Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [39]
By 1968 he was ready for the colleges, lined up for him by the Dick Fulton Speakers Bureau. He had worked hard on the little cards that contained his subject matter, gleaned from the Bible, the Qur’an, and Elijah’s messages. Belinda helped him with his writing and spelling. The lectures made him feel significant in a different way, that he was tossing nets into the sea for Elijah, that he was an inside player in some large conspiracy for right. “I loved it,” he remembered later, “meetin’ students, the black power groups, the white hippies, and we’d all have sessions and dinner was then planned in the hall, and we’d go to the Student Union buildin’ and I’d give my talk and then they’d ask me questions, all the boys and girls, black and white. Like what should we do, or what do you think is gonna happen, you know—just like I was one of those sleepy-lookin’ senators at the Capitol.”
The audiences were not all so convivial or supportive. Some middle-class schools greeted him as a rather quaint figure, the Ivies examined him the way they would iridescent flora, while others saw him as the leading act of a touring revue. In the main, though, he was being heard, and he seldom lost the crowds. There were often snickers and loud hecklers, whom he fumbled with at first, then learned to handle with the ease of a nightclub comic. His rap was the usual that had appeared in one form or another over the years, now much smoother and elongated, delivered with the cadence of a ring-wise preacher. At a white college in Buffalo, he looked at the many signs behind his platform, reading: LBJ, HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY? He wouldn’t speak until they were removed. He sniffed the air for the smell of pot.
Seldom has a public figure of such superficial depth been more wrongly perceived—by the right and the left; he was reminiscent of the simple Chauncey Gardener in Being There by Jerzy Kosinski; for his every utterance, heavy breathing from the know-nothings to the trendy tasters of faux revolution. In the mangle of cross-purposes of the sixties, Ali looked down a clear sight. He was not about the antiwar movement; that was peripheral, a college-kid issue that he tolerated and used. “You see,” he’d say, going into his wallet, “I ain’t burned my draft card.” He was not about the counterculture, and certainly not women’s rights; in his view both were avenues of disintegration, if he ever thought about them at all. Ali was about Ali—for his right to work and the teachings of Elijah that nourished him.
The “briefcase of truth” that he took on the road was given other resonance. Each group would attach their own values to him, just as Chauncey’s talk of topsoil and the life cycle of the rhododendron was inflated into comic wisdom. Being There could be seen as a remark on the sixties, the willingness, the desperation to believe anybody in the face of intellectually destitute leaders, searching, confused, perhaps evil in blind resolution. Ali could not have picked a better time for campus exposure. The social and political climate finally matched him stride for stride. An old America had abused his rights and isolated him, now a new one was suddenly by his side. It was a sky lit with the celebration of chaos. The atmosphere was caught perfectly by Saul Bellow in his novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, when old Sammler, eternal student of the mind