The Devil and Sonny Liston (3 page)

I
N 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 189
0
s 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
g
randmother.
"

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 188
2
: 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.