The Devil and Sonny Liston Read Online Free Page A

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.
    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