Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [38]
Belinda recounted how Ali pressed her hard for premarital sex, even bringing the equal of Vatican authority to the problem. The son of Elijah, his own manager, Herbert Muhammad himself, “said it was okay.” He’d have done better introducing the name of someone who ran an escort service. Herbert! Never mind whether or not old Elijah fiddled in the mansion, and Herbert wafted through the streets like an unchained sexual melody, Belinda Boyd would not defy her Muslim teachings; besides, her parents would turn her into one of whitey’s Boston cream pies if they ever found out. Ali would have to take a cold shower. If she had been suspicious of Herbert, an old family friend, she would now not trust him at all.
The couple settled in a small South Chicago house. Belinda was real bunker material. She was not afraid of hardship. She sewed her own clothes, cooked, and each morning Ali drove her to school. Later she would become proficient in karate—regrettably, for Ali—and study photography. Right now, she was learning to type so she could answer his letters. In ankle-length Muslim dress around the house, she was of impenetrable visage, polite and careful to his each stage mark for a Muslim wife when around reporters. “Belinda doesn’t talk much,” it was pointed out to him. He answered rather proudly: “That’s ’cause she ain’t got nothin’ to say. I do the talkin’.” What was his view of women—outside of a four-poster bed? “Our women,” he said, “should be honored, but they should understand their inferiority. Man gotta look down on women, and women up to men whether they standin’ up or layin’ down. I don’t take any sass.” He called out for his food: “Belinda! What you doin’ with that meal?” Soon eating, he called out again.
“Belinda, bring me a diet Coke!”
“Belinda, bring the steak!”
“Belinda, bring the brown sugar!”
Requests granted, he said: “The okra’s too runny. The steak’s too tough. Bring me the chicken.”
“It’s cold,” she said.
“Bring it anyway.”
In company, she never sat at the table, and when he drove her to school, if there was a visitor, he ordered her into the backseat; forget about opening the door for her as she left. By every action, she seemed intent on showing the Muslim husband as disciplinarian, as the center of unrelieved attention. In the sixties, her kind of marital comportment attracted a blizzard of thrown bras. But a Muslim marriage, for a wife, was a delicate transaction: public servitude for private rule. Behind closed doors, he listened, she talked, much more as she got older, and her influence would not go unnoticed by Herbert Muhammad.
Belinda was the easy part of the show, sincere and natural in her role. The trouble was that Ali could never find his character, or kept blurring the lines. What did he want the world to believe during this period of stress and trial, for he always wanted it to believe something. Like when he used to take a limo and chauffeur up to Harlem, stop it suddenly, go into a small joint and order a $1.50 hamburger, and then leave behind the desired effect: Yeah, brother, you got the machine, you got the steam, but you know where you come from. Politicians and evangelists have been working this corn forever. Anyway, for now, what he wanted to illustrate were a number of things: his true Muslim marriage; his self-reliance; the wall of Muslim caring and protectiveness around him; his supreme indifference to money and boxing, “a white European sport invented by lowdown animals.”
And the press, he figured, would corroborate all of the above. If he held an impromptu press conference, he’d count heads: “Is the AP here? I see. The UPI? Good. Anybody from Time? No. Newsweek? No again. Guess they can’t make any money since I’m gone. Television? Where you