The Devil and Sonny Liston Read Online Free Page B

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