The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  Alexander Liston was born into slavery on the farm of Martin Liston in October 1840. Fannie, his wife, was born into slavery in March 1838. They dated their marriage to 1866, the first year of their freedom, although by then they had four children: Ned, Rachel. Joseph, and Frank, all of them born into slavery on the Liston farm.

  Although courthouse fires in 1874 and 1881 destroyed most of the old records of Choctaw County, Montgomery County land records of 1884 show that Robert C. Liston laid hold of almost forty acres in Poplar Creek in the fall of that year. United States Homestead Certificate Number 10768 shows that Alexander Liston laid hold of a little over 160 acres of land neighboring that of his former master's son in the fall of 1896.

  White Liston, black Liston: they remained together, in a once nameless place of pine and cotton that became Beat 5, Poplar Creek, Montgomery County, Mississippi.

  By the end of the century, Fannie Liston had given birth to nine children, six of whom survived. Among the survivors was Sonny Liston's father, Tobe, born in January 1870.

  In 1889, Tobe Liston married a woman named Leona, also known as Cora, who in the span of the next twenty years bore him thirteen children, seven of whom survived: Ernest, Bessie, Latt, William K., James, Helen, and Cleona.

  ·

  Ned and Mary Baskin were born into slavery on the nearby Liston farm. Both of them were sixteen when they had their first child, Willis, in 1858. A daughter, Martha, was born in 1860.

  Martha Baskin got pregnant by a man named Joe McAlpin. The child, a daughter named Helen, who became Sonny Liston's mother, was born in 1897. Another child by Joe, a second daughter, named Ida, was born in 1900.

  Joe up and left when the girls were very young. Martha later married Charles Berry, a farmer from North Carolina who was eighteen years her senior and by whom she had a third child, again a daughter, named Lesla, born in 1917.

  Jessie Hemphill Golden, one of the elder sisters of the local black community, laughed fondly when recalling Charlie Berry, who she said was known, for reasons that were not known, as Spodge. "He was a tall, ugly man with a round, hard head." She told of a storekeeper in Kilmichael who kept two big, heavy staved barrels outside his shop. One of these big barrels was empty: the other was full of flour. If you could knock over the empty barrel by butting your head into it, you got the full barrel for free. Charlie Berry, with that round, hard head of his, brought home a lot of flour that way. And once, on a bet, a man took a two by four to the crown of that head.

  Martha's eldest daughter, Helen, grew up wanting nothing to do with the curse of these men's names, neither the father that had abandoned her nor the stepfather with the round, hard head. She chose to be known by her mother's maiden name and called herself Helen Baskin.

  ·

  As they had taken the names of their masters, so their religion as well. The forgotten gods and spirits of Africa were a vague and underlying ancestral presence in the palimpsest Christianity that slaves had created from the church stuff religion of their Baptist and Methodist masters. Most of those masters never knew that the word "religion" was not to be found in any bible or that the pagan Latin word religio, whence it came, denoted the supernatural powers of magic and of sacred place, concepts much closer to the purer spiritualities of Africa than to the debased and pious spirituality denoted by "religion" among America's settlers.

  Though great Shango was forgotten, the power of his thunder lingered. It reverberated in the blood when the Mississippi sky broke open with a blast and a serpent of lightning: and it reverberated in the Word. The risen Christ was mighty vodu, and in His cross there was more of meaning, more of religio, than any bible toting bossman ever knew.

  Bethel Methodist Church, founded by Martin Liston and other settlers, was out on Bethel Road. From its earliest years, in the 1840s, a section of the church was reserved for slaves. Nearby on Bethel Road was a black Baptist church called Pinkney Grove, founded after the Civil War: and east of Poplar Creek there was another black church, called Shiloh Missionary Baptist. Amid the graves marked only by rocks in the little Shiloh cemetery, several headstones, including that of the pastor, the Reverend S.H. Winfrey (1866-1963), bear Masonic symbols.

  It was at the Shiloh church in 1914 that Helen Baskin met a man named Colonel Ward, the son of a Poplar Creek farmer named Gerard Ward. As her own father had done her mother, Ward got Helen pregnant and then up and left. The child born to her, on August 6, 1915, was given the name Ezra Baskin Ward.

  I found Ezra Baskin Ward, age eighty three, living with his wife Mattie at a nursing home in Arkansas. Of all the children Helen had, he, the first born, was now the sole survivor. Nobody called him Ezra anymore. For most of his eighty three years, he had been known as E.B. or as Ward. That is what his wife called him: Ward.

  Whatever happened to that father who ran off on him and Helen?

  "I think he got poisoned by a lady," he said. It was while Ward was still a baby, barely two years old.

  Children born out of wedlock were common, and Ward made no pretense that his mother and father might ever have been married. Things were different in those days, Mattie said. As she saw it, propriety overtook licentiousness, not the other way around. "I didn't know but one girl that got pregnant until they was married. Go to church, keep that dress down."

  It was soon after Ward's birth that Helen Baskin became the second wife of Tobe Liston. Her mother, Martha, advised her against it, telling her that she should stay free and single and not marry this man. Helen did not listen.

  IN THE OLD DAYS, THERE HAD BEEN NO BOLL WEEVIL in Mississippi. The ugly little long snouted creature and its fat white maggot larvae, first found in Central America, were unknown. But they had put an end to cotton farming in Mexico, and in the early 1890s had spread across the Rio Grande to Brownsville, Texas, and thence outward, wherever cotton was grown, at a rate of about seventy miles a year. The boll weevil infestation brought blight to Mississippi cotton farming in 1916, the year in which the demagogue Theodore G. Bilbo became governor of Mississippi.

  Tobe Liston heard that a better crop could be made farther north, on the other side of the Delta, and so it was that he and Helen moved northwest across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, taking with them a rag tag load of Tobe's children, siblings, and his seventy six year old father, Alexander. Tobe's mother, seventy eight year old Fannie, moved to Arkansas as well, but lived apart from her husband, with the family of her daughter Maggie.

  Both Helen and her mother, Martha Berry, agreed that Helen's baby boy, Ezra Baskin Ward, should stay behind with Martha rather than risk mistreatment by a stepfather in a strange land. Besides, Martha said, she "didn't have no boy, and she was "gonna keep this boy and raise him up right." And she did.

  "She was crazy about him. He was almost spoiled. But she whup him, though, take him to church," said E.B. Ward's wife. Mattie. "He loved her, he really cared for her."

  Ward remembered the little church, Pinkney Grove, and, across the rutted road, its small patch of a cemetery where his and Sonny's grandmother, Martha Berry, now lies buried in an unmarked grave, close to the unmarked grave of Ward's first "wife," the mother of the bluesman B.B. King.

  As for Martha's husband, Charles Berry, "All I know is he's just a man," Ward said. "A man who come in up there in Kilmichael who married my grandmother."

  The first child that Helen bore to Tobe Liston up in Arkansas was a daughter, Clara, born in the summer of 1919. She would not survive, but others did: the daughter Clytee, then Leo and Shorty, who was also known as J.T. After them came Annie, Alcora, Curtis, and, last born, Wesley, who would be remembered always as the baby.

  And, somewhere among them in that brood, the son named Charles L. Liston.

  Charles Liston, after the world came to know him as Sonny, would often say that he was born in Pine Bluff. Arkansas. He would also say that he was born in Little Rock, and on one legal document he would state his place of birth as Memphis, Tennessee.

  His mother would say that her son
claimed Pine Bluff as his birthplace because "his manager told him to give a big town," and Pine Bluff was bigger than Forrest City, where, according to her, he was in fact brought into this world. "He was never in Pine Bluff," she would say, "and I never been there either." But the "big town" of Pine Bluff lies about sixty miles from Forrest City, no closer than the state capital of Little Rock, and is but thirty four miles west across the Mississippi River from Memphis. Today Pine Bluff is the shadow of a town. One of the military's eight chemical dumping grounds on the mainland, the Pine Bluff Arsenal, eight miles long and three miles wide, is the storehouse of over 10 percent of America's stockpile of chemical weapons, and since 1963 has cast an ever darker pall of desolation over this forsaken town on the Arkansas River. Like Forrest City, like Poplar Creek - population 350 in 1960, current population reckoned at fewer than a hundred of the sparse twelve thousand or so who now inhabit Montgomery County - the places where Sonny Liston's past existed, and the places where he claimed it to have existed, when he owned to any past at all, are places of ghosts.

  More than anything else, that is what this is, I now feel: a ghost story, a haunting unto itself. A whisper through the savanna, a whisper through the pines, a whisper unto itself through the dark of the blood.

  Forrest City, the county seat of St. Francis County, Arkansas, lay on the western slope of Crowley's Ridge, between the L'Anguille and St. Francis rivers: a town of a few thousand souls that had risen from a working camp of the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad in 1867. It was named for the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Tennessee slave trader who served after the war as the first leader of the original Ku Klux Klan, an organization which, in 1869, he tried to disband in disdain of its increasing violence.

  During the Civil War, Cross County, to the north, had been formed in part from the older county of St. Francis and named for the Confederate colonel David C. Cross, who was the largest landowner in the area. Its county seat, Wynne, also located, like Forrest City, on the western slope of Crowley's Ridge, grew from the wreckage of a train derailment in 1882: a box car, overturned and without wheels, was set upright and named Wynne Station, in honor of yet another Confederate veteran, the Forrest City banker Jesse W Wynne.

  The cotton plantation of George Morledge straddled both counties, encompassing some twenty five hundred acres. The Morledge house - it was called different things: the Big House, Headquarters, the Main House - was located near Wynne, in Cross County. It was there that George Morledge lived with his wife, Mary. Nearby were a barn, cotton gin, and commissary.

  It was in the sector of Morledge Plantation that lay in Johnson Township, St. Francis County, that Tobe Liston and his family came to live and farm, on a low patch where a rill of muddy water, a mile and a half or so long, dribbled dead to its end in a slough of sandy dirt where nothing could grow. The place had a name, but it was not to be found on any map. They called it Sand Slough.

  It was there, in Sand Slough, on the Morledge plantation – not in Forrest City, not in Pine Bluff, not in Memphis - that Charles L. Liston was born, on the fifty acres that Tobe rented from the Man.

  Helen remembered the house where Sonny was born: a cypress board shack. "It had no ceiling. I had to put cardboard on the walls to keep the wind out." He was given the name Charles L. not by her or by his father, but by the "old woman who delivered him. If the "L." stood for anything, the old woman never told, or if she did, no one recalled.

  "I noticed his big hands when the midlady brought him to me," Helen said.

  As to Charles L. Liston's date of birth, at least half a dozen have been set forth. Liston himself, who in 1950 gave his age as twenty two, and in 1953 gave it as twenty one, finally settled on May 8, 1932, saying that anybody who doubted it "is callin' my mama a liar." Testifying before the Senate in 1960, he said, "I was born in 1933."

  After Liston had settled on May 8, 1932, his mother settled on January 8,1932. This date, she said, had been duly recorded in an old family Bible, but the Bible, she added, had been lost somewhere along the way. At times, she gave the date as January 18. "I know he was born in January", she said. "It was cold in January." While corroborating the year of birth her son had come to claim, she seems to have once inadvertently recalled the year as 1929, then 1930, before correcting herself to confirm Sonny's chosen year of 1932. He was, Helen said, the ninth of ten children she bore to Tobe. This places his birth between that of Curtis, who may have been born in the summer of 1929, and that of Wesley, "the baby." Annie and Alcora, who came before Curtis, are believed to have been born in the summer of 1925 and the fall of 1927, respectively. One of Liston's closest friends, the boxer Foneda Cox, who was born November 2,1929, felt that Sonny was older than he, but not by much.

  Ultimately, the precise truth may never be known, since there was no record filed at the time of birth. (It was not until 1947 that Arkansas mandated the filing of birth certificates, and then only for hospital births: and it was not until 1965 that the state enacted mandatory filing for every birth.) The only record is one filed, for legal reasons, in 1953, when Sonny put forth the date of May 8, 1932. He was almost certainly older than that, and he knew it, but it is doubtful that even he knew by how many years he was lying. Where May 8 came from is anybody's guess. As to Helen's date of January 8, it is interesting that of the two Liston siblings whose births were officially recorded, one of them, Sonny's brother Curtis, was registered as having been born on January 8, 1928.Though Sonny and his mother disagreed on the number of children she bore - Helen remembered eleven, including her first born, Sonny's half brother E.B. Ward, while Sonny said "my mother had either twelve or thirteen children" - they both agreed that Curtis was older and that only Wesley, the baby, was younger than Sonny. As United States Census records are not accessible until seventy five years after the year of census, the stated age of the boy named Charles Liston in 1930 or 1940 must wait until 2005 or 2015 to be revealed.

  Conceived and born under stars no one remembered, Sonny himself never knew how old he was, only that he was most likely older than he claimed. According to ancient astrology, the day of one's death could be foretold only when the astronomy of one's first breath was known.

  Sidonius Apollinaris, a bishop in fifth century Gaul, told of a friend, an orator called Lampridius, whose death by violence was presaged to him by African astrologers, down to the year, month, and very day, on which it came to pass that Lampridius was murdered by his slaves.

  "I know he was born in January," Helen Liston said. "It was cold in January." It was in January, too, that life was known to have left him: the starless astrology of the soul of a man that "died the day he was born." January, the month of Janus, who beheld beginning and end at once.

  The plantation owner George Morledge quit farming in 1955 and died, age eighty, in the spring of 1966. His wife, Mary, passed on, age eighty three, in the spring of 1975. Their son, George, Jr., born in the summer of 1923 and today the lord of the land that was his father's, is the only one from the plantation who remembers the Listons.

  The elder George Morledge was known as the Man, or the Captain. His son, from about the age of ten or twelve, was known as the Little Captain. Big George and Little George, they called them, too.

  There were perhaps fifty to sixty families, roughly two hundred people, black and white, working the Morledge land. The humblest of them were the day hands, who labored in the fields for thirty five or fifty cents, later seventy five cents, a day. Then there were the tenant farmers and the sharecroppers.

  The Listons were tenant farmers, not sharecroppers. The difference was in the breakdown of pay and expenses. Sharecroppers worked the land with seed, fertilizer, beasts of burden, and equipment furnished by the farm operator, and when the crop was sold, they got fifty percent. Tenant farmers rented their acres, either with cash or a promised portion of the crop to come. They furnished three quarters of their farming expenses; the owner furnished the rest. When the crop was sold, the tenant farmer got three quarter
s of the money, the owner got the rest. Throughout the year, sharecroppers and tenants ran accounts at the commissary - "the farm was seventeen miles from town," Morledge said. "It took a wagon all day long to go to town and come back" - and if the crop brought enough money, the commissary accounts were settled. Not everybody settled. "They might be there for ten years, move off in the middle of the night and owe you three or four hundred dollars," Little George recalled.

  And ten years was nothing. There was one family of five generations that made the Morledge farm its home. "So it wasn't too bad," George said, "or they wouldn't have stayed." In fact, he said, it was all "like family." The Big House was left unlocked. If anyone, black or white, got sick, the Morledges would fetch a doctor, and if the stricken family couldn't make good on the bill when the crop came in, "we'd take care of it." If anyone got thrown in jail, behind too much liquor or for whatever else, the Morledges would bail him out.

  There was a little church for white folk, Morledge Church, in the northwestern part of the plantation. There was a little Baptist church for black folk, known as New Sardis, on the bank of a lake in the southwestern part, and, a few miles down the dirt road, there was a second, Methodist church for black folk that was known as Jones Chapel or simply the Sand Slough church. New Sardis and the Sand Slough church each held services twice a month, on alternating weeks. So it was that many of the black families on Morledge were Baptist one week. Methodist the next; and so it was that while Helen Liston held that Sonny had taken religion in the Methodist church, his half brother E.B. Ward held that Sonny had been raised a Baptist. However he had been raised, on the one known occasion when he professed himself to be of any religious denomination at all, Sonny professed himself to be a Baptist.

  The churches were churches only on Sundays. The rest of the time, they were one-room schools that housed classes from the first to ninth grades.