Authors: Mark Kram
When he was called up for induction and the Commission’s retaliation came, he had earned $2.3 million over his seven-year career, with not a great deal left. He outlined his predicament to Tex Maule, after first asserting that he would work for Elijah as a minister for $150 a week and be happy the rest of his life. It was a comment that instantly incited psalmodic flight. “People ask me,” he sang, “how you gonna eat. I say, look out there at that little robin peckin’ and eatin’. Look up at all the stars, planets in the heavens. They are not held up there on the end of long, steel poles. Allah holds them up there. If he has this power, will he let his servant starve, let a man doin’ his work go hungry?” Wasn’t the Lord’s caseload a bit heavy, what with all the death in Vietnam, the babies all over the world with big bellies and sunken eyes? Why would the Lord think Ali was so special? Not batting an eye, he said: “Well, Allah always gotta have his favorites.”
He then pulled out a little notebook. “My wife,” he said, “she cost a hundred twenty-five thousand. Spent forty-five thousand on my mother and father. Gave her a Cadillac and a house. Give my brother twenty-five thousand for a little house. I paid Covington (Hayden, his draft lawyer) sixty-eight thousand, and he say I owe him another two hundred thousand. My home cost sixty-one thousand. My own personal expenses, say thirty thousand, not much. The government took roughly ninety percent in taxes. Not much left,” he said. He calculated $463,000. Maule’s calculations, assuming the tax bite, showed that Ali was $233,000 in the hole, not counting the $200,000 Covington was claiming. And if he stayed out of jail he was looking at a lot of money
for appeals. Ali shook his head at Maule’s figures, saying: “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
Ali went to trial on June 19, 1967. Up to the last second, even during the trial, government lawyers believed he would accept a deal with the Army’s Special Services. Trouble was that the Muslims insisted he never be in uniform and never be given a rank. “The Muslims,” a lawyer said, “seem to want him smack up against the wall. They want him to go down for the cause. I don’t know. We don’t want this. They want it.”
Generous
and
fair
or
sympathetic
are not words that come to mind about prosecutors. They are often ruthless, spiteful, and undiscriminating in pursuit of wins for themselves and departments. But the motor for the Justice Department’s chase after Clay came from J. Edgar Hoover, the petty, abusive FBI chief, a specialist in creating wild dogs his whole career, and he saw them and rebellion around every corner. An obsessive-compulsive snoop in all sorts of corners, he loved to crush wayward groups and their symbols. Clay was not a lone, crusading, principled obstruction as is commonly believed, and had he not become a Muslim chances are he would have remained “unfit” for duty, 1-Y, after failing two previous tests that put him near the moronic level.
Throughout the trial the next day, Ali sketched absently at his defense table. The jury soon retired, then returned in twenty minutes with a guilty verdict. Ali wanted his sentence immediately. The lead prosecutor, Morton Susman, asked Judge Ingraham for a reduced sentence, calling the outcome “a tragedy,” blaming it on the Muslims, who “could not hide behind religion” but were political up to their bow ties. Ingraham gave him the maximum five years and a $10,000 fine; his passport was turned over. He left the courtroom like a man who had heard the will and got the expected safe-deposit box and the waterfront. No bravado, no spleen or sorrow, no riffs or burlesque repartee. The drawings left on his table said more: first, a plane high
up in the sky, a child’s depiction of puffy clouds and bright sun, then on the next sheet, rain and fog, and the aimed descent of the plane straight toward the top of a mountain.
T
wigs and cold fires are too often all that’s left of the trail from the kid to the life. Desperate to see the child in the man, and to reach for connecting psychological tissue, it is easy to land on a pointed head. Usually, what is strikingly apparent is all there is. Fighters, by and large, have been colorful translators of what they did and felt, that is until the intrusion of the mass press conference with its numbing etiquette, prefabricated and surface inquiry. There used to be a direct path to fighters, and lazy days could be spent in productive talk until you left with a bit of confidence as to who they were. Not so with how they were formed or grew up; they became reticent or they didn’t know how to answer, perhaps because to some of them their origins were so hideous that they looked upon it as another lifetime. There had been no other time, this was it, the closet full of clothes, the identifying car and a woman or women to match. They were contenders.
For a good period, Joe Frazier seemed as if he had been born at the age of twenty-one. No one knew much about him. In many conversations he was agreeable enough, but there was a strained cheerfulness, and just below a restrained hostility. Or was it? Perhaps it was just a matter of confusion within that was behind his vague remoteness, a distrust of white people, a frustration with his ability to articulate or know how to act confidently, or that he hadn’t come to accept himself as a contender. He never looked you in the eyes, never seemed to want to be there. Gypsy Joe was asked about his pal’s demeanor and said: “He just a warrior. He afraid to say much.” Most likely, all of the above was true about Frazier then; he left the personality of himself up to his manager, Yank Durham, who gladly
obliged. He was seldom without Durham by his side, and over the years it become discomfiting and eerie how the manager seemed to think he was the fighter, how he even ended sentences for him, like: “I don’t think this fight will go long. You won’t see any lumps on my face after this one. I wanna do some dancin’ with the girls tonight.”
A big man of large gestures, Durham had a deep, magisterial voice and an easy personality. When he and his sidekick Willie Reddish walked into a ring in satin smoking jackets, you half expected someone to give them a brandy and a cigar. Yank, without being overbearing, relished attention. He had never been in the big time before, just a respected presence at the PAL gym in Philly. He had been an amateur boxer, then in the war a Jeep hit him, broke both his legs and put him in a hospital for over a year. He was a welder when he found Joe—and an ace hustler like Joe’s father, Rubin. He made corn liquor at his house (just like Rubin), and used Frazier in the early days to deliver it. He promoted card games and all-night craps games. “Gimme a smoky room and lots of suckers,” he used to say, “and I’m a happy man.” When he cut deals for Joe’s fights, he made backroom deals for himself, but he always gave Joe the details of them. Joe loved him like he did Rubin. “As long as I’m alive, no matter what happens,” Yank said, “this kid’ll never want for a buck.”
It wasn’t until Ali began to humiliate Frazier about his blackness, tried to turn him into a white pawn, that he started to respond about his youth and bleak times. The last of eleven children, Joe was raised in Laurel Bay, not far from Beaufort, South Carolina, the otherworldly low country that was the oldest and most historical settlement of the slave culture in the nation. The people there were perjoratively called Geechee, but they were actually Gullah and they spoke a language of their own. They had their own way of living, had a silent contempt for whites, and were suspicious of other blacks, who viewed them in turn as backward and dangerous, a people who
had not moved beyond slavery. They were in fact a proud, independent people who clung to African ways (to assimilate was to lose their souls) with small adjustments for reality. Once there, you could never forget the people or the land, filled with large trees weeping Spanish moss, thousands of whispering, steaming waterways that easily concealed bootleg stills and smuggling. “I remember the nights,” says Burt Watson, who grew up there. “You couldn’t see your hand.”
So did J. E. McTeer, for decades the High Sheriff of the low country; no power was larger there. He was a diligent man, benign, and ultra-sensitive to the culture. He was convincing once when he said that the “Geechee threw a bone on Ali before their first fight.” What kind of bone? “The most awful,” he said, “a black, catfish bone.” If Frazier knew a bone was in play, he said, he didn’t have to know much else, such was the enabling power of the belief in it. In order to deal with the Gullah and earn their respect, McTeer became a scholar of their thinking to the point that he became a feared purveyor of “white magic.” He wrote a book about the Sea Islands, remarking how the blackness of night was a heavy weight, how the people “rushed inside at dusk, saying nothing aloud inside of what they believed and feared.” It had an extra blackness, he wrote, “carried here by their forefathers, sensed rather than seen.” Drums beat across the swamps, “root doctors” knelt on their knees in graveyards at night and dug for the juju that would cure illness and bring good times to their patrons or evil to their enemies; the black art of “Root” pervaded. Its master and McTeer’s adversary was the legendary Dr. Buzzard, a tall man whose eyes stayed behind green-tinted glasses and who was celebrated as an “ender” of vendetta in a place where memory was long. “I don’t think Frazier knew the term Uncle Tom,” says Ricki Lights, a poet and medical doctor in Philly who was raised there. “You never heard it. To call a Gullah an Uncle Tom would be asking to die. I mean it.”
Slave history of the low country supports that view. Class distinc
tion based on skin color was drawn almost from the beginning of the settlement. Mulattoes, the fair-skinned progeny of white slavers and African women, were the emerging group and favored by owners. They got the better jobs and a big share of the largess (such as it was) that was handed down on the whim of their masters. Purebloods from Africa, seen as nonadaptive, resented sharply the superior airs of the mulattoes, who were too eager to conform to white culture. In various rebellions that were often chronic, the mulattoes were rarely included in conspiratorial plans; the blooded didn’t trust them.
While Frazier would later call Ali a “half-breed” in Manila, the phrase was not just a passing comment of frustration; it leaped out from a tribal flash of racial memory. Always able to feel the lancing invective with which Ali assaulted him, Frazier began to see it as an orchestrated campaign to crush any respect he had in the black community. Blacks who understood the mulatto and pureblood equation winced. On display every day in the streets, it was now being played out in a large public way.
The Muslims, it should be pointed out, mirrored the age-old divide of color. Their leader, Elijah Muhammad, was “color struck.” He taught his followers that they were descended from “Asiatic blacks,” meaning that they were from Arab stock, not from the sub-Saharan Africa. Elijah was a light man, and so were a large part of the Muslim hierarchy; the so-called sub-Saharans in the movement had subordinate roles. When Malcolm X established contacts with newly independent African nations, he was admonished for associating with “these people.” Unlike Malcolm, Elijah would avoid travel to sub-Saharan Africa during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1959. During at least two later visits to Africa, Ali himself would remark that African women would be more attractive if they had a little white blood in them.
The young Frazier and his family were on the rim of the culture, the father Rubin being too much of a pragmatist and survivalist to
become lost in the world of the black art. But his mother, Dolly, was never far from it, often telling the kids stories of the always looming Dr. Buzzard. She smoked a corncob pipe and was sensitive to spirits. A swarm of crows meant death, a strange noise in a walk by a graveyard meant that “the people were buried alive.” She worked in fields, tomato canneries, and picked crabs by hand on a small assembly line, with endless hours that rarely yielded more than five dollars a day. They lived on a ten-acre farm that Joe and his father tried to work with two mules; the earth didn’t give up much except watermelon; no vegetables for the table. Hard sun and flooding rain ran easily through the wood-tin roof of the six-room house that had no phone or plumbing, only an outhouse nearly a hundred yards away.
Rubin was a one-armed man, having lost his left wing over a woman. Her full-time lover was jealous, suspected Rubin, and shredded his arm with a pistol. He was lucky, he could have been hit by what they called a “ten-cent” pistol composed of lye, human urine and honey that disfigured, a prospect not to the liking of a ladies’ man such as Rubin. He once told Joe that, in all, he had fathered twenty-six children, an attainment of high order that Joe hoped to duplicate, such was his admiration for his father. When Joe was born, his father named him Billy, after his rugged old Ford that never let him down on the dark back roads he raced through. “He gonna be my left arm,” Rubin said of the baby. By day, Rubin was an overseer on the Bellamy farm, at night he cooked up “white lightning” that he sold for seven dollars a gallon. Turned age seven, Joe began helping him with late-night liquor deliveries. “I was never little, or played little,” he would say. “I ran with my father.”
In the early fifties, Rubin bought a small television, and the high point of Joe’s week was watching the weekly fights with his father and uncles. No matter who was fighting, the talk always ended up with the name Joe Louis. His father respected Louis so much that the name blazed in Joe’s head. To show his father that he could be Louis,
too, he put a bag on a tree limb filled with bricks at the center, rags, and corncobs, and he pounded the bag day after day with an audience of his two mules, Buck and Jenny, until his hands were bloody, the hand-wrapping with his father’s ties being little protection. The stern Dolly didn’t like it much, and allowed him only an hour with the bag. She tried to curb his father’s influence by taking him to church, where his main function was to hold on to his mother’s hysterical friend who would be so in rapture that she might shake herself into injury. A dedicated truant in school, Joe was soon working with his father on the Bellamy land, and he lay awake plotting how he could make his way elsewhere, away from a place where doctors treated whites first, where a white store had a parrot that sang: “Niggers teefing, niggers teefing.” Teefing meaning stealing.