Blood Brothers (23 page)

Malcolm was shattered. He'd never imagined that Elijah, the man who had called him “son,” would ever consider him an outsider. Never before had he heard Elijah shout with such vitriol.

Then Elijah cut him again. “I'm suspending you for an indefinite time,” he said coldly. “I'm going to be watching you to see if you become stronger, strong enough to resist this poison Wallace is pouring over my people.” And with that final message, Elijah slammed down the phone, leaving Malcolm wondering when he would hear from him again.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
, Elijah called his trusted confidant Captain Joseph, informing him that James 3X, the head of Newark's mosque, would assume all ministerial duties in Harlem, but Joseph would retain all authority there. Undoubtedly, Joseph's loyalty belonged to Muhammad. Years earlier he'd been one of Malcolm's most dependable lieutenants, yet their relationship had fractured in 1956 when the captain was accused of assaulting his wife. Before the entire mosque he'd faced a trial, with Malcolm serving as judge and jury. Joseph pleaded guilty, and the minister banned him from the temple for ninety days. Humiliated, Joseph never recovered from the ordeal. Although he eventually returned as captain, his relationship with Malcolm remained strained and tense. Since 1961, when Muhammad made all mosque captains accountable directly to Chicago, Joseph had become an independent potentate, untethered to Malcolm's authority and nearly equal in power to him. Malcolm strongly disapproved of the way that Joseph disciplined the congregation and, in November 1963, had quietly petitioned Chicago to replace him as captain, a request that was denied.
⁴⁰

With Joseph assuming complete control over the Harlem mosque, the New York Muslims were directed to sever all ties with Malcolm. Muhammad informed the East Coast officials that the censured minister was suspended indefinitely and, through his aides, told his son Wallace that Malcolm had blamed him as the primary provocateur. Then he summoned Malcolm to Phoenix for a decisive trial, declaring, “I'm not through with Malcolm yet.”
⁴¹

In Phoenix, Malcolm faced the court: Muhammad, Sharrieff, and Ali. Since they had last spoke on the phone, Elijah had become even more caustic toward him. Sitting across from Malcolm, he looked at him like a stranger. Malcolm sat uncomfortably until he finally confessed that he had told Captain Joseph and various ministers about Muhammad's dalliances. Elijah demanded that he retract everything he said to them. “Go back and put out the fire you started,” he said.
⁴²

After Malcolm returned home, he learned that the Nation's headquarters had made it known that no one in the sect could speak to him. Elijah had effectively quarantined him from his people, from his center of power. In Harlem, he learned that a mosque official told members of his congregation, “If you knew what the Minister did, you'd go out and kill him yourself.” When Malcolm heard that the brothers in his
own mosque had started talking about his death, he knew it “could have been approved of—if not actually initiated—by only one man.”
⁴³

In isolation, Malcolm considered a new reality, a life without Elijah, one divorced from the Nation. He had built his entire world around the teachings of Muhammad, committing himself to his mission. Without the Messenger, he'd preached, he was nothing. Elijah was the one who woke him from the dead. But now he had been cast outside the Nation, and he feared that his worst nightmare was coming true: Elijah intended to bury him and send him “back to the grave.”
⁴⁴

M
ALCOLM ENDURED HIS
exile in a daze. He tried ignoring the death talk, but he couldn't. His headed pounded relentlessly, day after day. It hurt all the time, as if he suffered from
dementia pugilistica
. “I felt like my brain was damaged,” he told Alex Haley.
⁴⁵

His doctor examined him and recommended rest, but he didn't know how to slow down. His life had become a blur. Everything was out of focus. On January 14, he met Haley on the fourth floor of the International Hotel at the JFK Airport. For seven hours, from seven p.m. to two a.m., Haley sat at his typewriter, listening to Malcolm as he paced around the room, sitting only to scribble notes to himself on napkins.
⁴⁶

Malcolm could hardly concentrate. He knew what happened to insubordinate Muslims. He had seen gruesome images of black men bludgeoned at the hands of Muhammad's avengers. No one survived Muhammad's wrath. He could well imagine stalkers from the Fruit attacking him at any moment.

Even when he was inside the hotel room, he did not feel safe. He suspected that the FBI had bugged the room, a fear exacerbated by a radio broadcast he had heard just before the meeting claiming, falsely as it turned out, that the FBI and Rochester police considered him a suspect in an assassination plot against President Lyndon Johnson. He continued to agonize about what would happen if Elijah never reinstated him. Without his position, he would lose his monthly salary and his family's home in East Elmhurst, Queens. He had no savings, no insurance, and no property. He had even signed a contract donating his future book royalties to the NOI.
⁴⁷

This was no time to write a book. Haley wanted Malcolm to focus on the stories from his past, but all he could think about was his future.
What had first been only a vague idea began to take shape. He had long considered how he could benefit from the unique talents and fame of Cassius Clay, but mostly his musings had come from within the structure of the Nation. Now, if Elijah forced him out of the NOI, banished him from the organization that had given him sustenance, and made him move forward alone, Malcolm needed to consider how he could take Clay with him. How could he pry the boxer away from an organization and a theology that Malcolm had taught him was the foundation of all truth and reality? How could he convince Clay that everything Elijah preached was wrong?

Malcolm decided what Clay needed was a dose of political reality. He wanted Cassius to see the dark side of the movement and its leader. Malcolm fully understood that Elijah had ordered him not to talk with reporters and had commanded other members of the Nation not to associate with the defrocked minister—a directive that certainly applied to Cassius Clay. Yet instead of moving a step behind Elijah, reacting to the Supreme Minister's edicts, Malcolm chose to take the lead and compel him to follow. If Malcolm went to Miami and flaunted his friendship with the boxer, he would challenge Elijah to either pull Malcolm back into the fold or punish Cassius. Either way, Malcolm thought, it would strengthen his relationship with Clay.

Chapter Ten

TROUBLE IN MIAMI

            
Where do you think I would be next week if I didn't know how to shout and holler and make the public sit up and take notice? I would be poor, for one thing, and I would probably be down in Louisville, Kentucky, my hometown, washing windows or running an elevator and saying “yes suh” and “no suh” and knowing my place.

—CASSIUS CLAY

S
portswriter Robert Lipsyte, sent to Miami to record the all-but-certain destruction of Cassius Clay, wrote Sonny Liston's comment into his notebook in red ink: “He's a fag, I'm a man.”
¹

Liston was not the first member of the boxing fraternity to question Clay's manhood. Since 1960, when he began training in Miami, rumors had persisted that he was gay, mostly because he defied simple stereotypes of boxers. From his first professional contest until the Liston match, he showed only a passing interest in women. To be sure, he talked about “foxes,” spent hours observing them, and engaged in good-natured, nonthreatening flirting, but that was about as far as he went. At this stage in his career, Cassius was “old school,” believing that any sort of sex drained strength and weakened fighters. “Masturbation is the curse of mankind,”
The Ring
editor Nat Fleischer wrote in his influential book
Training for Boxers
. By extension, sex while training was tantamount to career suicide. Determined to win the title and all the fame and money that went with it, Clay accepted the common beliefs and for the most part pushed women to the far corners of his life.
²

Cassius Marcellus Clay Sr. was a frustrated artist who was convinced that white men had stunted his career. His rage shaped the man that his son became. But the father also resented the influence the Nation of Islam had over his eldest child.
Getty Images

His androgynous behavior added to the rumors. Like Emile Griffith, who designed women's hats and spoke in a wispy, breathless voice, Clay's actions defied the conventional masculinity. He seemed obsessed with how he looked inside the ring. His polished white shoes and white satin trunks, Vaseline-coated body, and sleek defensive style seemed dictated more by his sense of aesthetics than any athletic imperative. And no boxer in a sport that almost guaranteed facial cuts and a flattened nose talked more compulsively about his appearance. Choosing feminine adjectives, he repeatedly asked before and after every match, “Ain't I pretty?” or “Ain't I beautiful?” Seldom, if ever, did he refer to himself as handsome.

Liston might have sensed that, like Benny “the Kid” Paret did with Griffith, he could belittle Clay's masculinity by calling him a “fag” or “bitch.” But although Griffith was sensitive about his sexual identity, Clay was not. Paret's taunts were on target, causing Emile to respond
violently. But Liston's vulgar labels never reached Cassius's heterosexual core.

Clay's psychological warfare against Liston was dramatically more effective. He began his campaign in earnest on November 5, 1963, at about three a.m. outside Liston's home in Denver. Fleeing police harassment in Philadelphia and looking for a “new start” and a quiet life, Sonny had moved to Denver and bought a home in an upscale neighborhood filled with well-established bankers, lawyers, physicians, and businessmen.
Sports Illustrated
's Huston Horn claimed that the week after Liston moved in, thirty-two for-sale signs sprouted in neighborhood lawns, but Sonny wanted peace, not war, with the other homeowners.
³

Liston may have desired a quiet suburban existence, but Clay had other ideas. While Sonny slumbered peacefully, Cassius, aboard a red-and-white thirty-passenger 1953 Flxible bus, was headed in the champion's direction. There was nothing incognito about his approach. The slogans “
CASSIUS CLAY ENTERPRISES
,” “
WORLD
'
S MOST COLORFUL FIGHTER
,” and “
SONNY LISTON WILL GO IN EIGHT
” decorated the side of the bus, which bounced and rumbled with a circus-coming-to-town festivity. Inside, Cassius, Rudy, Bundini Brown, photographer and friend Howard Bingham, and a few other merry pranksters joked as they planned their assault on Liston's domicile. To guarantee an audience for his performance, Clay had already alerted local reporters that something was about to happen at Sonny's place.
⁴

Outside the house, Clay hit the horn:
“Oink! Oink! Oink! Oink!”
Lights blinked on in the surrounding houses. “You know how them white people felt about that black man just moved in there anyway, and we sure wasn't helping it none,” Cassius later remembered. “People was hollering things, and we got out with the headlights blazing.” Bingham had a mild stuttering problem, so of course Cassius insisted that he knock on the door and talk to Liston.

About the time he reached the door, Sonny, wearing short nylon pajamas, cracked it open. “What do you want, you black motherfucker?” he greeted Bingham. And if his point was not made quite strongly enough, he fixed him with his infamous stare, as if the intruder were a bug about to be pinned in his insect collection.

While Bingham beat a hasty retreat, Cassius advanced into the yard, “screaming and hollering about how he was gonna whup Liston bad,”
as Bingham later recalled. “Come on out of there! I'm going to whip you right now! Come on out of there and protect your home! If you don't come out of that door, I'm going to break it down!” Cassius raged. Sonny, however, stayed put. Finally, seven squad cars arrived and the police sent Clay and his band on their way.

Liston was trapped by his past and his police record, and Clay knew it. If the police were called out and he was involved in a scuffle, even one he did not provoke, he knew he would get arrested. Furthermore, Cassius's actions confused Sonny. “You know, if a man figures you're crazy, he'll think twice before he acts, because he figures you're liable to do
anything
,” Clay said.

He had planted the seed in Liston's mind. Initially Sonny assumed Cassius's stunts were just that—harmless acts to build the gate. But as one stunt led to the next, he found it difficult to separate the act from reality. “A man with Liston's kind of mind is very funny. He ain't what you would call a fast thinker,” said Cassius. “He's got one of them bulldog kind of minds. . . . Once he ever starts to thinking something, he won't let hold of it quick.” Once he had believed that, like virtually every other man, Clay was afraid of him. Now he did not know what to think.

Clay continued his campaign on the afternoon of November 5, when he met with Liston in a Denver hotel to sign contracts for a title match. “I don't want to sit by him,” he said when he arrived, and throughout the proceeding he shouted insults at the champion. Liston swatted away the verbal attacks, occasionally laughing at Cassius's performance. “I'm the champ of fighting,” he told Clay, “but you the champ of talkin'.” There were reasons for his good cheer—his 40 percent of ticket, concession, closed-circuit, television, and radio revenue would amount to several million dollars. Toward the end of the meeting, as Liston was speaking and Clay was digging into a plate of chicken, the champ looked over at his next opponent and said, “You eat like you headed to the electric chair.”
⁵

L
ISTON AND
C
LAY
had signed on to fight, but the contest still needed a home and a date. For a while it seemed that the world of boxing was divided between promoters who did not want any part of Liston and his underworld ties and promoters who worried that Clay would fare no better than Patterson did against the powerful champion. They feared
involvement in a congressional inquiry, a shameful mismatch, and a financial fiasco.

Liston understood what constituted an attractive contest: “A boxing match is like a cowboy movie. There's got to be good guys, and there's got to be bad guys. That's what the people pay for: to see the bad guy get beat.” He understood his role—“I'm the bad guy.” Yet between Sonny's nefarious past and questionable present and Cassius's incessant patter and Black Muslim connections, there was no cowboy to wear the white hat.
⁶

The December issue of
Esquire
attempted to put the white hat on Liston—actually, photographer Carl Fischer shot him in a red-with-white-trim Santa Claus hat. The cover close-up of Sonny's face—his expressionless mouth, flattened fighter's nose, and eyes that projected all the pain of his unhappy life—suggested that there would be no Christmas in 1963, an appropriate metaphor for a nation still morning the death of President John Kennedy.

In Miami, however, there was another Santa. “William B. MacDonald needs only a snowy beard to pass for Santa Claus,” wrote
Miami Herald
reporter Edwin Pope. Shortly after
Esquire
appeared on the newsstands, Uncle Willie, as businessman and sportsman MacDonald referred to himself, bought the dubious rights to stage the Liston-Clay fight in the Miami Beach Convention Hall. Perhaps it took a gambler and promoter like MacDonald to agree to pay the enormous sum of $625,000 for the live gate of a match that had sent so many other established boxing promoters fleeing for the doors.
⁷

Why take the chance? He had the answer: “For kicks. I'm in it for kicks.” But beyond the sheer fun of the action, he sought to promote the image of America abroad. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union openly ridiculed what it considered the hypocrisy of America's claims of freedom and equal opportunity. MacDonald thought “it would be great to show the world that two colored boys like Liston and Clay could fight in a Southern city and be treated like kings.”
⁸

Although paternalism streaked through MacDonald's discussion of race, he praised Liston and Clay, emphasizing their gentlemanly qualities. But his liberalism stopped short of tolerance for the Nation of Islam. A MacDonald associate said, “Don't invite Uncle Willie and Malcolm X to the same party.”
⁹

T
HE IDEA OF
Malcolm running into Uncle Willie at a cocktail party in Bal Harbour or the Fontainebleau Hotel seemed unlikely. But he would have found a warmer welcome there than in New York, where his troubles with Elijah Muhammad weighed heavily on his mind. Malcolm needed to get away. His phone rang nonstop with press calls dogging him with questions about his future. The man who had always had an answer for reporters was now unsure what to tell them. Tortured by his separation from the Nation, his mind randomly jumped among Elijah, Captain Joseph, President Kennedy, his mosque, the press, and the death threats. It was all too much.

On Wednesday, January 15, the morning after his late-night writing session with Alex Haley, he reached for the phone to call a friend. But before he could dial the number, it rang. Joseph K. Ponder, an FBI agent from the Buffalo field office, was on the line with a few questions: Where were you last night? Do you know anything about a plot by the Black Muslims to assassinate Lyndon Johnson? How long will your suspension from the Nation last? Ponder seemed especially interested in Malcolm's future with the sect.
¹⁰