Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [15]
When Sugar showed up at Loew’s, he was met by a young Clay who was gathering tread, if not much wisdom. He had been married and divorced from Sonji Roi, a petite woman with the slink and catlike knowing of an Eartha Kitt. Herbert Muhammad, son of Elijah, had introduced them and was amazed when Ali married her almost instantly. Sonji didn’t care about the Muslims; they were whacked-out robots to her. She saw Ali as a tender, confused man who didn’t know much. She tried to adapt to being a Muslim woman, no short skirts, no smoking, no painted face, yet he wanted her to reek sex when they were alone. Her sexual electricity overwhelmed him as well as the status of his own Muslim face. To Herbert, she was a bad influence. She was planting doubt. She wanted a house and family. Ali said the Muslim Mother Ship was going to bomb all the whites, pick up all the Muslims, no need of a house. Why then, she asked, was Elijah padding around in a mansion in Chicago?
Ali began to see her as a temptress, a betrayer. She had too much to say. The Muslims began to cast her as a mistake for Ali, a slick bar girl, a woman after his money, and circulated false rumors that she had been a hooker. She tried with Ali, but she wasn’t about to spend the rest of her life in long dresses and looking up to the sky for the Mother of Planes; it was insane, demeaning. They fought often, once so loud and physical that Sugar Ray raced into their room to intervene, and Ali warned him to go away or he was going to cut him up the way Jake LaMotta never did. Herbert, through Ali, forced her out. A member of Ali’s entourage years later capsulized his dilemma of spiritual loftiness and lust. “Aren’t we all hypocrites?” he said. “Ali wouldn’t think twice about that now.”
Malcolm X was gone, too, assassinated by the Muslims who feared his worldly new direction and his steady inquisition of Elijah’s financial practices and his diddling of young Muslim women. Malcolm saw Ali as a new kind of Muslim, wanted to protect him. They passed each other in Ghana airport, with Malcolm in a white robe and carrying a prophet’s staff. Ali turned to Herbert, laughing: “He’s so far out he’s out completely. Elijah is the most powerful. Nobody listens to Malcolm anymore.” It was Elijah, the prophet’s teachings, that had turned Malcolm from a drug pusher and a thief into a leader; that’s what Ali saw. Malcolm’s power belonged to the old man. His murder would jolt Ali, drive home a point that he had given no thought; the Muslims played for keeps.
In Africa to broaden his world appeal, Ali stayed long enough to insult the looks of Nigerian women and, saying it was just a little place, he beat it to Egypt, the fortress of mighty Islam and home to the women he had remembered from Cecil B. DeMille epics. Gamal Nasser, the leader of Egypt and irritant to U. S. policy, was the kind of messianic strongman Ali found hard to resist. He reacted to power, the real kind that could hurt people or save them. Power was impenetrable, spooky. Nasser was a basilisk of control. They sat in his office, and Ali was mesmerized when a single fly landed on Nasser’s prodigious nose and the great man made no unmessianic effort to disturb it until Ali wanted to swat it himself; power was about control. They drifted down the Nile together, Nasser in a shimmering white suit, being fanned, and later Ali in native dress rode a camel to the pyramids. Squinting up to the sun, he said: “No white devil make anything like this, could they?