The Devil and Sonny Liston Read Online Free

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