The Devil and Sonny Liston (4 page)

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
quarters 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
k
nown 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.

"If their mother and father wanted to send them to schoo
l,
they sent them to schoo
l,
" Morledge said. "If they didn't want to send them to schoo
l,
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 chil
dren 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,
h
ad 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.