Big names would come and go at the gym for years—fellow champions, actors, politicians, and journalists by the score. Whenever Joe would drop by, parking his Cadillac up on the sidewalk by the gym entrance, someone would spot him and shout, “Hey, Champ!” Grinning, Joe would wave and reply, “Yo, man!” In an area of boarded-up houses, he would sit with the firemen at the station around the corner and occasionally play half-ball with them on summer evenings. When he was not working in the gym, chances were that he would be outside under the hood of his car fixing something. He loved tinkering with cars. Whenever he was driving someplace and spotted one with a flat, he pulled over, introduced himself to the distressed driver, and changed the tire. But it was an episode that occurred on a December day in 1986 that revealed to former cruiserweight Kevin Dublin the type of man Joe Frazier was.
Holiday lights blinked in the windows along North Broad Street on that cold, cold day. Joe was on his way to Atlantic City, where one of his fighters—heavyweight Bert Cooper—had a bout that evening at Resorts International. On his way out of the gym door, Joe ordered his son Hector and Dublin to come along, if just to keep an eye on them; both were just starting out in careers of their own. With Joe behind the wheel and Hector and Dublin in the back, the limousine glided down Broad toward the Ben Franklin Bridge, only to draw to a sharp stop as Joe came upon a man with no legs crossing the street in a wheelchair with a can of kerosene in his lap. Joe parked the car at an angle on Broad and hopped out, dressed in a long fur coat and cowboy hat, as passersby stopped on the sidewalk and looked on in curiosity.
“Come on,” Joe said to the man in the wheelchair. “Looks like you need some help.”
Joe picked up the man and placed him in the passenger seat, as Hector and Dublin stowed the wheelchair and the can of kerosene in the trunk and snapped it shut. Joe asked the man, “Where you headed?” When the man gave him a nearby address, Joe steered the limo up and down some side streets and found it. Leading up to the door was a ramp constructed of haphazard pieces of splintered wood. Joe placed him in the chair that Hector set up and pushed him to the door. Dublin followed behind with the can.
Covering the windows of the tiny, narrow house were quilted blankets to keep the cold out and the heat in. Dublin remembered thinking once he stepped inside that the occupants were squatters, yet he could not be sure. Their few possessions were scattered in the living room and dining room, including a table and chairs, a TV, and two kerosene heaters. In the shadows were three children. A woman came out of the adjoining room and stopped short when she recognized Joe. The woman squealed, “Lord, look who it is!”
Joe looked down at the man and said, “You look like you could use some love.”
The man replied, “No, man, you already showed me love by picking me up and bringing me home.”
“Nah,” said Joe. He stooped over and pulled a roll of hundred-dollar bills out of his sock. He peeled one off, then another. He handed the man the money.
The man looked up at him at with bewilderment in his eyes and asked, “Why you do this?”
Joe replied, “You need some help.”
Joe signed some photos that Hector retrieved from the limo and they were on their way to Atlantic City. Ordinarily, whenever Joe was driving anywhere, there would be Bobby Womack or some other soul singer blaring from the speakers. But not today. It was quiet, as Dublin remembered, “Kind of weird.” For close to an hour, Joe barreled down the Atlantic City Expressway and said nothing, the trees alongside the highway spinning by. Then, unprompted by any question or comment from the young men in the back, he addressed Hector and Dublin.
“See, that was a man. Going out in this cold weather to get heat for his family.”
There was another long silence. And then Joe said, as if to himself—a tear in the corner of his eye—“You never know, man.”
Chapter One
Billy Boy
Joe at age twelve. Philadelphia Inquirer
Far and wide across Beaufort County, the boy who would one day become heavyweight champion was celebrated for his uncommon strength. Groups of teenagers would stop by the commercial farm where he worked just to watch him load crates of vegetables into the rear of trucks. Chubby yet endowed with broad shoulders and iron biceps, he prided himself on his physical prowess, which he used to protect less able boys from school bullies. At a Frazier summer reunion years later, his aging cousins remembered how he would show off by scooping up two of them under each arm and three more on his back. As they laughed and laughed, he would set his jaw and wobble this way and that for ten yards or so before setting them down in a squirming three-hundred-pound pile. Whether this particular piece of lore has been colored by exaggeration is unclear, yet there can be no arguing that by adolescence the seed of who Joe Frazier would become had been planted.
Joe Frazier answered to the name “Billy Boy” in those days. It was inadvertently given him by his doting father, Rubin Frazier, a one-armed handyman-cum-bootlegger whose speech impediment prevented him from uttering the words “baby boy.” In the years that would follow, he would be identified by a variety of other appellations—the Slaughterhouse Kid; Billy Joe; later, more famously, Smokin’ Joe; or—if he was in the company of friends—Smoke. But it was always “Billy” that would anchor him to the hypnotic South Carolina Lowcountry of his youth. Even at the height of his boxing career, whenever a voice would call out “Hey, Billy!” from the rear of the crowd, he’d immediately send someone in search of the voice. “That’s somebody from back home,” he’d say. “Go get ’em.” No one who knew him from the Laurel Bay section of Burton, South Carolina, ever called him Joe, and surely no one who represented themselves as kin and actually were. They called him Billy Boy or Billy.
Laurel Bay sat in the poorest county in the poorest state in America when Joseph Frazier was born, on January 12, 1944. In a clearing cut from ten acres of woodland dense with big pines and gnarled oaks dripping with Spanish moss, Rubin Frazier erected a single-story house that had a sporadically leaky roof and no electricity or running water until some years later. Elevated from the ground on oak blocks, thus keeping it dry in the event of occasional flooding from nearby creeks and swamps, the bare structure had a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms—one occupied by Rubin and his wife, Dolly; Billy; and Billy’s sisters, Martha (Mazie), Julia (Flossie), and Rebecca (Bec); and the other variously by his brothers Marion (Bubba), Eugene (Skeet), Andrew (Bozo), Rubin Jr. (Jake), John (Big Boy), and Thomas (Tommy). David, a seventh brother, would die in infancy of diphtheria. With the exception of an old car that Rubin always seemed to be under the hood of, the place appeared to have been preserved in amber from the bygone days of Reconstruction. Rubin buried what small sum of cash and few valuables he had in a coffee can under the pigpen out back. There, he also stashed his reserves of corn liquor, guarded by a hog that only Rubin seemed to have the skills to pacify. “That animal would take you out,” Joe’s niece Lisa Coakley told me. “No one would ever get near it but Uncle Billy. It stunk back there.”
Generations of Fraziers had labored in the blazing heat on this very same land, first as slaves on the antebellum plantations strewn across the Sea Islands and later as field workers for truck farms that became the hub of the local economy. Slavery had been established at the outset of the founding of South Carolina by prosperous white planters from the West Indian colony of Barbados. The Barbadians had amassed their wealth through the harvesting and processing of sugarcane, which they sold at a premium as molasses, refined white sugar, and rum. Liberal with the whip and other forms of torture, the Barbadians were particularly cruel to their slaves. Because Barbados was relatively small and lacking in economic potential, the planters set sail for the virgin coast of South Carolina, where the chief cash crops were rice, indigo, and, later, cotton. Accordingly, they enslaved specific West African nationalities who were able to endure the extreme climate of the Deep South. Although the identity of their African forebears is uncertain due to the incineration of vital records
during the Civil War, DNA analysis indicates that the Fraziers originally came from what are now Cameroon/Congo, Benin/Togo, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal.
Sea Island slaves were freed early in the Civil War. Strategically advantageous because it had the deepest harbor south of the Chesapeake Bay, Beaufort was captured from the Confederacy in the Battle of Port Royal, in November 1861, and became a beachhead for Union naval operations. Thus, the ten thousand enslaved Africans who had been in captivity in the area became the initial beneficiaries of Reconstruction. Chief among the progressive initiatives ordered from Washington was the Port Royal Experiment, which established schools for former slaves and enabled them to purchase parcels of the land that had been abandoned by fleeing Confederates. As Reconstruction unfolded in the years that followed, Beaufort enjoyed a flourishing phosphate industry and an international demand for Sea Island cotton. So-called one-mule farmers could earn three hundred dollars a year selling cotton.
Prosperity ground to a halt in the 1890s. By happenstance, the phosphate plants were wiped out during the savage hurricane of 1893 just as prices on the cotton exchange plunged. Amid the wreckage of the hurricane, Beaufort County was deprived of aid from the state legislature, which dismissed it with the same contempt that Governor and, later, Senator Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman exhibited when he called it “the niggerdom of Beaufort.” By 1895, the state legislature had done away with the Reconstruction constitution and replaced it with a Jim Crow constitution, which placed constraints on the ability of the “colored” population to vote and institutionalized separate entrances, waiting rooms, and drinking fountains in public places. But Beaufort County remained tethered to the Republican Party—the Party of Lincoln—in large part due to the presence of Robert Smalls, an African American who commandeered a Confederate transport ship in 1862 and later became a Republican icon as a U.S. congressman. Unseated from his position in 1886, the so-called King of Beaufort County became port collector and represented the lingering vestiges of the Republican voting bloc until his passing in 1915. Local historian Lawrence Rowland told me: “You could say Reconstruction of the South began in Beaufort County and ended there.”
Over the fifty-year period from 1890 to 1940, 52 percent of the African Americans living in Beaufort County joined the Great Migration to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West. Opportunity presented itself in those places, even if the level of bigotry was no less corrosive than it was in the South. At the height of the Great Depression, in the 1930s, the average annual salary in Beaufort County was ninety dollars—$1.73 a week. On top of that, there were a plethora of diseases. Outhouses became a haven for the parasites that caused hookworm. Malaria was so commonplace that Rowland said “nearly everyone had a touch of it.” Vitamin deficiencies led to recurring outbreaks of pellagra and scurvy. Fifty percent of African American males suffered from syphilis, which rendered them ineligible for service in World War II. In preparation for the three-volume history he coauthored on Beaufort County, Rowland found two cases of people who succumbed to starvation. One occurred very close to where the Fraziers lived.
But character, ingenuity, and hard work always provided a way to get by in the Sea Islands. Rubin and Dolly Frazier possessed each in abundance and encouraged these principles in their offspring, who were as hard-nosed outside the ring as Billy would one day become inside it. To feed themselves, the Fraziers hunted and fished, and they sold whatever they could for extra money, be it firewood, manure, or corn liquor. To heal themselves, they combed the tangled brush for “root,” plant life that could be distilled into home remedies to be applied topically or swallowed by the spoonful. And if the privation visited upon them became too unbearable, they offered it up to the Lord in prayer, certain that there would be better days ahead. Even if they did not live to see them, it was their abiding belief that their children would, if not here on earth, then at the throne of God.
* * *
No one would be able to say years later exactly what precipitated it. The version that Joe told in his autobiography was that it began as an argument between rivals over a woman at a house party. But the account passed down to Lisa Coakley by her grandmother Dolly was that the quarrel started not over a contested paramour but as a turf war between Rubin and Arthur Smith in the illegal commerce of corn liquor. By wide agreement, Rubin had the preferred stock in the county. Unlike the cloudy swill that some bootleggers circulated through an old car radiator during the distilling process, which introduced toxic traces of antifreeze, the goods Rubin sold were always clear in appearance and posed no threat of poisoning. According to Lisa, Smith had a few drinks too many and grew irritated by something the equally inebriated Rubin said or did. Words were exchanged.
“Rubin, I think we need to leave,” said Dolly, the two now sitting in his pickup—Rubin with his right hand on top of the steering wheel, Dolly in the passenger seat, their daughter Rebecca cradled in her left arm as she nursed her. Dolly had her right foot tucked up under her.
“Ah, Dee, don’t worry about a thing. I’m all right.’”
“No, I’m just getting this funny feeling we need to leave.”
That very instant buckshot began to fly. Wielding a sawed-off shotgun with wild-eyed fury, Smith had fired through the passenger side and windshield. The fusillade struck Rubin in his lower left forearm and shattered the bones in his wrist and hand. Dolly covered up to protect her baby, Rebecca, who would not suffer any wounds. But Dolly was hit by pellets in her left foot. Smith was arrested by police and charged with intent to kill; he later served two years in prison. Rubin was admitted to the hospital, where his forearm was amputated. Doctors also treated Dolly, but fragments of buckshot would remain embedded in her foot. At sudden changes in the weather, she would complain: “Oh, that foot. That bullet is in there moving around.”
Dolly was pregnant with Billy when that incident occurred, in June 1943. Only five years old when she began toiling in the fields of white men, she would pass down a fighting spirit to her son that was galvanized by the hard and violent days she had seen. She had been raped as a teenager. But she overcame whatever obstacles she encountered with the help of Scripture and a profound integrity that would not allow her to capitulate to any circumstance that she looked upon as degrading. Given the choice between picking vegetables from sunup to sundown and working as a housekeeper for the wife of a wealthy white man, she could not bring herself to do the latter, even if labor as a field hand was just seasonal. “Very spirited—and very spiritual,” neighbor Kenneth Doe told me. “She carried herself in a way that you had to respect.” Along with her essential generosity of heart, Billy would inherit from Dolly Frazier her work ethic, occasional sharp temper, and general distrust of outsiders. She was not a woman to defy, as her progeny would discover whenever they stepped out of line. In a corner of her spotless house was a switch she had braided from supple branches. She would either use that or send the offending child outside to retrieve a suitable stick—and then let him or her wait . . . and wait . . . and wait until she summoned them for punishment. And when Rubin showed up at the door at the end of one of his weekend sprees? His granddaughter Dannette Frazier told me with a laugh, “Oh, Lord, that woman would kick him into the fireplace.”
Dolly and Rubin exchanged marriage vows in 1930. By legitimate occupation, Rubin was a carpenter who did odd jobs for people and later worked as an overseer at the Bellamy Farm. One of thirteen children born to Dennis and Susan Frazier (a midwife who helped deliver Billy), Rubin held a certain stature in the community beyond his aptitude for making corn liquor. “He was what you would call a ‘fixer,’” his grandson Rodney Frazier told me. “He helped people in any way he could. And if somebody got in trouble, he would find a way to get them out of town.” Even with just one hand, Rubin could still change gears, hammer a nail, and tie his shoes. And he still had a wandering eye for women. In his autobiography, Frazier recounted how Rubin had once told him that his sexual adventures produced a total of twenty-six children, and
that the accommodating Dolly accepted them as her own whenever they appeared at the door. Only Rubin himself could say if there was any truth to that pretention of fecundity—or how truly accepting of it his wife was. And yet these very same roving appetites would appear in Billy at a young age, along with the same innate enthusiasm Rubin possessed for lending a helping hand to others.
Far from the pitched battles in Europe and the South Pacific, Laurel Bay was enveloped in a winter chill on the day Billy was born. Of that blessed event, Frazier would say years later, “When I was born, three hundred people gathered ’round the house to see if I’d been born with one arm or not, because my daddy had lost his arm in an accident.” With a chuckle, sister Mazie wondered aloud, “Was it three hundred? I don’t know. I do know there were a lot of people who wondered if he would have one hand.” Recollections of those early days would be preserved by Mazie in a composition book: “Well, it was January 1944 and I had wanted a baby sister. But the day started, the sun came up and news spread that Dolly Frazier had given birth to a son. . . . When my mother went back to work six months later, my dad became his babysitter and was with him the whole day. Billy Boy would sit in his lap when dad drove the car and pretend to steer it. Dad became his hero. You would have had to have been there to see the love they had for each other. Dad would hand him to me and I became his overseer. I had to feed him and see that he got dressed. He depended on me. I looked out for him. And when he became a young man, he looked out for me.” Years later, Mazie told me, “Wherever I went, he went. Everyone thought he was my child.”
A used school bus from G. W. Trask & Sons would take Dolly and the other workers from Laurel Bay and drop them off each morning at the fields they were scheduled to pick. George W. Trask had relocated to Beaufort County from Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1908, followed in 1920 by his son Neil (who later branched off into cattle in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina) and in 1934 by his son John. Shrewdly, John began acquiring land at Depression prices and cultivated key relationships with two top grocery chains, A&P and Safeway. At the height of its operations in the 1940s and ’50s, G. W. Trask produced approximately one thousand acres of crops annually, the profits of which were shared with John and his young brother Harold (also known as Beanie). Some years were better than others, depending upon any wild swings in the weather, but it was, by and large, a lucrative undertaking that enabled John to follow his entrepreneurial spirit and buy into a variety of downtown businesses. John Trask also became an influential figure in local politics.
Smokin' Joe Page 2
