• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 605 0

just about threatened out of retirement, was selected to remove the “bad nigger.” Calling him Master Jeff, Jack whipped Jeffries on July 4,1910. Afterward, there was social chaos. Blacks took over a town in West Virginia for hours. In Georgia, three blacks were killed in a gun battle. Two more were attacked in Oklahoma by a man with a knife who claimed he was the second cousin of John L. Sullivan. Marines were sent to Norfolk, Virginia, and anger combusted in Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Maryland, and other places. The toll was 19 dead, 249 injured, and nearly 5,000 arrested. Big Jack was then pursued “legally.” Accused of everything but incest, he was later arrested under the Mann Act, a “white slaving” law so obscurely written to include any man who motored a woman across a state line (wives excluded) and had sex with her. He was never caught in the act; sex was presumed since he had made countless trips with a woman named Belle Sheiber. An all-white jury convicted, and he drew a year in prison. Johnson jumped to Europe, where he dissipated his body and money. In 1915, he agreed to meet a new white hope, Jess Willard, in Cuba, where he was counted out in the twenty-sixth round—one hand shielding his eyes from the sun, a hint for experts years later that Jack had come up with his own plea bargain and that, rather than true defeat, he had wearily resigned from office.

Imagination had been vital to the ring’s popularity; look at the old newsreels and study the eyes by the radio bringing a big fight. A man could go out and hit a ball, catch a pass; he could relate physically to these things. To hit or be hit in the face, to have your masculinity so nakedly tested, that was something else; visualized, yes, but still incomprehensible, a mystery. The great fighter was distant, a man to be invented and shaped by the fan’s imagination. The less you knew about him the better; it added immensely to the suspense, their expectations, to a ritual of instant reckoning, made important and deadly by the nonverbal hostility that ran through it; words only diluted that starkness and aloneness of the ritual that most men felt and few wanted to enter.

As a radio fighter, Ali would have been far less inciting. Words were not ready for his act, could never have fixed him in the public mind or accurately brought his talent to life. Seeing him as a radio fighter, though, is time-machine fantasy. Given the racial climate of the radio days, Ali as we know him could never have been—not even as the pre-Muslim Clay. Imagine the young Clay listening to instructions the way Joe Louis did in his early days; his handlers tutored him often with regard to public table manners and inoffensive commentary. But with TV, Ali had the good fortune to have a medium that seemed to be invented for him. He didn’t pervade it, he invaded, demanding that you become a participant in his career, a rapt listener to his egoistic mantra. If your mind was still on Louis or Marciano, the old matrix for the hero, get it off there and start moving; this, he was the new age. He seemed to know instinctively what it was about, the shameless selling of self, breakfast cereal and audience. “Be pretty, be loud,” he’d say, “and keep their black hatin’ asses in the livin’ room.” Going into exile, Clay had defamed “the office” for white Americans; he might be “the new man” as he claimed, but not one with manhood or courage and, worse, with no mind of his own.

In the forties, Louisville, which thrived on blooded horses, bourbon, and tobacco, had the feel of a plantation big house, was seen to have a sensibility about race not like the rest of the South. Space and humanity for all; the reality was just don’t get near the corn bread cooling on the porch. The Clays lived on the crowded West Side, and as in all ghetto cultures, distinctions were made about the quality of blackness, sometimes expressed aloud in street verse: White, you’re right/Light, you can fight/Brown, stand around/Black, stand back. The theme of lightness and blackness is in a lot of black literature. Wallace Thurman’s