Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [29]
Tension and sudden anger threatened the family at all times. In the presence of his father over the years, Ali was seldom at ease, and not only because he had to stand between his father and the Muslims. He never stopped listening for intonation of behavior that might signal combustion. A family friend explained to Jack Olsen: “There’s more apt to be a violent strain in a smart Negro family than in a dumb one. Dumb ones go their way like animals…just like dumb white ones. But the smart black could feel the pain of what was happenin’ around him, and at the same time there wasn’t a thing he can do about it, ’cept make it worse. Sometimes this passed down to the kids. And every once in a while somebody shakes the whole soda bottle, and it explodes.” Cash’s brother, a top mathematician, committed suicide. Odessa was of Irish descent, and said: “Ain’t a thing I can do about it.”
Police would sometimes show up at Grand Street. One night they found Odessa in a rage. Nothing had been done to her, but Cassius had a bleeding gash on his thigh; he told the cops he had fallen on a milk bottle. They let the incident slide after telling her that she “could take out a malicious cutting warrant.” On another occasion, Rudy flew at the father when he tried to tee off on Odessa, and he had to be sent to live with friends. But Cash was not really a violent man. It was just the gin that sometimes touched him off and heightened the futility caught by the poet Langston Hughes…“liable to be confusion…when a dream gets kicked around.”
Ali liked to recount dreams he had as a young kid, some that left numbing fear, beckoning death, escape, suspense, and the spectacular. In one he was on top of the Empire State Building. “Everybody lookin’ at me. Thinkin’ I’m gonna kill myself. Firemen and police tryin’ to talk me out of it on a loudspeaker. ‘Don’t jump!’ And I say, ‘I’m gettin’ ready.’ So I jump and stop right in the air. Flap my wings like one of those little birds in Disney movies. Everybody’s faintin’ and screamin’…Oooooooh! Then, I just float down and land on my feet. Then, I wake up.”
His first contact with boxing came when he nearly knocked Joe Martin over after his bike was stolen. He was crying, his body trembling. Martin was a cop and head of the Louisville Recreation Center, one of those anonymous people who often show up early in great careers, who grapple with raw material and point the way. He also had a periodic TV show called Tomorrow’s Champions in which he would showcase boxing talent. “No, I can’t fight a lick,” the kid told Martin. “He was all of eighty-nine pounds,” Martin would recall, “and his hands shook as I laced the gloves on him, but when he walked out of that ring he was all smiles.” Three months of training, and he was on his first TV card.
Boxing brought a change in Cassius. No longer did he brood around the house, and adolescent games seemed beneath him; he expected people on the streets to know who he was. “I’d never seen a kid so taken by boxing like him,” Martin said. His education took a step down. He had no interest, he would say, “because there was no future in schoolin’, ’cause I knew too many who had it and were layin’ ’round on corners.” Martin had him for 106 amateur fights and until age eighteen. He noticed much about him. His mind was a jungle of fears. Of ghosts, violence, blood, “you name it,” Martin said. He was emotionally wild before a fight. “He’d build himself up into a regular frenzy,” Martin said, “letting that fear out by tormenting his opponent.