Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [28]
The Clays were strivers, ambitious and makers of plans—without destination or a ladder. They lived in a one-floor, four-room clapboard house on Grand Avenue. Odessa was a cleaning lady in white mansions, while Cassius Sr. was a sign painter, occasionally doing murals in churches for twenty-five dollars and a chicken dinner. The son watched from a distance in the church darkness, better to see the assorted seraphim gaining shape on the clouds. “His crucifixions,” Clay would say later, “like to make me cry.” He once asked Odessa: “Mama, is you white lady, or is you colored lady?” and to Cash: “Why Jesus always white?” A rhetorical stone he would skip across many future Muslim rants. “Because,” his father said, “we supposed not to know who we are, and the white man thinks he knows who he is, so he the only one can tell what Jesus is or isn’t. So he thinks.”
Neither parent saw himself or herself as poor. Clay didn’t either until he nearly hit bedrock trying to align himself to a desolate, more suitable reality for his Muslim autobiography. He insisted he was a child of the slums, how he was left to roam the streets in tatters, how he was so hungry. His father had to put cardboard in his secondhand shoes. His clothes came from Goodwill. The house was nearly falling down; the roof leaked, the toilet didn’t flush. He and his brother, Rudy, seldom had bus fare for school. I asked his parents one night over drinks in New York about his son’s claim of early poverty. Odessa just smiled placidly, shook her head with resignation; his father said, “Sheeeeeit.”
Odessa was full of laughter, gracious, with an infectious gentleness that often could be seen in Ali. He got his flair, his paradoxes, his quickness to invent new exteriors and much more of a darker nature from his father. Cash was a shape-shifter, a puzzle on the wind. Grab a piece, and you’d have the neglected artist who saw a small facility as a major talent denied. “I think I’ll paint the Mona Lisa,” he’d say, “and jazz her up some.” He once looked at the tomato cans of Andy Warhol and said: “Ain’t them white folks got some scams, my, my.” He then seemed visibly depressed over some lost opportunity that only he seemed to understand. “This joker can’t hold a candle to me,” he said. Grab several other pieces, and you’d have a thwarted dancer, a singer, and a true romantic who was certain he resembled Rudolph Valentino, screen idol of the twenties.
Cash slipped into many shapes. If he was in a Hindu mood, he’d take a rug, stretch it out under the sign he was working, kneel on it, and begin to chant. As a Mexican he’d sport a sombrero and pretend he was taking a siesta. His longest-running part was that of the Sheik (Valentino’s character), and he strode around with a tasseled hat and a shawl slung over his shoulder. The quick-change roles seemed to provide an exotic, safe haven from frustrations that sapped his spirit. He was a few shades darker than his son, a fact that he would lament or boast about depending on his mood. “Old Cash,” a friend of his said once, “knows a lot ’bout color in a painting, but he sure don’t know what color he is.” When Clay became known and the press came around the house, he was fond of saying: “I’m Arab. Don’t I look like an Arab? Damn sure.”
“Looville ain’t no prize,” the father said. “They just sneakier here about race.” He once put his sons in line at the Kentucky State Fair, saying, “You all are first now. Stand right there. Don’t let nobody get in front of you.” A white lady heard him, and she yelled: “Lookee here, you’re still in the