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The corpse was rolled over and lay face down on the metal slab. It was then that the coroner saw them: the copper-colored whipping welts, old and faint, like one might imagine to have been those of a driven slave.

To say that Charles Liston had been a slave would be to render cheap metaphor of the life of a man. And yet those scars on his back were as nothing to deeper scars, the kind that no coroner could ever see, scars of a darkness far less imaginable than those from any lash. Charles Liston, the most formidable of men, the most unconquerable of heavyweight boxers, had been enslaved by the forces of that darkness: enslaved, conquered, and killed by them.

Born with dead man’s eyes, he had passed from the darkness of those scars on his back to the darkness of the criminal underworld, to a darkness beyond, a darkness whose final form was the last thing his eyes ever saw.

I remember the figure of Sonny Liston from my boyhood: distant, ominous, enigmatic, alluring. It now strikes me as odd — looking back at that boyhood — that a black man could have fascinated me so. In 1962, the year that Sonny won the heavyweight title, I was in the eighth grade of P.S. 24 in Jersey City. The school was predominantly black, and intramural racial conflict was the foremost extracurricular activity. There were skirmishes every day, full-blown gang fights every Friday afternoon: black against white, white against black. The mutual hostility had always been there, but in the fall, winter, and spring of 1962–3, the brew of that hostility boiled over. Friendship between black and white was driven underground, or ended. The punishment for consorting with the enemy was to be beaten, damned, persecuted, and ostracized, not only by one’s own kind but by the enemy’s kind as well. To black and white alike, such behavior was contra naturam, an assault and a crime against all that was as it should be.

At this same time, LeRoi Jones was writing a novel about the evil spirit of those days. In The System of Dante’s Hell, published in 1965, it was as if Jones, setting out to exorcise evil, was overtaken by it, and his book emerged as one of the most powerful and beautiful expressions of blind hatred and its wages since the Pentateuch. The hell he chose in which to set his story was the city of Newark, where he had his roots, and where I was born and partly raised. I must have read the paperback in 1966, and I was in Newark in the summer of 1967 — the Summer of Love, those hippie assholes called it — when the riots flared. For me, it was like the force of Jones’s vision erupting from the underworld regions through the streets. I loved it. It had nothing to do with black and white, it merely was: an emanation of all that destroys us from within, wild and deadly and beyond the lie of law. I remember the old Jewish shopkeepers fleeing, painting the words SOUL BROTHER on their storefront windows, in the vain hope that their enterprise would be perceived as black and therefore spared.

But no one, black or white, was spared. There was much talk about “black rage” — a catch phrase that was brought to us by the same mass merchants who brought us “summer of love” — and blacks themselves bought into it, for the black is no less a fool than the white and will cling to any rationalization that masks or justifies, however fatuously, the part of our nature that seems to belie our humanity: the part of our nature that, in our vanity and denial, we have come to call inhuman, a word that has barely changed since the Latin inhumanus of the ancient Romans, whose empire was built upon slavery.

As I remember those old Jewish shopkeepers hurriedly painting their windows, so I remember the self-proclaimed black radicals, like Jones, having their dashikis made by those same old Jewish tailors. It was as close to Africa as they had ever been, the corner of Broad and Market in downtown Newark. A little old Jewish tailor stitching raiments of polyester pride for a bunch of guys who were suddenly talking about slavery as if it were a personal experience and about Africa as if it was their true home. It was a minstrelsy skit of a new age: the angry young Afro-American and his tailor.

LeRoi Jones, 1964: “Sonny Liston was the big black Negro in every white man’s hallway, waiting to do him in, deal him under.” Liston, wrote Jones, was “the bad nigger,” the “heavy-faced replica of every whipped-up woogie in the world.”

But nobody ever saw Sonny Liston in a fucking dashiki. Sonny Liston knew — you could see it in those dead man’s eyes — that there was no black and white; there was only that hallway: your hallway, my hallway, Jones’s hallway, the unlighted hallway of the world.

I think now that my boyhood fascination with Sonny Liston had to do with his being as feared and hated by blacks as by whites. He was the ultimate outlaw. Man, those narrow-lapelled sharkskin suits, that felling left and that slaughterhouse right, and that scowl: his badness transcended race.

As years passed, the more I learned of boxing, and the more fighters I saw fight, the more I knew that there was no other fighter like Sonny Liston. There never had been, and there never would be. And the more I lived and learned of other things, the more I began to feel that the secret history of Sonny Liston would reveal one of the greatest Mob tales ever told, a tale that ended in a murder mystery whose solution seemed to be lost forever, as gone as that night when Sonny’s dead man’s eyes went dead for good. I did not know that it would also reveal the forces of another, unexplored darkness, an underworld unto itself. And I did not know, above all, that it would reveal a soul that, even amid the darkness in which it dwelt, eluded all concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong, of light and dark themselves.

A guy who knew Sonny once said, “I think he died the day he was born.” Nobody, not even Sonny, knew exactly when that day was, or where he was born. Only he and the men who killed him knew the date of his death. His life began and ended in a blur.

A wind through the savanna, a rustling through scrub, through big trees’ shadows never to be seen again; the eye of one’s own kind more terrible than the eye of the leopard cat.

The Oyo enslaved the Oyo and the Dahomey, and in their freedom the Dahomey enslaved the Dahomey and the Oyo and the Ashanti, and in their time of might the Ashanti enslaved the Ashanti and the Oyo and the Dahomey and all men of free-born ancestry.

When the leopard drenched the grass and dirt with the blood of one’s life, one’s soul returned to the spirit of the river of his father. But to be wrenched from the land was to lose all ancestral power. It was to be forsaken by all that was immanent in the places of that power, and it was to know that, upon death in a strange land, the soul would never return to the river of its kind. To know these things was to know fear and was to bear in life the fate of the soul in death, which was that of an ended sigh. If it was true that evil dwelt in the branches of the odum tree, then it must be from the souls of man that the roots of the odum drank.

Those who were taken downriver to the sea by their own kind knew this. It was a knowledge that reverberated like the thunder of Shango. The gods had been vanquished by powder and guns. No man was free.

The sea was the color of the odum tree’s leaves. The color of the leaves of Mississippi was the same.

The state of Mississippi was carved from the Mississippi Territory, which also included Alabama, in 1817. Thirteen years later, the Choctaw who lived there were dispossessed of their land through the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit, which opened much of Mississippi to white settlers. Most of the Choctaw were relocated in Indian Territory, land the government reserved for them in what was to become, in 1907, the state of Oklahoma. Their chief, however — Greenwood Leflore — stayed behind, acquired much land, much wealth, and many slaves. He is known to have bought a hundred slaves on one day alone in the spring of 1839, and in 1850 his real estate was valued at $80,000. He lived and died on a 15,000-acre estate called Malmaison — “Evil House” in the tongue of his French-Canadian father. He was not alone among the Choctaw in owning slaves. In the Civil War, it was for the Confederacy that the Choctaw nation fought.

Choctaw County, Mississippi, formed in 1833 from the ceded Choctaw lands, lay between the rich alluvial brown-leaf loam and loess of the Yazoo-Mississippi Basin and the flatwoods of Oktibbeha County to the east. It was a land of short-leaf pine, of few souls and infinite shadows amid dark blue-green foliage.

Sonny Liston’s ancestry was a haunted whisper through the savanna, a hainted whisper through those pines.

The name of Liston, which represents English, Scottish, and Irish bloodlines, is ultimately of Norman origin, and it is believed that the first Liston to leave Normandy for England came with William the Conqueror, the first Norman king of England, in the invasion of 1066. This progenitor settled in the Essex lowlands, where to this day the parish of Liston and, within that parish, lands designated Liston Manor commemorate the Listons’ presence as a knightly family.

In the twelfth century, in one of the early invasions of Scotland, some Listons settled in the East Lothian region of that country. (Centuries later, the first minister from Great Britain to the United States after the British acknowledgment of American independence was Sir Robert Liston, who died in Edinburgh, the administrative center of the Lothian region, in 1836, in his ninety-fourth year.)

It was later in the twelfth century, in 1171, that a Liston accompanied Henry II to Ireland and was granted land in Limerick, the richest agricultural area in the country’s south. The Listons held the land for almost five centuries, until 1655, when the subjugator Oliver Cromwell confiscated it and gave it to the Bishop of Limerick. The Listons dispersed then to the various outlying townships and beyond. By 1665, there were Listons in America.

Martin Liston was born in Virginia in December 1798. He moved to Georgia, where he married Caroline Elmira Tranum, who was born there in 1813 and who there gave birth to a son, Henry, in 1837. From Georgia, the Listons moved to Mississippi.

The western division of Choctaw County, where the Listons settled, became Township 17, Range 7, of Choctaw County, in the area that in 1870 came to be known as Poplar Creek.

But back then, when Martin Liston was drawn to the rich soil south of the Big Black River and east of the Mississippi flood-plain, it was a place without a name, a land of hills and open meadows, wild piney woodlands, and swamp overgrown with cane; a land of panthers, bear, wolves, and deer. The Big Black flowed as clear as springwater in those days, and there were no towns. The future Montgomery County seat and self-styled “crossroads of North Mississippi,” the town of Winona, on the “yan” side — that is to say, north — of the Big Black, would not be incorporated until 1861; Poplar Creek not until 1870; and Kilmichael, an outgrowth of one of the region’s earliest settlements, also on the yan side of the Big Black, not until 1890. These were the places, unnamed and then named, that circumscribed all that branch of the Liston family.

Martin Liston was one of the founding members of the Bethel Methodist Church, established in the 1840s about seven miles southeast of what was to become Kilmichael. He was also one of the founders of Biddle School, organized twenty years later, about two miles east of Bethel Church.

Caroline Liston bore six children in Mississippi: Robert, William, H.J., Susan Emmaline Amelia, Fanny, and Martin Liston, Jr. The son known as H.J., barely thirteen, died in the fall of 1870.

The oldest of them, Robert C. Liston, was born in October of 1845. In 1878, he married a twenty-six-year-old Poplar Creek girl named Eudora Wilson. They brought into the world six children who died at birth, in infancy, or in youth. But others survived beyond childhood: Verdie, Wiley, Alma, Edith, Willie, Renfro.

Martin Liston died, age seventy, in the spring of 1869. His wife, Caroline, died, age seventy-four, in the last cold days of 1887. Their son Robert C. Liston died in the spring of 1913, five years after the death of his wife, Eudora. Robert C. Liston’s son Wiley, born in 1882, came to own much of the land around Bethel Cemetery in Poplar Creek, and was a member of the Masonic lodge there; Robert C. Liston’s son Willie, born in 1890, was appointed postmaster of Kilmichael in 1935 and was also a member of the Masonic lodge there. He and his wife, Hester Loraynne Jordan, had five children. One of them, William Harry Liston, Jr., born in 1931, co-founded the Winona law firm of Liston-Lancaster and is today the eldest member of the only family to bear the Liston name in Montgomery County.

Bill Liston remembered his father telling him what he had been told of those days before the Civil War. “They had a few slaves. When they were freed, they stayed on the farm.”

Of the ten or more million Africans sold into slavery from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, few were brought to market in the land that came to be called the United States — far fewer than a million — while Brazil and the Caribbean colonies alone accounted for more than seven million.

Nevertheless, when England and the United States abolished slave trading in Africa in 1807, it was much to the disappointment of the West African alaafin, kings and chieftains who thrived on their harvest of flesh.

The first federal law prohibiting the importation of slaves from outside the United States came into effect in 1808, nine years before Mississippi became a state. While slave-smugglers continued to operate downriver in New Orleans, Mississippi’s involvement in the foreign-slave trade was slight, and most of her slaves came from other states, either through direct purchase, professional traders, or the migration of their owners.

By 1840, there were more slaves than white folk in Mississippi. Yet less than ten percent of those white folk were slaveholders, and Choctaw County was among the Mississippi regions where slavery was rare. What few slaves there were in Choctaw County were found on the small farms of the settlers.

The Martin Liston homestead was one of those farms, valued at a meager $290 in 1850, the year that Choctaw chief Greenwood Leflore’s real estate was valued at $80,000.

A proper surname was a nicety that few slaves knew, and upon Emancipation, it was the common practice for freed slaves to adopt the family name of their former owners. Thus, the few slaves that had worked the Liston homestead came themselves to bear the name Liston after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865.

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.

Nick Tosches

NIGHT TRAIN

The Sonny Liston Story

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN BOOKS

NIGHT TRAIN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FROM NOTHING