He never lifted the veil, not when he was Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. or after he became Muhammad Ali. Some things he would talk about incessantly—his greatness, his beauty, and his rendezvous with destiny. Other matters he would discuss in more serious moods—the history of the black man in America, Black Muslim theology, and, after he became an orthodox Muslim, universal peace. Yet he seldom whispered a word about the discord in his own family. “There was a lot of trouble, bad trouble, between his father and his mother,” recalled one of the boxer’s early advisers, “but Cassius would bite his tongue before he mentioned it.”1
IT WAS A dime-a-dozen domestic battery, out in “the colored district” of Louisville’s West End. On the hot night of August 8, 1957, Officer Kalbfleisch took the call. When he arrived at 3302 Grand Avenue, an older man took off running, darting between houses and into the night. Two young boys huddled close to their crying mother, whispering to her in a comforting manner. One of the youths was bleeding from a knife wound. Years later Kalbfleisch couldn’t remember if the boy had been cut on his ass or on his thigh, but “it was in the meat” and bleeding pretty good. When asked about the gash, the teenager said that he had cut it on a milk bottle.2
It was an unlikely story. The father had bolted when he saw the police car. The mother, the policeman later told a reporter, was causing trouble—“you know how women are.” Kalbfleisch got the picture: The father got drunk. Began to beat his wife. Her son tried to protect her and got cut for his efforts. It was not the first time that Mrs. Odessa Clay had called the police. Nor was it the last.
The injured son, only fifteen years old, identified himself. “My name is Cassius Clay,” he said. “I’m a boxer under Joe Martin.”
The name Cassius Clay meant nothing to Kalbfleisch, but he knew Joe Martin. A patrolman who in his spare time trained young boxers at Columbia Gym, Martin produced a local television program called Tomorrow’s Champions. Not many of the kids who fought each other on the weekly telecasts ever won titles, but the mere fact that they were seen on TV granted them a certain local celebrity. And Cassius was one of them, a kid from the tough side of town whose transitory fame still proved no defense against a drunk, angry father.
Kalbfleisch could have filed a formal report at police headquarters, but he let it slide. “I said to myself, ‘Well, there ain’t gonna be no prosecution anyway.’ So I said to the mother, ‘Now look, take him to your doctor or take him to the hospital, and if you want to, go up and take out a malicious cutting warrant.’” But the officer knew that the incident would end there. Mr. Clay would return soon enough, and life would go on as before.
All that remains of the episode is a few lines in the duty record book: “August 8, 1957—10:32 p.m., Mrs. Clay, cutting INV. [investigation] 330[2] Grand. NA [no arrest].”
CASSIUS MARCELLUS CLAY JR. grew up living in fear—fear of his father’s raised fist, the smell of alcohol on his breath, and his rising, angry voice bursting through the front door. He also feared what would happen if he did not heed his father’s warnings about the dangers lurking outside their home. Repeatedly, the man exhorted his boys: Don’t leave our neighborhood. Don’t go into white people’s stores. Don’t contradict a white man. Don’t look at white women. Don’t disobey policemen. And most importantly, don’t get arrested. “Our parents taught us to be safe,” said Bob Coleman, a childhood friend of Cassius Clay. “And they knew that if I got arrested by a policeman, there was nothing they could do to help me. It would be like I was lost to them. I would be on my own. That scared them as much as me.”3
Cassius Clay Sr. told parables that taught young Cassius and his brother Rudy about the world. All the stories had the same general theme: black men die after seemingly harmless encounters with white men. The murders, Clay Sr. insisted, were “legal lynchings.” They happened all the time, he said. “When I was a boy, seemed like every darned day you’d read in the paper about something like that: a lynching, a burning of a Negro, every day. Now wouldn’t that turn you against the white man? Nine or ten or twelve or fifteen cases like that a week?”4
The past haunted Clay Sr., and it lived on in the stories he told his sons. Living in a world of intolerable racism and violence, Clay Sr.’s frustration manifested in outward rage and loathing for the white man. As James Baldwin wrote in 1962, “The Negro’s past [was one] of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect.” In the words of Baldwin, this “hatred for white men [ran] so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.”5