Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [58]
The Uncle Tom epithet tripped so incessantly from Ali’s lips, and now from the crowd around the gym, that Joe might as well have been wearing a sign. His son, Marvis, had to defend himself and his father in school. The phone calls came day and night, some calling him a tommin’ dog, others vowing that he would never see another day if he beat Ali. The label hadn’t stuck with Patterson and Terrell, but it was isolating him to a speck of a man, right in his own town, in his own gym, except for one brave soul who showed up each day with Joe’s name tattooed on his back. Frazier had police guarding him around the clock, and it seemed remarkable that he did not teeter into disorientation, that the job ahead stayed fixed in his mind. It got to Durham finally. One day, without warning, the gym almost empty, Yank picked up a water pail and slammed it repeatedly against a ring post. “It’s a damn shame what Clay’s doin’ to my boy,” he said, then kicked the smashed pail with full force up over the ropes.
Young white men, Jews, Italians, Irish, Hispanic, never have to fret much about their racial character. In these times, perhaps always so, young blacks were forced to dwell on the steps to be taken on the wavy line of their existence, of going along or burning down, and this was no time to be neutral. In this regard, where had Frazier failed the test, a young kid run out of town by his mother in fear for his life, while the young Ali, understandably, sucked and slurped the big orange of the Louisville rich and fingered the laurel wreath of wide recognition from hometown whites? Move back three decades, and Frazier had a ring DNA similar to that of Joe Louis, self-effacing, reticent, and worshipped by all blacks. Long after his career, he would say on the subject of Ali: “I don’t believe in the separation of races.” Where, then, was the justice? “There ain’t none,” Frazier said. “Not for me. It eats at me, but I don’t let on and don’t forget. He uses his blackness to kick up a stir, get people excited, maybe convince himself of somethin’, then he’s gone. He thinks no hurt’s left behind. What he ever do for people but give ’em a lot of silly words?”
He added: “He’s no martyr. The heroes are them kids with their pieces of body all over Vietnam, a lot of poor blacks. I don’t care about his draft thing. His politics. His religion. But he ain’t no leader of anything. He stop the war? How do people buy his shit?”
From an irrational rouser for a pseudo Master Race (Bundini said: “Only two kinds of blacks to the Muzzies—niggers and themselves!”) and now to a brave, slashing avatar of black thinking, Ali seemed to have a whole nation in stride, the prime figure ready for the gladrags of empty, make-believe sixties radicalism. Young blacks bought the whole hog, not knowing or caring that the Muslims had him in a choke collar and a leash, taking no notice that he had, with great arrogance, betrayed another hero of large appeal, Malcolm X. Black magazines, confused about whether they were MLK passives or Stokely Carmichael’s troopers, slew Frazier’s blackness at every turn. In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver had his say on Ali as a race dragon: “A slave in private life, a king in public—this is the life that every black champion has had to lead.” He called Ali the first “free” black