The Devil and Sonny Liston

by Nick Tosches

  "If their mother and father wanted to send them to school, they sent them to school," Morledge said. "If they didn't want to send them to school, they didn't." One way or the other, there was no school during the cotton chopping months of June and July or during cotton picking time, which could stretch from September to March, depending on the weather.

  The black preachers were Morledge Plantation laborers during the rest of the week. "We did not enter into there. That was theirs," Morledge said of the little church on the lake. But often, when a black sharecropper or tenant farmer died, George, like his daddy before him, was asked to come down to say a few words in eulogy. George was asked as well to attend "many a baptism" in the lake. "They take 'em down there," he said, "and they all dress in white, and they back up out of the water." He remembered it as "one of the greatest social events of the year" for the black church folk of Morledge Plantation.

  George Morledge, Jr. said that he could not recall the Listons all that well, no more than he remembered any other family that worked the land. By the time in his youth that he had become the plantation's Little Captain, Tobe Liston and his kin had been there for the better part of twenty years.

  Tobe, he said, "was a little fella," maybe a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty pounds, maybe five feet six or five feet seven. Helen, he said, was big, two hundred and thirty five pounds or thereabouts, and maybe five feet ten. Everybody called her Big Hela, pronounced Heelah.

  "Her name may have been Helen," Morledge said, "but the niggers on the place called her Hela...

  "They had I don't remember how many children," he said of Tobe and Big Hela. "They had several inside, several outside."

  Several inside, several outside. "Well, the terminology in the southern plantation days was, if the children were not of the mother and father, then they were outside, and if they were, they were inside children. That's terminology. Y’all wouldn't understand that, but that's what it was."

  Inside, outside. "I don't think she ever saw anybody that wasn't a friend," Morledge said, laughing. "You are not in with the black community whatsoever, the dark ones, are you? They were very" - he seemed to search for a word that did not come. "As I said, she never saw anybody that wasn't her friend."

  The boy who came to be known as Sonny was close to none of his kin. They were accidents of the blood, like himself, without known age or meaning or even the senseless animal bond of kindred familiarity. From savanna and pines to the rut of a destiny in a slough of sandy dirt where nothing could grow, neither cotton nor love nor hope, that whisper in the dark of his blood told him not that he had come from anywhere or anything, and not that he was or could ever be anything, but, simply and fatally, that he was alone and doomed so to be.

  Later in life, he would be unable, or unwilling, to name more than a few of his brothers and sisters. In 1962 and 1963, before and after Sonny became the heavyweight champion of the world, the Little Rock reporter R.B. Mayfield was paid by Newsweek magazine to file several reports on Liston's background in Arkansas. When Mayfield interviewed Helen Liston for one of these unpublished background reports, she told him that Sonny knew only "two or three" of his half siblings, and of the six surviving children she had while living on the Morledge farm, Sonny had always been the loner.

  Clytee died in the forties.

  Leo was shot to death by another man in Michigan some years after leaving Arkansas.

  J.T. Liston - Shorty - remained on the plantation after the rest of his kin were gone; then he himself moved on, his whereabouts unknown.

  Annie Liston lived in Gary, Indiana, as did Curtis Liston.

  Wesley was a farmer near Cherry Valley, Arkansas, near the plantation where Sonny and he and the rest of them were born.

  "He never talked much." Helen said of Sonny, "and still don't." He was "big and strong" as a boy, and he kept to himself.

  In Arkansas, countless bodies of water left by the shifting courses of rivers and streams bore the name of Horseshoe Lake. The Liston shack in Sand Slough was situated near one such Horseshoe Lake, and Charles "loved to swim, and to ride his mule named Ada."

  George Morledge, Jr. had no idea of when Sonny was born. It may have been around the time the old Big House burned down, back in 1929 or 1930 or so. The Captain rebuilt it, and it burnt down again many years later, after Morledge Plantation had come to be known as the St. Francis River Plantation.

  He recalled the adolescent Charles Liston as "big, overgrown, never too bright, and pretty much of a loner."

  That is what he told the reporter from Little Rock many years ago. I wanted to know more.

  "You want a truthful impression?"

  Yeah.

  "He was just a little nigger kid. That's the way it was in those days. Just another little darky."

  The grandson Martha had raised, Helen's first born child, E.B. Ward, was known in Poplar Creek as something of a blues singer and guitar player. He had taken up, as man and wife, with Nora Ellen King, the mother of another, younger blues singer, who would come to be known as B.B. King. Nora Ellen had died in 1935, when E.B. was twenty.

  Ward made a living as a farm worker: '"Workin' for wages', you called it," as one old timer said. "They gave you a place to live, three meals a day, and a salary."

  Mattie Mae Ratliss, who was about two years older than Ward, had been married to a man named Walter Flowers, by whom she had six daughters and a son. They lived off in the hills, a few miles from Poplar Creek, across the Choctaw County line, in French Camp.

  "It was a real poor place," Mattie said. "There was a white lady, she was real sweet, lived next door to us," who gave Mattie food and brought good water for her children. The white lady, Dorris Collins, told Mattie: "You're gettin' too skinny. You got to go to your people." But Mattie's mother and father were dead. Her husband, Walter, said that the white lady was right. He told her to take the daughters but leave him the son. Mattie went to her Auntie Sophie Robertson, whose family was making a good crop in Sumner, up in Tallahatchie County.

  Ward at that time was working for wages right down the road from Sumner, on a farm in Webb. He and Mattie met in Sumner and were married at the courthouse in Webb on the first day of 1941.

  Ward had been brought together with his and Sonny's mother, Helen Liston, at the funeral of his grandmother, Martha, in Poplar Creek in 1940. Not long after that, Ward and Mattie and Mattie's six daughters moved to a shack not far from the Listons on the Morledge plantation in Arkansas. They had two children on the plantation: Ezra, born in 1941, who survived little more than two months, and Ezraline, born in the spring of 1943.

  In 1944, they moved to a plantation that was co-owned and run by a white man named Riley McCorkle, south of Parkin, about fifteen miles west of Wynne, on the St.Francis River. Unlike Tobe Liston, who rented land at Morledge, Ward sharecropped - "workin' on halves," he called it. "If you had ten bales of cotton, the white man got five."

  Lone, brooding Charles Liston was, as certain funny looking and funny talking white folk of the day had lately come to say, a problem child. Looking back more than half a century, Ward remembered Big George Morledge as a "real nice" man. But things were different for kids in those days. "You stayed in your place," Ward laughed. "If you didn't, Mr. Morledge gonna whup you, and when you get home, your daddy gonna whup you again."

  Helen said, in 1962, that Sonny as a child "was a good, obedient boy" who "never gave me any trouble, never." In 1963, she saw the past differently. Young Charles was, in his quiet, lonesome way, "always a rough boy," she said. "He like the rough side of life.'' He took to mean and sinful ways, fell in with the wrong crew - "running around with bad boys," as Ward said.

  According to Mattie Ward, Big Hela "didn't know but to go to church and chop cotton, that's all I knowed of." She could not set her son aright. She tired of seeing him whipped, and she tired, too, of a growing hatred between father and son, or, as it sometimes seemed, between son and all the flesh of this world. For his part, Tobe would just as soon be qu
it of him. Sonny was sent to live with his older half brother, Ward, in Parkin. Ward remembered the year to be 1945 or 1946 and reckoned that Charles was about sixteen years old at the time. Ward was around thirty. The boy stayed with Ward and Mattie for about a year.

  "He was all to hisself," Ward said. "You know, he was off in hisself."

  There was no radio or phonograph in the Ward home. As Mattie put it, "We would do good just to have a piece of bread." But Ward still sang and played the blues. Those blues and the fierce, lovely hymns of church were all of music that Charles Liston knew.

  "Sonny liked blues music," remembered Ward.

  He and Mattie took Charles to church regularly, and, according to Ward, "He got better when he was around me."

  Mattie remembered a letter she got a few years later. "When he went down to the penitentiary, he sat down and wrote me a letter." It was likely the first of the letters that Sonny, throughout his life, would "write" through another's hand. She recalled the gist of it: "Miss Mattie, you sure was nice to me. When I get out of here, I'm gonna make you proud of me. I'm gonna make you proud of me. You just watch and see. I'm gonna make you proud of me. I'm gonna be good from now on till I die."

  "And then he went to boxing," she said, and that did indeed make her proud. "It did. It sure did."

  George Morledge, Jr., left home for the service during World War II. He ended his duty stationed in occupied Germany because of his fluency in German, and he did not return to the plantation until 1946. When he returned, the Listons were gone, save for one of the sons, Shorty. "He was a brother, or a half brother, or maybe a fourth brother. I don't know. He had the name Liston, and I couldn't tell you whether he was inside or outside."

  Shorty Liston, the remaining Liston - "that crazy Liston boy" - worked for George, Jr., as a tractor driver. "He was nutty as a fruitcake, but he could drive a tractor."

  "That was the last of the family. All the rest of them were gone."

  Bringing her son Curtis with her to the McCorkle farm, Helen Liston had joined Charles and Ward and Mattie and their children, little Ezraline and newborn Clint, and Mattie's daughters by her first husband. Helen made one crop there with her sons and daughter in law. By then, Tobe Liston was over seventy five years of age, and in time would be trucked off to the Forrest City hospital where he would breathe his last.

  "He taken sick," was all Ward said. "Taken sick and then died." It was all that needed to be said.

  Except for his big brother Shorty, who stayed behind on the plantation where he was born, and his daddy, Tobe, who lay beneath the dirt in Forrest City, Charles's kin had dispersed and gone the way of four winds, many of them joining him to live with the Ward family before moving on.

  "I really can't place nobody but Wesley and Uncle Sonny, I guess, because he turned famous. But all them other people, I just can't place them," said Ezraline, who was little more than a child at the time. "I don't know if its because I got beat upside the head or what, but I can't place those people" from the days "out there in the country."

  His sister Alcora Liston had gone off as a teenager. By the end of the war, she was married to a man named Jones and living some two hundred miles north, across the state line, in the city of St. Louis. Missouri.

  At the end of the war, after that last crop at the McCorkle farm, Helen Liston followed her daughter Alcora to St. Louis. As if in phonetic conflation of her plantation name, Big Hela, and her proper Christian name, the 1946 St. Louis city directory lists her as Healon Liston.

  In time, Ward quit the cotton fields and moved his family to Forrest City, where he worked as a carpenter. Ezraline remembers that she was sixteen when they left the farm and got their first real house - with a real address, 220 North Beach Street - in a real town. From that first Forrest City house, they moved to another, at 114 Union Street.

  By then, Charles L. Liston was a feared and mighty man who was known to the world as Sonny.

  Writing in the year before the March on Washington that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Arkansas reporter R.B. Mayfield, in the first of his unpublished background reports to Newsweek, observed. "The average Eastern Arkansas Negro is still virtually a slave, and was even worse off during the depression days."

  Charles Liston was a child of those depression days in eastern Arkansas, and the child, too, of a slight, scowling man whose small breath of freedom, cold and cruel as any bossman's, was drawn through the only tyranny that was afforded him, over the only living chattel allowed him, the chattel that his God had given him the power to create from his own soulless seed.

  "He who is by nature not his own but another's man, is by nature a slave," said Aristotle. While acknowledging that "others affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature," Aristotle concluded that "some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both expedient and right."

  Aristotle, pillar of Western Judeo Christian thought, tutor of the conqueror Alexander the Great, lived and spoke in the fourth century before Christ. The society that he knew, like every society that had come before and would come after, was a society of slavery, a universal practice older than history itself: in Mesopotamia, India, China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome: among Jew and Muslim, pagan and Christian alike.

  Again: "some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and ... for these latter slavery is both expedient and right." Note that "right" follows "expedient." This sleight of synapse is the Aristotelean fallacy, the Aristotelean legacy that has shaped, or misshaped, human thought.

  Aristotle owned fourteen slaves, and kept a slave woman, Herpyllis, as wife, by whom he had a son, Nicomachus. He saw himself, of course, as one of those deemed by nature free; and he was a great expounder of freedom and democracy, much as, in Martin Liston's day, Thomas Jefferson spoke loftily of liberty and strongly against miscegenation while owning slaves and fathering a son, in 1808, with one of them, Sally Hemings, the slave girl half sister of his wife, Martha. Of what Aristotle called the "three corresponding perversions -tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. " he judged that "democracy is the most tolerable of the three. " But democracy precluded slavery no more than did the other perversions of government. A nation without slavery, a world without slavery, was unimaginable: and in the end the helix of Aristotelean rationalism became lost in a swirl of equivocating subtleties:

  "Enough," he declared, ending his treatise on slavery in the first book of the Politics, "enough of the distinction between master and slave" - as if throwing up his hands before a suddenly glimpsed truth to which the tide of his logorrhea had delivered him, a truth that was beyond philosophy and logic, greater than philosophy and logic, and therefore unutterable: that there was no distinction by nature of slave and master, that they were by nature the same.

  No race, no people has been free from slavery, either as slave or as master. Every race and every people ever enslaved became at every opportunity enslavers themselves: Greek enslaved by Greek in the time of Aristotle, black enslaved by black since time immemorial in Africa and in the nineteenth century American South. Slavery was never predicated on race except as circumstance rendered it. Many of the vast number of slaves of ancient Rome were fair haired, fair skinned Germans and Anglo Saxons.

  The universal truth of slavery, that it has been throughout history one of the defining manifestations of human nature, has been suppressed both by that history and by that nature. The enduring myth that slavery was imposed upon Africa by outside forces, that it was introduced by the Portuguese in 1444, is belied by the fact that slavery and the slave trade were ancient and commonplace within Africa long before the arrival of any white slaver. (The trans Sahara slave trade route between West and North Africa likely had its beginnings as early as 1000 B.C., hundreds of years before the Ethiopians, long enslaved by Egypt, conquered and gave to Egypt its Twenty Fifth Dynasty: hundreds of years before Homer wrote in the Iliad that half of the soul of a man was lost when "the day of slavery" came upon him.)

&
nbsp; "Slavery was widespread in Africa," writes Professor John Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World,1400-1800,"because slaves were the only form of private, revenue producing property recognized in African law." To the odehye - free born - elite of West Africa, the outside forces of Europe, England, and the Americas imposed no evil, but merely presented a new market, increased demand, and lucrative new export opportunities that the indigenous powers welcomed and readily exploited.We bewail our past as slaves - experienced or ancestral, real or fancied - but never commemorate our enslavement of others. Only circumstance separates slave from master: and for much of history, freedom and the will to enslave have been one. The oppressed in the blessing of their deliverance will become the oppressors.

  "The ox" - Aristotle again - "is the poor man's slave."

  Sonny Liston knew nothing of Aristotle. But he knew more about slavery than Aristotle said or did not say. And that was because he knew Tobe Liston.

  To Tobe Liston, who was born four years to the month after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the passel of children he bred were younglings of burden. If they were big enough to go to the dinner table, Helen remembered him saying of his children, they were big enough to go to the fields.

  She recalled the one room plantation schoolhouses, and said that Charles "went a little bit, whenever his daddy would let him." But he never learned to read or write, and by the time Charles was eight, Tobe had him laboring full time.

  "He wasn't a mean man," recalled E.B. Ward of his stepfather, Tobe. But he had known Tobe only in adulthood, and it was to protect Ward from possible abuse by Tobe that Helen had left him behind with his grandmother all those years before. In further conversation, he said that, yes, Tobe was mean to Sonny, and the two of them, father and son, did not get along.

  It is impossible to tell how big the figure of small, slight, slaving Tobe Liston loomed in the solitary estrangement and taciturn brooding of his son. What little the son knew of his past he would leave behind him in the Arkansas dirt, where it belonged. But in that greater part of the soul that had nothing to do with knowing or leaving behind, he would never be shut of that past, as he would never be shut of masters or slavers or those who, like his father, gave life and cast a curse upon it at once.