Clay Sr. threw his entire body into the stories he told, twisting, snorting, huffing, and punctuating key points with a loud “Ummmmhmmmma” or an inopportune laugh. A natural storyteller, he moved gracefully from humor to tragedy, carrying the listener along with him.
He was an exasperated artist who earned a living as a sign painter. A wiry, dark-skinned man, opinionated and outspoken, he was not much of a fighter, except when he was drunk. Then he was apt to turn on his family. But he was also a teller of tall tales, most of which centered on his fantasy life. Given his mood of the moment, he might claim to be a Mexican, a Hindu, or an Arab. During his Mexican phase he wore a serape and took siestas. During his Arab period he called his second son Rudolph Valentino, after the actor who portrayed the Hollywood sheikh. A friend recalled that during Clay Sr.’s time as an Arab, he observed certain rituals. “At noon he used to get down off his painting ladder and in his little box he had a carpet and he’d put the carpet down and bow to the east and then bow to the west.”6
All his life Clay Sr. struggled. A friend of the family said he “enjoyed life,” by which he meant he took his pleasures where he found them and didn’t worry excessively about propriety and consequences. But a streak of anger, a sense of opportunities denied, ran like a river through his life. Had he been white, he thought, he would have been famous and wealthy. His murals on walls and churches in the West End of Louisville attested to his talents, and he could sing any song in his thin baritone. Yes, sir, he said, he could have been a great artist or recording star. Like the other greats, all he needed was a little more training. “Nat King Cole was nothing when he started out,” he said. “And Dean Martin was nothing. Frank Sinatra was sickening. Frank Sinatra was sickening!”7
CASSIUS CLAY JR. was a mama’s boy, handsome, sweet, and well liked. He feared his father, avoided violence, and abhorred alcohol. But in fundamental ways he was his father’s son, and he would become more so as the years passed. His father’s stories made all too much sense of the violent world inside and outside his home.
Two events were enough to confirm all of his father’s gruesome tales of horror. The first happened within a four-or five-minute drive of Clay’s home on Grand Avenue. In 1954 Andrew Wade IV, an African American electrician, and his wife, Charlotte, arranged for a white couple to purchase a house for them in an all-white suburban neighborhood. Their new neighbors immediately and angrily reacted, insisting that the Wades sell their house and move. When the Wades refused, they received ominous threats followed by a cross burning on their lawn. Later someone fired a rifle through a window in their house. Still, the Wades stayed put. Finally, on the night of June 27, 1954, while the Wades were gone for the evening, someone dynamited the house.8
There was no justice in the case. The person who ignited the bomb was never identified. And the Wades were forced to move into the segregated West End. It was another example of what Clay Sr. told his son: the white man doesn’t want you around. He explained that in America, the black man could never get ahead. Cassius asked why. If he worked hard, why couldn’t he become a rich man? Why couldn’t he share in the American Dream? His father pointed to the skin on Cassius’s arm: “Look there, that’s why you can’t be rich.”9
The second event—and for Cassius the more emotionally searing—occurred the following summer. Emmett Till’s mother had packed him off to visit family members in Money, Mississippi, and not long after his arrival in the small town, he and his cousin and several local boys went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. While in the store, Till whistled while speaking to Carolyn Bryant. It may have been a wolf whistle, as some recalled, or perhaps due to his problem pronouncing “b”-words, he whistled before asking for bubble gum. Regardless, Bryant later told her husband that Till had made a pass at her. Enraged, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam went after Till. They pulled him from his uncle’s home, pistol-whipped him, beat him, and finally shot him in the head. Then they attached a heavy cotton-gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and dumped him into the Tallahatchie River.