s. Belinda sprang from the sofa and flicked on the light to see Hugh O’Brien, who played Wyatt Earp on TV, standing in her living room. Ali had met O’Brien and persuaded the actor to come home and play a gag on his wife.
“I think that’s the time he was the best man in the whole world to me,” Belinda said years later of her husband. “I was happy when he wasn’t making money. I was most happy.”
Ali had an extraordinary appetite for sex, and Belinda learned to enjoy it, too. Ali was gorgeous, with a body that might have been carved by Michelangelo, and exceptionally well equipped as a lover. He had only one flaw in the bedroom, although it was not evident to Belinda until years later, when she had been with other men: Ali was a selfish lover, paying scant attention to her pleasure, she said. Still, the seventeen-year-old was not complaining, and after only a month or so of marriage, she became pregnant.
The Alis, in some respects, were like a lot of newlyweds. Money was tight, the future uncertain, dreams big. Belinda worried that her in-laws were not crazy about her — perhaps because she was a Muslim and perhaps because Odessa and Cash were still fond of Sonji. But it didn’t take Belinda long to establish a connection with Odessa. Odessa got along with everyone. Odessa was the only one who could put Muhammad Ali in his place and get away with it. “Oh, you’re pretty, but Rock’s handsome,” Odessa would say, referring to her other son, Rahaman. “Rock’s stronger, too!” It drove Ali crazy, but everything Odessa said came out sugarcoated. Cash was different. Cash was not like any man Belinda had ever met. She was stunned to hear Cash refer to himself as a “whore-runner.” What sort of man brags about such things? Cash told Belinda he liked women with big legs and big chests — “them stallions,” he called them. “But I ain’t leaving my wife for that crap,” he said, as if such fealty would impress his daughter-in-law. “My wife knows what I’m doing.”
Odessa surely did know. Back in May, Cash’s womanizing had made headlines in Louisville. He had been out with two friends at Billy Limp’s Chicken Shack when a woman had come to the restaurant’s door. “I’m in trouble now,” Clay had told his friends upon spotting the woman. Cash had stepped outside, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal, whereupon the woman had stabbed him in the chest.
Belinda and Muhammad Ali spent most of the first year of marriage on the South Side of Chicago, in their 1,300-square-foot brick house at the corner of 85th Street and Jeffery Boulevard. Rahaman, still shadowing his big brother, rented a place a few blocks away. Belinda and Muhammad’s house had been owned or rented by Herbert Muhammad, but Elijah Muhammad had ordered Herbert to give it to the Alis. It had two bedrooms and one bath, wall-to-wall carpeting, a blue velvet couch, and a color TV that nestled inside a marble fireplace opposite the couch.
One morning, a reporter from Esquire magazine visited. Ali was shirtless, stretched out on the couch and running his hands over his flabby belly. A game show flashed on the TV, depriving the reporter of Ali’s full attention. The boxer showed off his newest gadget — a small remote control that allowed him to adjust the sound on the TV without getting up and crossing the room, perfect for when his brother and Bundini Brown weren’t around. Ali’s eyes drifted to the screen as he tried to convince his visitor he was a busy man, even in exile. “And tonight,” Ali said, “they’re having this big musical and they want me to say a few words about whatever I want to talk about. Then I got a call from this college in Hartford — I forget the name of it — and they want me up there . . . There’s always something. Everybody wants me.” One had the impression that Ali, if formally invited, would appear, no questions asked, for the opening of an envelope.
Behind the fireplace was a mirrored wall, and Ali checked it at times to see how his performance was getting across. “It’s impossible for me to dry up and have nothing to do. I mean I just don’t represent boxing. I’m taking a stand for what I believe in and being one thousand percent for the freedom of the black people. Naturally those who have the same fight, but on a smaller scale, they come to me,” and then he whispered, quoting the average black man: “ ‘You speak for me, too, brother, you speak for me, too. I make my money from Charley but I’m with you.’ ” He lifted his voice again. “So I got hundreds of places to go and talk and I’ll always have them as long as I’m talking for freedom.”
At about 12:30 in the afternoon, he put on a striped shirt and a black leather jacket and invited the reporter to get in the car, saying he needed to go downtown to pick up Belinda, who was attending secretarial school in the Loop so that she could learn to type Ali’s letters. Ali drove her to school every morning and picked her up every afternoon. His Eldorado sat by the curb. As he drove north on Lake Shore Drive, careful to stay below the forty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, he adjusted the small record player under the dashboard and talked more about how busy he was, how he scarcely found time for religious study. “You see, I’m a minister and I have to know these things because of the questions they ask me,” he said.
When Ali reached the Loop, Belinda, now three months pregnant, climbed into the backseat of the car. Ali dropped her off at the house, asked her to cook steak and vegetables for dinner, and drove away, saying, “We got something important to do.” Then he went to get a carwash for his already sparkling-clean Eldorado. When the carwash turned out to be closed, he went home to watch more TV. The reporter, Leonard Shecter, had a hard time making sense of Ali at times. On the one hand, Ali complained that Uncle Sam was trying to starve and humiliate him. On the other hand, he said he was grateful the government had decided to release him on bond and allow him to travel the country, and that he had to be careful not to say or do anything that might make the feds change their minds.
Belinda served the men dinner. Ali shook pepper on his boiled okra and cabbage.
“Belinda, bring me some diet cola,” he said.
“Belinda, bring the steak.”
“Belinda, bring me some brown sugar.”
He declared the steak too tough.
“Bring me some chicken.”
“It’s cold,” Belinda said.
“Bring it anyway.”
He ate quickly, left the table, and went to his bedroom to change his clothes, singing Ain’t Too Proud to Beg while he dressed. When Belinda joined him in the bedroom, Shecter could hear the couple cooing. Ali emerged wearing a shiny black suit, white shir
t, and dark tie, and saying he was going to show the reporter what he did now that he wasn’t boxing. They drove to LaTees Beauty Parlor and Barber Shop on South Drexel Avenue, then to 79th Street, where they dropped in on the reporters and editors at Muhammad Speaks. Ali paid no attention to no-parking signs as he moved from one destination to another. In later years, he would tell friends that when he saw a curb painted yellow or red, he took it to mean that the city had reserved a parking space for him; his friends were never sure if Ali meant it as a joke. At the newspaper office, he opened a cabinet drawer containing thousands of pictures from his boxing career. He pulled out a bunch, reminisced a while, and put them back.
Then they were on the move again, headed to the Shabazz restaurant on 71st Street for a big piece of chocolate cake, which Ali ate in five bites. On his way out, he bought a piece of bean pie and ate it in two bites. Whenever they got to the car, Ali did a search for his keys. They were always in a different pocket. Occasionally, he locked them in the car.
He arrived at a theater where he had been asked to speak, but he was two hours early and the doors were locked. To pass the time, he wandered along the sidewalk, trying to attract attention. “I’m looking for a fight!” he barked to anyone in earshot. “Who’s the baddest man around here?”
The whole thing saddened Shecter. Ali seemed at a loss. A national magazine writer was accompanying him, recording his every word and every action, and it was not enough to sate his ego. With two hours to kill before his next audience could be assembled, he was incapable of enjoying a quiet moment of isolation or introspection, incapable of trying to get to know the man who’d been accompanying him around town all day. Before their time together ended, the reporter asked Ali how he felt about going to jail. Ali managed to turn his answer into a boast.
“Who wants to go to jail?” he said. “I’m used to running around free like a little bird. In jail, you got no wife, no freedom. You can’t eat what you want . . . being in prison every day, looking out of the cell, not seeing nobody . . . A man’s got to be serious in his beliefs to do that.”
Esquire decided to put Shecter’s story on its April cover, and the magazine’s art director, George Lois, was assigned to come up with a design. When Ali arrived at a New York studio to be photographed, Lois showed the boxer a reproduction of Botticini’s painting of St. Sebastian, an early Christian martyr, tied to a tree, his body pierced with arrows. Lois asked Ali to pose the same way.
Ali considered it for a moment.
“Hey, George!” he finally answered. “This cat’s a Christian!”
Lois, a nonpracticing Greek Orthodox, explained that Sebastian had been executed for converting to Christianity, just as Ali had been excoriated for converting to Islam, and he asked Ali for permission to call Elijah Muhammad to explain. Ali agreed, and Lois spent the next ten minutes on the phone discussing imagery and religious symbolism with the Nation of Islam’s leader. Elijah Muhammad, who understood the power of the media better than most, gave his blessings.
The arrows were too heavy to stick to Ali’s body with glue, so the Esquire crew tied fishing line to the arrows and hung them from a bar high above Ali’s head. Ali, wearing nothing but white Everlast boxing shorts, white boxing shoes, and white socks, had to hold still until photographer Carl Fischer and his assistants could line up the arrows with the fake blood painted on the boxer’s body — two in the chest, one below the heart, two in the stomach, one in the thigh. Lois was struck by Ali’s patience and good humor. At one point, the fighter pointed to the arrows and gave them each a name, “Lyndon Johnson, General William Westmoreland, Robert McNamara . . .”
The Esquire cover may have been the best publicity Ali ever received. The headline would read, “The Passion of Muhammad Ali,” but it was the photo that made the greatest impact. The image of the mighty boxer as a martyr, his hands tied behind his back, blood dripping from his torso, his head tilted, mouth agape in anguish, brought together three of the most searing issues in American culture: race, religion, and the Vietnam War. And it made people think: Maybe there was more to the noisome boxer than they believed. Had Ali been a Christian, like St. Sebastian, would he have been treated differently? Would he have been admired for abandoning his personal and professional desires to follow the word of God? Would he have been deemed a hero for converting his religious ideals into action?
Of course, when Ali posed for George Lois, neither man could have imagined how the timing of that magazine cover would magnify its power. On April 4, 1968, just as the magazine was appearing on newsstands and in mailboxes, Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis to speak at a rally for striking sanitation workers and to promote his campaign against poverty. At 6:05 p.m., as King stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he was struck in the chest with one round from a rifle and killed.
Ali told reporters, “Dr. King was my great Black Brother, and he’ll be remembered for thousands of years to come.” Later, he would speak less kindly, calling King “the best friend White America ever had.”
Robert F. Kennedy, who had recently announced plans to run for the presidency, learned of the murder moments before he was to give a speech in Indianapolis. He abandoned his prepared remarks and delivered an extemporaneous eulogy, saying, “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black . . . you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.”
Two months later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a hotel kitchen after a speech in Los Angeles.
It would stand as one of the most tumultuous years in American history. Riots erupted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Daniel and Philip Berrigan led a group of Catholic activists in seizing hundreds of draft cards and setting them aflame with homemade napalm, an act that inspired an escalation of antiwar protests around the country. Women fighting for equal rights tossed their bras, mops, frying pans, and girdles into garbage cans in protest at the Miss America beauty contest in Atlantic City. Richard M. Nixon won the presidential election, but the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, running as an independent, received almost 10 million votes. Black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a black-power salute when “The Star Spangled Banner” was played at their medal ceremony during the Olympic Games in Mexico City, a gesture that would have been unthinkable before Ali.
It was in this context that Ali as St. Sebastian greeted Americans — as a man who divided and inspired and suffered for his beliefs, a man shot through with enemy arrows. If Ali’s religion struck some black Americans as a con man’s game, and if white Americans could only scratch their heads trying to understand why Ali would praise the segregationist views of George Wallace, the nuances mattered less with every passing day, every passing riot, every passing protest march. All around was chaos, bloodshed, and disorder. Ali wasn’t the only one bleeding.
On May 6, 1968, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Ali’s conviction for draft dodging, ruling that the boxer had no legitimate claim as a Muslim minister or conscientious objector to avoid military service. Nor had he been the victim of discrimination, the court declared. If he didn’t join the army, he would go to jail.
Ali remained free as his lawyers prepared an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Nation of Islam had already lent him $27,000 to help him cover some of his legal and living expenses. He paid that back and soon after borrowed another $100,000. But even wi
th the loans, he struggled to keep up with his bills. To make money, beginning in the fall of 1967, he began presenting lectures on college campuses, earning between five hundred and three thousand dollars per appearance.
The lectures produced anxiety in Ali, who was insecure about his reading and writing abilities and uncertain what kind of questions he might face from college students. He listened to recordings of Elijah Muhammad’s sermons and read Muhammad’s book Message to the Blackman in America, slowly copying lines and ideas from those sources onto index cards that he could keep in the pocket of his suit jacket. It was painstaking work. For Ali, it was the beginning of a battle to overcome the dyslexia and poor reading skills that had hampered him since childhood. In years to come, he would fill hundreds if not thousands of yellow legal pads with transcriptions from Elijah Muhammad’s writings and from the Koran. He would read the Christian Bible too, trying to identify contradictions in the text, and he would write those down. He would invite reporters to his home or to his hotel rooms, pull out those legal pads, and read from them, sometimes for hours.
He hired an agent to arrange lectures, and the agent ran an ad in Variety. A picture showed Ali in boxing gloves with the following copy: “Muhammad Ali, world’s heavyweight champion (Cassius Clay) — Available for Lectures — Nationwide Training Tour — Personal Appearances — Theaters — Country Fairs — Arenas — Colleges — Universities — One-nighters.”
In addressing college students in 1967 and 1968, Ali typically kept his remarks brief. He swore allegiance to Elijah Muhammad. He reminded listeners that he had proved his religious commitment by divorcing his first wife and forfeiting millions of dollars in income. He bragged that he was still the true heavyweight champion and would remain champion until someone defeated him in the boxing ring. He mocked other fighters, and for those who looked at his rounder-than-usual face and wondered if he was getting out of shape, he demonstrated his speed and agility with a flurry of air punches and a display of his speedy footwork, always to great applause. Of course, he also spoke about his opposition to the war.