Blood Brothers by Randy Roberts

Author:Randy Roberts [Roberts, Randy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465098637
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-12-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

FREE TO BE ME

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

—JAMES BALDWIN

Now everyone wanted him, not Sonny Liston. Before the match, experts and casual fans alike thought Cassius would go directly from the fight to the hospital, and that Sonny would head to his own victory celebration. But Sonny got the ride to St. Francis and Cassius, resplendent in a black tuxedo, disappeared.

Outside his dressing room, Dee Dee Sharp waited patiently with her mother. After recording “Slow Twistin’” with Chubby Checker and releasing such hit singles as “Mash Potato Time” and “Do the Bird,” the attractive and coquettish Sharp was at the top of her recording career. During the previous few months she had seen Cassius off and on as their schedules permitted, but their relationship had not yet bloomed into a full-scale romance. She was just one of the “foxes” that seemed to form the wallpaper of his life. George Plimpton suspected Cassius’s use of the word foxes was “half affectionate and half suspicious: he feels that girls can be ‘sly’ and ‘sneaky’ and are to be watched warily.”1

Dee Dee saw herself as more than just another fox, and she had plans to spend the evening with the new heavyweight champion of the world. So she waited, crammed among the other well-wishers who claimed they knew all along that Cassius would win, and every once in a while she would call out to someone squeezing in or out of the dressing room, “Tell Cassius that Dee. . . .” She called him Cassius around the men, but in private she used his middle name, Marcellus. “A beautiful name. I can say it over and over,” she told Plimpton.2

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