Malcolm’s message sounded to Clay like a voice from a burning bush. At a moment when the world seemed to doubt him, the man Cassius greatly admired never lost faith. Malcolm filled him with confidence. And if he said that Allah had ordained a victory, then it must be true. Malcolm, Cassius believed, only spoke the truth. But he’d told him a lie, the same lie that he told reporters and himself: that he would be reinstated within ninety days.22
Malcolm was living in the past. At some level, he must have realized that he would never return to the Nation, but he still held out hope that he would reconcile with Elijah. He desperately wanted to believe it, and he convinced Cassius. Throughout January and early February, he wrote the Messenger, pleading for reinstatement, but he received only silence from Chicago. Most likely, Malcolm’s enemies intercepted his letters before they ever reached Elijah. The silence troubled him, making him even more desperate to do something to restore his place in the Nation.23
THE ONLY THING that Angelo Dundee knew about Malcolm X was what he had read in the papers, and he mostly read the sports pages. He knew that Malcolm had said something incendiary about President Kennedy, but he did not realize that the man reporters described as “the violently anti-white New York chief of the Muslims” would be in Miami celebrating Cassius’s twenty-second birthday. Seeing him in the flesh made the trainer nervous. Malcolm wore a broad, casual smile that never touched his eyes, a mask that seemed more threatening than friendly. But nothing startled Angelo more than when he saw Cassius “involved in a deep conversation with Malcolm X.”24
Sam Saxon was similarly surprised to see Malcolm hanging around the gym. He knew that the suspended minister was not there to trade small talk. Earlier, Malcolm had asked him, “If I go over to the gym, would I hurt Brother Cassius?”
“Hell, yeah, man. Everybody knows you,” Captain Sam replied. He suggested that Malcolm go nowhere near 5th Street. Malcolm said nothing, but a few hours later he showed up at the gym. Saxon noticed that whenever reporters came around to see Cassius, Malcolm talked to them. And anytime a photographer snapped photos of the contender, Malcolm maneuvered in front of the camera.25
Malcolm knew exactly what he was doing. If Elijah never accepted him back into the Nation, then he had to consider an exit strategy that would force Cassius to walk in his shoes. Talking to reporters while photographers took his picture with Cassius violated the terms of his suspension. More importantly, he understood that all Muslims, including Cassius, were prohibited from speaking with him. If anyone in Chicago learned that Clay had disobeyed the Messenger, perhaps Elijah would have no choice but to punish the boxer too. Then Cassius would clearly understand Elijah’s vindictive nature and Malcolm would not have to convince him of it. It seemed like a good plan, but Elijah didn’t fall for the trap.
Angelo suspected that Malcolm was up to something but was not sure what. He seldom pried into Cassius’s private life, but when outsiders stepped into his gym, his sanctuary, and disrupted training, he voiced his displeasure. This was no time for distractions, he told Clay. They were about a month away from the biggest fight of his career. He refused to let anyone, especially some guy named “X,” cost Clay the title.
Dundee had already started losing patience with Cassius. Sometimes the boxer simply ignored his instructions. It seemed that he didn’t listen to anybody except the Muslims, and now he was looking to Malcolm for training advice, financial counsel, and emotional support. It was nearly impossible to carry on an actual conversation with him. “Nobody ever talks with Cassius,” Clay’s fight doctor Ferdie Pacheco observed. “You listen to him. This man known all over the world for his mouth can’t even converse. You don’t get an exchange of ideas. He doesn’t even hear you.” Pacheco was wrong on one point: Clay heard who he wanted to hear.26
When Dundee saw Cassius talking with Malcolm, he pulled his boxer into a corner of the gym and made sure that he heard him clearly. “Get that guy out of here,” he said. Clay assured him that Malcolm was leaving town the next night.27
What he didn’t tell Angelo was that he was going with him.
On Tuesday, January 21, two days after Betty and the children departed Miami, Malcolm, Cassius, and Archie Robinson flew to New York. Malcolm was worried about going home. In Harlem, where he once ruled the streets, he now had to look over his shoulder. He was not entirely sure who he could trust at Mosque No. 7. Searching to “find some way to defend” himself, he wrote in his journal, he had “to retaliate against those enemies without hurting [Elijah].”28