Blood Brothers (32 page)

During their conversations with African leaders, Clay deferred to Malcolm. He was uncomfortable speaking, and uneducated, about the issues concerning African nations. Watching Malcolm interact with ambassadors, Cassius recognized that Malcolm's relationships with African leaders could help elevate his own standing in the world. It was “obvious,” journalist Murray Robinson concluded, that Malcolm had “set out to make the heavyweight champion an international political figure.”
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Reporters wondered if Malcolm had scripted the entire week in an effort to strengthen his bond with the champ. Malcolm's critics suggested that he was just using Clay. The champ, a writer from
Sport
maintained, had become nothing more than a “tool in Malcolm X's feud with the Muslims.”
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After Malcolm and Cassius made plans to travel the world together, writers speculated that Clay's visa might be withheld given his uncertain military status. When the
Louisville Courier-Journal
published a story that Cassius had failed a military intelligence test, reporters pressed him about his case. He did not know if he passed the Selective Service exam he took on January 24 in Miami, but he insisted that it was difficult. “I finished Louisville Central High School,” he said, “but I wasn't very bright. I was in the Golden Gloves and didn't have time for studies.”
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If he passed the test and was drafted, writers asked, would he oppose military service on religious grounds? Did the NOI oppose military enlistment? Would he declare himself a conscientious objector? Cassius was unaware of the Nation's opposition to the army and Elijah Muhammad's past imprisonment for draft evasion. In fact, he had no idea what it meant to be a conscientious objector. “I just want to do what's right,” he said. “I don't want to go to jail, and I don't want to get into trouble.”
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On the morning of March 6, around seven a.m., Malcolm picked up Rudy and Cassius at the Theresa in his dark blue Oldsmobile 98. During their drive back to the UN, Malcolm explained the crafty ways black men avoided military service, recounting his own experience evading the draft during World War II. In June 1943, when he was scheduled for induction, Malcolm made sure that army officials thought that he was mentally unstable. He showed up “costumed like an actor,” wearing a zoot suit, his hair frazzled “into a reddish bush of conk.” At the reception desk, he ran his mouth, talking nothing but jive, addressing a white officer as “daddy-o.” Finally, a man in a white coat pulled him out of the induction line and sent him to see a military psychiatrist. He appeared incredibly paranoid, rambling and whipping his head around as if somebody was spying on him. Suddenly, he bolted from his seat and peered beneath the door. Then he whispered into the psychiatrist's ear, “I want to get down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us some crackers!” A few months later, Malcolm's performance earned him a 4-F classification, mentally disqualified for duty.
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When they arrived at the UN, Malcolm and the Clay brothers had brunch with Simeon O. Adebo, an ambassador from Nigeria. Adebo thanked Cassius for befriending Nigerian boxer Dick Tiger and invited him to visit his country. Adebo also encouraged him to accept the responsibilities that came with being champion, a champion recognized by black people all over the world. “You are not now what you were before the fight,” he said. As the champion of the world, Adebo advised, he possessed cultural power, the kind of power that could unify black people “in the name of world brotherhood.”
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As Cassius walked out of the UN, a reporter from the
New York Times
spotted him and asked a few questions. When he said that his new name was “Cassius X Clay,” the writer inquired if the “X” had replaced his middle name. “X is what the slave masters used to be called,” Cassius answered, making an obvious error. Malcolm clearly had more teaching to do. He elbowed Cassius, suggesting that they should end the interview.
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Elijah seethed when he learned that Malcolm had escorted Cassius to the UN again. He knew that his former minister “was out to destroy” him, but he refused to let Malcolm “snatch Cassius Clay” away from him. Since he called Cassius on the eve of the Liston fight, the boxer had ignored his warnings against socializing with Malcolm. Perhaps Cassius did not fully understand what was at stake, or maybe Malcolm had persuaded him that everything was fine. After Cassius returned from the UN, Elijah called him at the Theresa and made clear that he could no longer associate with the exiled minister. Cassius understood, promising that he would “stop seeing Malcolm starting today.”
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Torn between his friendship with Malcolm and his faith in Muhammad, Cassius wavered. He admired both men, but he was confused by Malcolm's behavior. What no one knew was that Malcolm had told him something that he just could not believe. For nearly two years, he'd taught Cassius that Muhammad was Allah's Messenger, the most powerful black man in America. Nearly every lesson began with, “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad teaches us . . . ” Yet on or around the day of their second visit to the UN, Malcolm told Cassius and Rudy that Elijah was a false prophet who had lied and abused his power. He probably also revealed that Muhammad had impregnated numerous secretaries.
When Rudy heard Malcolm talk such blasphemy, he wrestled him to the floor until Cassius pulled them apart. Malcolm's allegations made Cassius question his friend's motives. It made him wonder “why Malcolm was staying so close [to him] all the time.”
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Malcolm had a good reason to attach himself to Cassius. About a week earlier, when he returned from Miami, Malcolm had learned that Captain Joseph had contacted a soldier in the FOI. During a private conversation outside the Nation's Harlem luncheonette, Joseph gave Lukman X a deadly assignment: “Plant a bomb in [Malcolm's] '63 Oldsmobile that will take care of him.” Suspicious of Joseph's instructions, Lukman wondered why he did not follow the chain of command and deliver the message to one of his lieutenants as he normally did. Joseph never gave direct orders to the Fruit. The assignment made Lukman uneasy. He had long admired Malcolm for protesting police brutality. Skeptical of Joseph, he shared the assassination plot with Malcolm, forcing him to finally accept that his life with the Nation was over. “I knew they didn't intend to reinstate me as a Muslim,” he said later. “You don't point a shotgun at somebody who's suspended.”
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H
OURS AFTER HE
left Cassius and Rudy at the Theresa, Malcolm turned up the volume on his car radio when he heard the voice of Elijah on WWRL. Over a nationwide broadcast, Muhammad announced that the name Cassius Clay “has no divine meaning. I hope he will accept being called by a better name. Muhammad Ali is what I will give to him as long as he believes in Allah and follows me.”
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Malcolm erupted behind the wheel, shouting to one of his aides, “That's political! That's a political move! He did it to prevent him from coming with me.” In the past, the boxer had professed great admiration for his name. It was hard for him to imagine being anyone other than Cassius Clay. Knowing that there were lifelong members in the Nation who never received their “original” names from Elijah made him doubt that he had earned such an honor. But the Messenger reminded him that his “original” name meant “one who is worthy of praise,” and no one was more deserving of the distinction than him.
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Cassius instinctively knew that the internecine fighting between Elijah and Malcolm had escalated to a critical, violent stage. He had heard stories about Muslims who crossed Muhammad and paid severely for
it. Malcolm himself had once told him, “Nobody leaves the Muslims without trouble.” Now he had a choice to make. If he accepted the name Elijah gave him, would it end the brotherhood with Malcolm? If he rejected Elijah's overture, would it cost him his life? Politics, he was discovering, was more dangerous than fighting Sonny Liston.
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Ultimately, he submitted to Elijah. When he denounced his “slave name” and accepted the name Muhammad Ali, he symbolically broke with a heritage tied to bondage. It signified an awakening, a reclamation of freedom from the white world. But it also cut his ties with Malcolm. Instinctively more than intellectually, he understood the choice he had to make. And as he had so often before, he chose the less dangerous path.

When he was Cassius Clay, he had said, “I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want to be.” Yet that was never really true. There were limits to his new freedom. If he had remained friends with Malcolm, he would have fallen out of favor with Elijah and would have been forever known as Cassius Clay. But when he chose Elijah over Malcolm, Elijah determined who he wanted him to be, and that was Muhammad Ali, a devout Muslim and his loyal subject.

Once Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, Elijah won his political chess match with Malcolm. When Malcolm heard Elijah's radio address, Clay had not yet publicly announced that he had accepted the Muslim name, but it did not matter to Malcolm. When Malcolm lost the contest for Clay's loyalty, he had no more moves, no more pawns to sacrifice. At that moment Malcolm was expendable. At that moment his life was in jeopardy.

M
ALCOLM WAS SINKING
fast, like a man drowning in quicksand. Hearing Elijah's announcement over the radio elevated his heartbeat. In a panic, he telephoned the boxer's suite. A voice on the other end of the line told him that Clay was not taking his calls. Elijah had already assigned members of the Fruit to guard his most prized possession. The Muslims around the boxer spoke with one voice: Malcolm was a liar and a traitor. Dejected, Malcolm hung up the phone without ever speaking to his friend.
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Malcolm's mistake was that he believed Cassius would see the world through his eyes. If he spent enough time with Cassius, he thought, he could prove that he had his best interests in mind, and perhaps their
brotherhood would become stronger than Clay's allegiance to Elijah. He had hoped that he could mold Clay's combative boxing instincts into fighting for black freedom outside the ring.

But unlike Malcolm, at his core, Cassius was never comfortable with the politics of confrontation. He had said again and again that he was afraid of what would happen if he joined a demonstration or a sit-in. He felt far more secure within the Nation, where he was constantly praised for simply being who he was: a boxer.

Malcolm never wielded the same power over him that Elijah Muhammad did. How could he? Clay's vision of Elijah Muhammad was a product of Malcolm's creation—part man, part prophet, all-powerful, and all-knowing. Cassius respected authority, and there was no higher authority, Malcolm said, than the Messenger. Although he admired Malcolm, he viewed him only as Muhammad's representative. When Malcolm belatedly challenged Muhammad's sovereignty, he became a castaway in a lifeboat, drifting in the wrong direction. Elijah, on the other hand, was the emperor of an entire kingdom, and now Cassius had become his shining new prince.

Elijah also offered him something that Malcolm could not: the love of a father. “The Nation,” Jerry Izenberg observed, “became [Clay's] family, even to the extent that he was able to bring his brother into it. And Elijah Muhammad became his father.”
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Yet he seldom let anyone get too close. Few ever really knew, as Malcolm thought he did, the man who became Muhammad Ali. Over the course of his career, people moved in and out of his life as if they were walking through a revolving door. Friends, promoters, hustlers, entrepreneurs, accountants, agents, lawyers, and women came and went. Cassius built a wall around himself in the form of an entourage, hiring men with fake titles whose only job was to take care of him. As long as they served his needs, as long as Cassius did not have to worry about anything or anyone, they remained in his life.
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He willingly allowed older men to take charge of his life. He did not need another brother or best friend. Rudy filled those roles. Searching for a father figure, he found security in the hands of patriarchs, whether a boxing trainer like Angelo Dundee, the members of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, or Elijah Muhammad. Ceding his life to Elijah, though, reveals a certain irony. “It was Clay's father who laid
the groundwork for the boy becoming a Muslim,” Gordon Davidson explained. Clay Sr. frequently told his sons not to trust white men and warned them about the dangers of integration. He claimed that he had “Arabian” features and, like Elijah, prophesied about the Day of Judgment. “It's the end of times!” he often ranted. “We're in the last days! The last days!” Clay Sr., who was not a devout Christian, claimed that he read the Bible closely and that he knew that only Christians would survive the resurrection. “Those Muslims,” he said, would incur God's wrath. Listening to him and Elijah, one could hardly tell them apart.
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T
HE CHAMP WAS
in no mood to deal with his father. On Saturday, March 7, Cassius and Rudy arrived at Standiford Field, where nearly four hundred people, including the Louisville mayor, welcomed him home. At the airfield, he met with reporters, fans, and family, who all expected him to arrive with “a boyish grin, bold boasting, and comic attempts at poetry.” The public expected an entertainer, but the champ was not interested. When his father tried to crown him with a golden papier-mâché coronet, scarlet cloak, and scepter, Cassius, looking visibly agitated, pulled away and said, “I don't want any of that stuff.” His father didn't let up, pestering him again until he finally posed for photographers wearing the royal costume with a frown.
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