Blood Brothers (24 page)

After the call from Ponder, the phone rang again. A reporter from the
New York Times
also wanted to know if there was any truth about the plot to kill the new president. “The whole idea is ridiculous!” Malcolm declared. For an hour, reporters from all over the country dialed his number, inquiring about the assassination rumors and his suspension. Finally, the phone stopped ringing. After being badgered for an hour, Malcolm turned to a personal matter and called a friend in Miami to tell him that he was bringing Betty and their children to visit. “That's the best news I've heard all day!” Cassius Clay said. “Me and Brother Archie will pick you up.”
¹¹

After the call ended, an FBI agent listening to their conversation contacted the Miami field office and instructed agents to tail a 1963 Chrysler with Florida license plate 1E-16521. The New York agent stressed that it was important that they follow the car to the airport the next day and “determine” the purpose of the “subject's activities” in Miami.
¹²

The next morning, Cassius and Archie Robinson greeted Malcolm and his family at the airport. Smiling as he shook Malcolm's hand, Clay showed no fear of being seen with the suspended minister, whom he
called his “brother.” After he hugged Sister Betty and lifted her three little girls up into his arms, Cassius, Archie, and Malcolm's family packed into the Chrysler and headed to Brownsville, a segregated, middle-class black neighborhood.
¹³

Sam Saxon, the Miami mosque captain since the late 1950s, was a little surprised to see Malcolm. Clay's fight against Liston was still more than a month away. Malcolm told the brothers in Miami that he and Betty were celebrating their first vacation in more than six years. But he wasn't on vacation. Malcolm, Saxon soon realized, “had another agenda in mind.”
¹⁴

Malcolm and his family checked into the Hampton House Motel on Northwest Twenty-Seventh Avenue. A popular retreat for black tourists and locals, some of the most famous figures in America had booked one of the balconied rooms. Considered more glamorous than the black hotels in Overtown, the Hampton House was a resort, featuring valet parking, a courtyard swimming pool, a restaurant, and a jazz club famous for its mixed-race sessions lasting until sunrise.
¹⁵

When he was not training, Clay visited the Hampton House and played with Malcolm's daughters, teasing them like a big brother. Watching Cassius entertain them made Malcolm smile and, for a moment, forget all about his troubles. “I liked him,” Malcolm later admitted. “Betty liked him. Our children were crazy about him.” Watching her husband interact with Cassius, Betty could see that Malcolm “loved him like a younger brother.”
¹⁶

Cassius brought out Malcolm's warm, playful side. The minister laughed as he snapped pictures of the boxer clowning for his camera. But the pictures Malcolm took were not for a family photo album. In a private notebook, he began constructing photo captions and a narrative he entitled, “The Other Side of Malcolm: The Family Man.” The notebook and accompanying photos of Cassius, Malcolm, and his daughters, which were published in two black newspapers, the
Chicago Defender
and the
New York Amsterdam News
, suggest that he had begun to fashion a less threatening image of himself, one of a loving father and husband and an older brother to Cassius, someone more acceptable in the mainstream civil rights movement. It was also no coincidence that the pictures were published in the two cities where his enemies in the Nation could not miss them.
¹⁷

In the early evenings, Malcolm walked with Cassius on the streets of Brownsville while FBI agents trailed closely behind. In all the time that they had spent together, in storefront mosques and crowded temples, in private meetings and family gatherings, Malcolm had learned that Cassius was an impressionable, inquisitive youngster who absorbed everything that he taught.

Cassius, he recognized, was perfect for his plan. He was a one-man publicity machine, capable of attracting Malcolm's desired audience: young, idealistic, angry black men. Cassius, Malcolm told a reporter, “[has] as much untapped mental energy as he has physical power.” He possessed incredible potential to be something much more than a boxer. Studying Cassius with a crowd of journalists and a mob of black admirers, Malcolm could imagine him as a political force—someone “who should be a diplomat,” traveling the world with him, galvanizing a human rights movement at home and abroad.
¹⁸

Whether Malcolm returned to the Nation or not, Cassius was ideally suited to follow him, to use his platform as a boxer to mobilize poor, disfranchised black Americans. Cassius, Malcolm noticed, “knows how to handle people, to get them functioning. He gains strength from being around people.” He could draw people in, shape their perceptions, and make them believe what Malcolm wanted them to believe.
¹⁹

Nothing seemed to rattle Clay. “He has tremendous self-confidence,” Malcolm observed. “I've never heard him mention fear.” Perhaps he did not realize the depth of Malcolm's problem. His public relationship with Malcolm irritated the Nation's officials in Chicago, especially Elijah Muhammad. The Supreme Minister had directed all followers to avoid the censured minister, but Cassius had disobeyed him.
²⁰

In Miami, Malcolm became convinced that his future with the Nation depended on Clay winning the heavyweight championship. While most doubted his chances of beating Liston, Malcolm bolstered Clay's inner strength, telling him that he was too smart, too fast, and too big to lose the fight. And Allah, he preached, had ordained that Clay would win. He believed in Clay so much that he called Alex Haley in New York and told him that if Haley bet on his friend, the underdog, he would win big. This fight was more than just another athletic contest; it was part of his larger plan. Clay would not just win, he would deliver a message—a message inspired by Malcolm.
²¹

Malcolm's message sounded to Clay like a voice from a burning bush. At a moment when the world seemed to doubt him, the man Cassius greatly admired never lost faith. Malcolm filled him with confidence. And if he said that Allah had ordained a victory, then it must be true. Malcolm, Cassius believed, only spoke the truth. But he'd told him a lie, the same lie that he told reporters and himself: that he would be reinstated within ninety days.
²²

Malcolm was living in the past. At some level, he must have realized that he would never return to the Nation, but he still held out hope that he would reconcile with Elijah. He desperately wanted to believe it, and he convinced Cassius. Throughout January and early February, he wrote the Messenger, pleading for reinstatement, but he received only silence from Chicago. Most likely, Malcolm's enemies intercepted his letters before they ever reached Elijah. The silence troubled him, making him even more desperate to do something to restore his place in the Nation.
²³

T
HE ONLY THING
that Angelo Dundee knew about Malcolm X was what he had read in the papers, and he mostly read the sports pages. He knew that Malcolm had said something incendiary about President Kennedy, but he did not realize that the man reporters described as “the violently anti-white New York chief of the Muslims” would be in Miami celebrating Cassius's twenty-second birthday. Seeing him in the flesh made the trainer nervous. Malcolm wore a broad, casual smile that never touched his eyes, a mask that seemed more threatening than friendly. But nothing startled Angelo more than when he saw Cassius “involved in a deep conversation with Malcolm X.”
²⁴

Sam Saxon was similarly surprised to see Malcolm hanging around the gym. He knew that the suspended minister was not there to trade small talk. Earlier, Malcolm had asked him, “If I go over to the gym, would I hurt Brother Cassius?”

“Hell, yeah, man. Everybody knows you,” Captain Sam replied. He suggested that Malcolm go nowhere near 5th Street. Malcolm said nothing, but a few hours later he showed up at the gym. Saxon noticed that whenever reporters came around to see Cassius, Malcolm talked to them. And anytime a photographer snapped photos of the contender, Malcolm maneuvered in front of the camera.
²⁵

Malcolm knew exactly what he was doing. If Elijah never accepted him back into the Nation, then he had to consider an exit strategy that would force Cassius to walk in his shoes. Talking to reporters while photographers took his picture with Cassius violated the terms of his suspension. More importantly, he understood that all Muslims, including Cassius, were prohibited from speaking with him. If anyone in Chicago learned that Clay had disobeyed the Messenger, perhaps Elijah would have no choice but to punish the boxer too. Then Cassius would clearly understand Elijah's vindictive nature and Malcolm would not have to convince him of it. It seemed like a good plan, but Elijah didn't fall for the trap.

Angelo suspected that Malcolm was up to something but was not sure what. He seldom pried into Cassius's private life, but when outsiders stepped into
his
gym, his sanctuary, and disrupted training, he voiced his displeasure. This was no time for distractions, he told Clay. They were about a month away from the biggest fight of his career. He refused to let anyone, especially some guy named “X,” cost Clay the title.

Dundee had already started losing patience with Cassius. Sometimes the boxer simply ignored his instructions. It seemed that he didn't listen to anybody except the Muslims, and now he was looking to Malcolm for training advice, financial counsel, and emotional support. It was nearly impossible to carry on an actual conversation with him. “Nobody ever talks
with
Cassius,” Clay's fight doctor Ferdie Pacheco observed. “You listen
to
him. This man known all over the world for his mouth can't even converse. You don't get an exchange of ideas. He doesn't even hear you.” Pacheco was wrong on one point: Clay heard who he wanted to hear.
²⁶

When Dundee saw Cassius talking with Malcolm, he pulled his boxer into a corner of the gym and made sure that he heard him clearly. “Get that guy out of here,” he said. Clay assured him that Malcolm was leaving town the next night.
²⁷

What he didn't tell Angelo was that he was going with him.

On Tuesday, January 21, two days after Betty and the children departed Miami, Malcolm, Cassius, and Archie Robinson flew to New York. Malcolm was worried about going home. In Harlem, where he once ruled the streets, he now had to look over his shoulder. He was not
entirely sure who he could trust at Mosque No. 7. Searching to “find some way to defend” himself, he wrote in his journal, he had “to retaliate against those enemies without hurting [Elijah].”
²⁸

He knew that he was not safe around the mosque or the Rockland Palace Ballroom on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, where the Fruit of Islam had planned a dinner. So he sent Cassius Clay to the dinner in his place. On their flight from Miami, Malcolm had tutored Cassius, outlining a speech for him and explaining that some Muslims might not approve of their friendship, and the two had continued to rehearse the speech at Malcolm's home in Long Island. Malcolm told Cassius that he wished he could go with him, but that that was not possible because he had a prior engagement.
²⁹

In front of about 1,200 Muslims, Clay delivered what Archie Robinson claimed was “an impromptu speech.” “There wasn't anything planned,” Malcolm's aide falsely insisted.
³⁰

“I'm a race man,” Clay began, “and every time I go to a Muslim meeting I get inspired.” The crowd thundered with applause as Cassius grinned with gratification. “I'm a free man, and I'm talking so much because of the [Muslims'] teachings.”
³¹

Sonny Liston, according to Cassius, was not a race man like him. In poetry, he attacked his opponent as a race traitor, living next door to white people.

He's not doing as he should,

Because he lives in a white neighborhood.

And because he doesn't like black,

I'm going to put him on his back!

Again, a loud burst of laughter and applause. Cassius insisted that because he was a Muslim, he was purer than Liston too. He didn't smoke, didn't drink, and had never been arrested like Sonny. “I'm training on lamb chops and that big ugly bear is training on pork chops!”
³²

Then Cassius walked into a bear trap. He announced that he'd had another advantage during training in Miami: the wisdom imparted by his brother, Malcolm X. When Cassius declared that he was proud to walk the streets with Malcolm, the mood of the evening changed. The crowd was stunned. No one in the mosque talked publicly about
Malcolm, let alone called him brother. An informant told the FBI that “the Muslims were very cold towards” Cassius for “defending Minister Malcolm,” especially after “the Messenger had said to put him down.”
³³

When William C. Sullivan, the assistant director of the FBI, learned about Clay's presence at the Muslims' dinner, he concluded that the boxer had joined the Nation of Islam. A few weeks earlier, Sullivan had circulated a memo among leading FBI officials encouraging a counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) to discredit Malcolm, Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther King, and other prominent black figures. Special agents working in the Bureau's covert program had infiltrated organizations like the Nation of Islam, disrupted their activities through wiretaps, surveillance, forged documents, and blackmail, and planted false media stories. Armed with information about Clay's affiliations, Sullivan tipped off the press and added his name to a list of NOI targets.
³⁴

The day after his speech, reports about Clay and the Muslims appeared in New York newspapers. The
Herald Tribune
's Dick Schaap, who had known Cassius since his amateur boxing days, was not sure if the fighter was “a card-carrying Muslim,” but he had no doubt that he sympathized with the Nation. “If Clay shares the anti-white sentiments of the Black Muslims,” he wrote, “he has always disguised his feelings well.” Although he had interviewed Malcolm in the past, when Schaap investigated the minister's relationship with the boxer, he learned very little. “Malcolm won't say anything publicly,” an acquaintance told Schaap, “and the one subject he won't talk about even privately is Cassius Clay.”
³⁵