Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: A Book Brings a Black Hero to Life
BECOMING MUHAMMAD ALI
Written by James Patterson and Kwame Alexander
Illustrated by Dawud Anyabwile
Some people move through the world in italics, the rest of us in unadorned, austere typeface. These lightning-bolt figures are poetry surrounded by prose. So it was with Muhammad Ali and so it is in this vivid retelling of the legendary boxer’s youth. “Becoming Muhammad Ali” brings prose, poetry and full-page illustration together to tell this story, as if to say the teenage Cassius Clay can’t be contained in just one kind of narrative vessel. A fitting framework for a book about a sublimely gifted pugilist who spoke in rhyming couplets.
“Becoming Muhammad Ali” is narrated in part by a childhood friend of Clay’s named Lucius, or Lucky for short. He introduces us to a world outside the ring: 1958 Louisville. A place with Whites Only signs that Clay’s father painted hanging over stores where neither he nor his son was permitted entry. A place with proprietors who would refuse a thirsty child a glass of water.
The poem “Signs My Father Painted,” in a single page, ably accomplishes the task of world-building, pulling the veil back on a place riddled with contradiction at the center of which sits Black America: “Colored Waiting Room / This Way for Fun — Fontaine Ferry Park / Whites Only / Segregation Is Immoral.”
But “Becoming Muhammad Ali” isn’t the typical overcoming-the-odds tale about how difficult it is, and always has been, to be Black in America. It celebrates Blackness. Clay recalls his Granddaddy Herman’s living room as if it were church: “Ebony magazine / was his bible.” Elsewhere, Clay states, “I am from Sunday fried chicken and chocolate birthday cakes, / from Levy Brothers’ slacks and shiny white shoes, / from Cash and Bird, / from storytellers and good looks, / from don’t say you can’t till you try.” In “My Friends,” Clay makes a ballad of his friends’ nicknames and the coltish, whimsical ways they earned them.
The poetry of Clay’s inner life takes up most of the book, the meter varying to distinguish a young boy’s observations from his conversations with the figures around him. It makes for a kinetic, dazzling experience, to which Lucius’ charming prose perspective is a necessary counterweight. Through him, we receive a multifaceted picture of Black boyhood: admiration for his superhuman friend destined for greatness, awareness that their Blackness means they must move through the world differently from their white counterparts, emotional acuity in the boys’ love for each other. It’s all there. I wished only that Patterson and Alexander had provided more of it.
Clay doesn’t have his radioactive spider moment until halfway through the book, a staccato sequence in which he descends into the bowels of a building to uncover a boxing gym. By then, we’ve seen him rejoice over a new bike, learn card tricks from Granddaddy Herman, protect his friends from bullies, stare at the stars, race a school bus and be shy with a girl. We’ve seen him, in short, be a Black boy, which is the gift of this book, the prism through which the myth of Muhammad Ali is cast. It also lends poignancy to his drive for success. Clay is 13 when his father shows him the magazine cover featuring a mutilated Emmett Till, a photo that galvanized the civil rights movement. Till was 14.
Like the world many adolescents inhabit, the world that “Becoming Muhammad Ali” presents is complex, made up of segregation and backyard baseball, racial violence and report cards. But most importantly, it’s a reminder that once upon a time Cassius Clay, all poetry and italics, was a kid like the rest of us. It is my hope that Black children read this book, see themselves in young Clay and know that they too are poetry made flesh.
