Authors: Mark Kram
By 1968 he was ready for the colleges, lined up for him by the Dick Fulton Speakers Bureau. He had worked hard on the little cards that contained his subject matter, gleaned from the Bible, the Qur’an, and Elijah’s messages. Belinda helped him with his writing and spelling. The lectures made him feel significant in a different way, that he was tossing nets into the sea for Elijah, that he was an inside player in some large conspiracy for right. “I loved it,” he remembered later, “meetin’ students, the black power groups, the white hippies, and we’d all have sessions and dinner was then planned in the hall, and we’d go to the Student Union buildin’ and I’d give my talk and then they’d ask me questions, all the boys and girls, black and white. Like what should we do, or what do you think is gonna happen, you know—just like I was one of those sleepy-lookin’ senators at the Capitol.”
The audiences were not all so convivial or supportive. Some middle-class schools greeted him as a rather quaint figure, the Ivies examined him the way they would iridescent flora, while others saw him as the leading act of a touring revue. In the main, though, he was being heard, and he seldom lost the crowds. There were often snickers and loud hecklers, whom he fumbled with at first, then learned to handle with the ease of a nightclub comic. His rap was the usual that had appeared in one form or another over the years, now much smoother and elongated, delivered with the cadence of a ring-wise preacher. At a white college in Buffalo, he looked at the many signs behind his platform, reading:
LBJ
,
HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY
? He wouldn’t speak until they were removed. He sniffed the air for the smell of pot.
Seldom has a public figure of such superficial depth been more wrongly perceived—by the right and the left; he was reminiscent of the simple Chauncey Gardener in
Being There
by Jerzy Kosinski; for his every utterance, heavy breathing from the know-nothings to the
trendy tasters of faux revolution. In the mangle of cross-purposes of the sixties, Ali looked down a clear sight. He was not about the antiwar movement; that was peripheral, a college-kid issue that he tolerated and used. “You see,” he’d say, going into his wallet, “I ain’t burned
my
draft card.” He was not about the counterculture, and certainly not women’s rights; in his view both were avenues of disintegration, if he ever thought about them at all. Ali
was
about Ali—for his right to work and the teachings of Elijah that nourished him.
The “briefcase of truth” that he took on the road was given other resonance. Each group would attach their own values to him, just as Chauncey’s talk of topsoil and the life cycle of the rhododendron was inflated into comic wisdom.
Being There
could be seen as a remark on the sixties, the willingness, the desperation to believe
anybody
in the face of intellectually destitute leaders, searching, confused, perhaps evil in blind resolution. Ali could not have picked a better time for campus exposure. The social and political climate finally matched him stride for stride. An old America had abused his rights and isolated him, now a new one was suddenly by his side. It was a sky lit with the celebration of chaos. The atmosphere was caught perfectly by Saul Bellow in his novel
Mr. Sammler’s Planet,
when old Sammler, eternal student of the mind and friend of H. G. Wells, was pressed into talking about the British scene of the thirties at Columbia University.
He hardly begins when a voice starts to attack him, shouting: “Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counter-revolutionary.” The young man turns to the crowd, shouts again: “Why do you listen to this effete old shit? What has he got to tell you? His balls are dry. He’s dead. He can’t come.” Sammler was struck by the will to offend. Bellow writes: “What a passion to be
real.
But
real
was also brutal. And the acceptance of excrement as a standard? How extraordinary! Youth? Together with the idea of sexual potency. All this confused
sex-excrement-militancy, explosiveness, abusiveness, tooth-showing. Barbary ape howling. Or like the spider monkeys in the trees, as Sammler had once read, defecating into their hands, and shrieking, pelting the explorers below.” Days later Sammler, having twice spotted a black pickpocket in his act on a bus, is followed into the empty lobby of his apartment house. The black pickpocket hurls him against the wall, grabs him by the neck. He does not intend to kill the old man. He simply pulls out his large penis and makes Sammler look down at it; the thing is shown with a “mystifying certitude”; black power is irrefutable, old America.
Ali drifted back into the news in December when he was picked up for driving without a valid license. He spent seven days in a Miami jail where, according to a fellow inmate eager to sell information, he wrinkled his nose at the food and spent much time looking wistfully out of a window. A taste of jail sobered him—privately. “It’s a baaaad place,” he said. “You get lousy food. You think of home, you think of people walkin’ around free.” But Washington insiders precluded any jail time down the road for him, so charged was the public atmosphere; he wasn’t just a Muslim anymore; he had become incorporated into the whole fabric of civil and uncivil disobedience. Tex Maule told Ali of a discussion he had had with a key figure in the Justice Department. After Martin Luther King’s death and the riots, Tex related to him, “Putting you in jail would be politically stupid, though you’ll have to play it through the courts.” He looked at Tex with wonder. “Why should I believe they got smart just like that?” he replied. “They been so stupid so long.” To Tex, he appeared agitated over being reduced to a minor role when told of the government’s disinterest in jail time “when I got more of a followin’ than Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton put together.” No, being a bit player with major legal bills, and facing more, was too bizarre even for Ali’s mind. “Ohhhhh no,” Ali said, “I’m still beeeeg trouble in their minds.
If I wasn’t, they’d give me back my passport.” The usual fate of saints did not elude him. “I could get killed any minute,” he told Maule, almost too agreeably. “All eyes are on me,” he said. “Ain’t it somethin’ to see. I don’t miss the ring.”
He did miss the money, though his financial condition was hardly that of a robin pecking at the ground. Herbert, his manager, was hardly a financial guardian angel at this time. While Ali said he could be put on railroad tracks with a hobo’s stick and Allah would lead him to “gold on the train,” Herbert was less than convinced. Once he went to Herbert and said: “I am looking for Allah to do something. I am his servant. Allah, they’re punishing your servant!” Herbert had no answer. If he missed the big money, it was because it pinched his style; a contemporary, blossoming prophet needed to be munificent, money dispensed added a glow to the prophet’s robes. He was not being trampled over by mendicants, and was hardly suffocated by so-called friends who had long since fled. But he repeatedly stressed the importance of the $500 to $1,000 college talks. Yet it was hard to gauge how marginal he was. He would show up and tell a reporter that he just bought a new silver limousine for $10,000, “I mean cash, baby.” Then, he would express shock over a cleaning bill. “Got to be a place cheaper,” he’d say, then take the writer to a bakery and ask him for “thirty-five cents for a bean pie.”
Ali knew the Muslim directive: he was to give no indication at all that he needed the white man’s fame or money or media. For all of his career, Ali thought most reporters were groupies content to be in his presence and fill notebooks with his gibberish, or if he thought they were clever they were no match for his own cleverness. He was suspicious of those who didn’t take down his every word. He was not concerned about accuracy; the note-taking process assured him that he was in command. Domination of content, the neutralization of hard questions by swarming nonsense, was what he was after. “Why aren’t
you taking this down?” he’d often ask. A pencil and a notebook, worst of all, a tape recorder made him think that he was talking to millions.
“People ain’t supposed to see I care anymore,” he said. He began to throw punches in front of a mirror, started to bob and weave around a glass coffee table, and put an opponent in with him; already he was looking down the road at Joe Frazier. He supplied narration, even the sound of the bell. Belinda came out and kept a steady eye on the coffee table. Before winning, Ali let Frazier knock him down in the second round, and he dropped with a thud to the floor, his legs twitching dramatically. He then disposed of Joe quickly and collapsed back onto the couch, puffing and laughing. “He’s always doing that,” said Belinda. “He’s crazy.”
So, it was clear, he was still much more the fighter than the preacher; in a tenuous self, boxing was still irreducible. Later, I spent a few days with him in South Chicago. In these days he seemed unstrung, on an aimless search for the briefest reinforcement, from people in barber shops, bakeries, and the La Tease beauty shop filled with giggling women. One evening he ended up looking at his boxing gear. He said nothing about a past life, simply wrote with his finger
M. Ali
on the patina of dust on a boxing glove. He looked at it absently, then said abruptly: “Let’s take a ride. I got some business.”
The tawny Cadillac Eldorado moved on the highway toward Milwaukee. He was eerily silent (for him) and kept looking at the speedometer. “Cops’ll put me in jail for anything.” He continued on, then finally said, “You don’t ever ask questions?”
“’Cause I know the answers, maybe.”
“You don’t know any answers. What color is God?”
“Which is why I don’t ask you questions.”
“You’re poor company,” he said.
“All right, how’s your money situation?”
“I got more money than you.”
“That’s not hard.”
“What else you got?”
“All right, they’re going to the moon soon. That’s amazing, don’t you think? Kind of makes you feel tiny. How ’bout you?”
“Not me, it don’t,” he said. “Black men put the moon up sixty trillion years ago, and…”
“Oooops, wrong question.”
“And there weren’t no white trash on the planet then. Whites just learnin’ ’bout gravity. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad says that black men drilled a hole in the earth, and with high explosives caused a piece to go into space. That piece is now the moon. Can’t nobody live on it. No water. When the white man goes up there, his eyes’ll pop out or sumpin.” He paused, adding with finality: “God is a black man!”
“Okay.”
“You don’t care?”
“He could be a porpoise.”
“A what?”
“A porpoise. It’s said they’re smart.”
“God’s a porpoise!” he said. “You gonna go straight to hell sayin’ that.”
Did he give $135,000 to the Chicago mosque?
“There you go. Changin’ the subject. You always do it. We’re talkin’ ’bout a
porpoise,
and now you’re in my wallet.” He thought for a second, then said, “If I did, just like you puttin’ money in your church collection.”
“I don’t go to church.”
He said: “You not goin’ straight to hell. You already there.”
“If eyes will pop on the moon,” he was asked, “there must be a lot of eyes you’d like to see pop here.”
“I’d fill the moon ship with white women,” he said. “They
dangerous.
They lure you in with them smiles. But they’ll never get me.
Then, on the second trip, I’d load it up with all those kinky-headed half-black niggers from mixed marriages.”
“You’re not so dark yourself.”
“Never mind that. My soul…it’s as black as night.”
“You got business in Milwaukee?”
He laughed. “Yeah, the only business I got now.” He added: “Just think, we get in a bad accident in the city. To die in Milwaukee. When I’ve been ’round the world. You…they not even goin’ to know you’re dead. It just be Ali this, Ali that. What was he doin’ in Milwaukee? Always a mystery, Ali.” He paused: “Nobody gonna remember you ever. Not even a church, ’cause you got a porpoise for a God.”
We drove along in silence for about five miles, and he said: “Tell the truth, I shook you up. You’re thinkin’, ‘Suppose he wraps me round a phone pole, who gonna care ’bout me?’ What you need to do is get you a God like me. Life is a scary place, even when you the king of the world like me.”
“The king of the barbershops.”
He folded his upper teeth over his lower lip as he always liked to do to show humor, cocked his left fist, while keeping his right hand on the wheel. “You talk like that,” he said, “we
are
gonna have an accident.”
“No, I was just thinking of your immortality. I figure for ten years. After you’re dead.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “We just flies, aren’t we? Just a whooooosh from God, and we’re dead all over the place, and soon all them flies that knew you, they all gone, too. Ain’t the world strange.”
We arrived in Milwaukee, and I kept waiting for him to park and go into a hotel or someplace to conduct his business. Instead, he kept cruising up and down the main street, around and around, the car now like some traveler lost in a fog bank. He’d pull up to a red light, turn full face to the car idling next to him, and wait for recognition, and there never was any, and he’d go around again, lingering at the
lights, his eyes silent and almost intense as if he were searching for witnesses to his existence, then after a while his silence turning into rapid speech and sound as he reproduced the thwack of gloves tracking toward his face; the feel of first sweat snaking down his back; the comradeship of the gym; the feel of a punch shivering up his arm. For a moment, it was as if he wanted to get out and stand in the middle of the traffic, so confounded was he that not one pair of eyes had met his and said, “Yes, you can’t fool me, I know who you are.” A cold, ineffable sadness billowed the curtains of the mind as he finally headed back toward the highway and Chicago, and there was no need to point out what he had done because he was now saying that he had made the trip several times in the past, going nowhere, around and around, and if there was a larger meaning he kept it concealed in what seemed a migratory soul—as the midnight car lights streaked across a quiet face, and he said only one sentence the entire trip back: “I know I’ll never fight again.”