Commercial farms were the chief employers in Beaufort County during these lean years. At G. W. Trask & Sons, field hands numbered anywhere from thirty-five to 150 during any given season. But while work in the fields could be counted on to provide a steady, if small, income, it was a hard existence for the men and women who stooped for long hours over rows of beets, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, and such. “It was backbreaking labor,” John Trask III told me. “You were bending over all day long.” Dolly wore a wide-brimmed hat, a scarf, long-sleeved shirts, pants, and work boots. With each bushel she picked, she would be given a “babbitt” valued at twenty-five to fifty cents, depending on the effort involved in picking the specific crop; they were redeemed for cash each Saturday. Annie Green worked with her cousin Dolly in the fields as a young girl and told me, “She had very fast hands.” Occasionally, Dolly hired on as a day worker canning tomatoes, which had to be pulled off a conveyor belt and skinned. Her daughter Mazie remembered she would peel and devein shrimp when the trawlers just in from the Atlantic Ocean unloaded their catch at the city dock. The jagged shells would leave her fingers bloody. Dolly once said, “Why, I done ever’ little thing for a livin’ ’cept kill a man.”
Grocery outlays were offset by how far a dollar could go in those days: a twenty-four-ounce loaf of Marvel Bread cost eleven cents, a pound of cheese thirty-seven cents, a dozen oranges twenty-five cents, and so on. But the Fraziers became skilled at living off the land. On their own ten acres in Laurel Bay, they coaxed peas, cotton, and watermelon out of the sandy soil. Eggs were procured from the chickens that were always underfoot in the yard. At the end of their productive peak, the chickens were butchered, as were the occasional cow and the hogs that were not otherwise engaged in standing sentry over the household loot. Whenever the larder grew bare, the Broad River and its tributaries yielded crabs and oysters and an abundance of fish—whiting, trout, flounder, and spottail bass. “If we had something that someone else needed, we traded it for something we needed,” said Mazie. “That was how we got by.” Dolly relaxed at the end of the day by lighting up a bowl of tobacco in her corncob pipe.
Forays deep into the woods provided access to a bounty of deer, ducks, turkeys, and small game such as fox, rabbit, raccoon, and squirrel. “The Lord make a way for you there,” Dolly would say of the wild, where she used to pick huckleberries to be sold by the quart door-to-door in Laurel Bay and “musk” to be peddled by the pound to “a white man who come around in his truck.” Billy would accompany her on these expeditions and help carry out sacks of the latter, yet he would always be spooked by the woods, how dark they would get at night, the animal life that lurked in the jungle of vines, and the noises—the sudden, creepy calls of peril. Instead of venturing outside at night to use the privy, which stood seventy-five yards from the back door, Billy would reach for the “slop jar” that was kept underneath his bed. “When I die,” he’d say years later, “don’t go buryin’ me down in the sticks, ya hear me?” But a cornucopia of “roots” bloomed there that were used as pharmaceuticals to treat fevers (horehound root); skin ailments (cockleburs); coughing (cockroach tree); urination issues (diluted wild grapevine sap); cataracts (persimmon sapwood), and so on. “Cures” were doled out not by medically trained professionals but by “root doctors”—latter-day African “witch doctors”—who in Gullah custom conjured up potions that both addressed physical needs and summoned the assistance of good and evil spirits. They assumed animal names—Dr. Bug, Dr. Buzzard, Dr. Crow, and such—and engaged in an enduring fox-and-hound chase with Ed McTeer, the so-called High Sheriff of the Lowcountry, who himself claimed to be skilled in root yet was obliged by law to haul the root doctors in for practicing medicine without a license.
Visitors would come by with some regularity in search of Stepney Robinson—aka Dr. Buzzard—who was located on St. Helena Island and was renowned for dispensing root in the form of charms intended to be worn, chewed, or buried. “People would come looking for him to get revenge on a rival by casting spells on them,” said Mazie. Closer to Laurel Bay was Peter Murray—aka Dr. Bug. Like Dr. Buzzard and the others, he kept a low profile in order to stay a step ahead of the law. An inhabitant of Laurel Bay could earn occasional dollar tips by helping visitors find Dr. Bug, whose career in voodoo came to an end when he began handing out a potion that enabled draftees to evade the service by giving them “hippity-hoppity hearts.” When two Gullah draftees died en route to their physicals at Fort Jackson, an investigation by McTeer uncovered that the potion contained corn liquor and a small amount of lead arsenate. “No, that potion ain’t pizen,” Dr. Bug explained to the court sorrowfully. “I drinks a shot of it myself ever’ day.” Dr. Bug pleaded guilty to hindering the Selective Service, was freed on five thousand dollars bond, and died soon thereafter.
Given her strong Baptist leanings, Dolly Frazier steered clear of the conjurings of Dr. Bug and his ilk, yet as Joe would remember, she was not beyond scaring you “practically out of your britches” with tales of the dead moaning in their graves. Nor was Dolly enthused by the perils the bootlegging operation invited into her house—certain arrest, possible jail time, the presence of firearms, and the corn liquor itself, which loosened not only tongues but also trousers. But Dolly adopted a pragmatic view that allowed her to accept it: The extra money always helped. Thus, it became a family operation, with Dolly and her daughters pitching in with sales and the sons helping Rubin on the production end. The still was hidden deep in the woods, and they scheduled their work in the early hours of the day, when the landscape would be covered with a ground fog that obscured the smoke curling up from the fire beneath the boiler. To ensure himself a jump on the law, Rubin would get up at 4 A.M., lean over his youngest son as he slept, and whisper in his ear: “Wake up, Billy Boy.”
* * *
Until he showed up for an appearance at Robert Smalls High School, Joe Louis had been a figure that the black community of Beaufort looked upon only from afar, his storied exploits burnished by his victory over Nazi propaganda tool Max Schmeling in 1938. They’d seen him in grainy newsreels at the downtown Breeze Theater, where blacks had their own entrance and were herded into the balcony, or perhaps in the pages of the Beaufort Gazette, which typically confined its coverage of local blacks to a small inside column under the rubric NEWS OF INTEREST TO THE COLORED COMMUNITY. But it was not until the Brown Bomber stepped into the ring in Beaufort to box in an exhibition on March 10, 1950, that he emerged before them in the flesh, his sloping, coffee-colored shoulders draped in a robe. By bus, by car, and by foot, his fans came from across the county and beyond to pay homage to a man who, in the words of novelist Richard Wright, embodied “the concentrated essence of black triumph over white.”
Louis had been invited to Robert Smalls by its forward-thinking principal, W. Kent Alston, who in later years would bring in Marian Anderson and Count Basie to perform. Far from the unmatched talent he had once been, Louis had hung up his gloves the year before, only to agree to a comeback bout against champion Ezzard Charles in September 1950 to chisel away at a five-hundred-thousand-dollar debt he owed the Internal Revenue Service. His visit to Beaufort was part of a sixteen-stop exhibition tour that would take him through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. Given the key to the city in a ceremony presided over by Beaufort Mayor Angus D. Fordham, Louis boxed a scheduled three rounds against an undistinguished local and collected half the $1,290.67 in proceeds. Ever magnanimous, he later said of his opponent John Shaw: “He packs a real punch. I was saved by the bell in that last round.”
In the crowd that evening was Billy Frazier. Far too young at six years old to grasp the social significance of the man he had come to see, he was just old enough for the event to leave an impression on him that would take shape in his imagination. “Every Negro boy old enough to walk wanted to be the next Brown Bomber,” said Malcolm X, who as a teenager gave boxing a whirl himself. From a knotty oak tree in his backyard, Billy hung a burlap sack that he jammed with
rags, sand, corncobs, Spanish moss, and bricks. With his hands wrapped in socks, he would spend an hour each day attacking it with wild blows, hearing in his head the prophecy of his uncle Israel: “That boy’s gonna be another Joe Louis!” Dolly’s nephew Charles Middleton remembered seeing Billy swat at the bag. “Sometimes it would swing back and knock him in the nose!” he told me. “But he would keep at it.” By the early 1950s, when Rubin had arranged to hook up his house to the electrical grid, he purchased a black-and-white television set that acquainted his youngest son with the royalty of boxing in almost nightly telecasts. From Madison Square Garden in New York City, the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports aired on Friday evenings and featured showstoppers such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Willie Pep, and a host of others, all larger-than-life men moving across the snowy screen.
Casual observers who sized up young Billy as he pounded away at his improvised heavy bag were amused. “You can all laugh,” he told them. “But I’m gonna be champion someday.” Given how Rubin coddled his youngest son, it seemed unlikely. Rubin would order Mazie: “Make my boy something to eat!” In charge of keeping house as the oldest daughter while Dolly was at work in the fields, Mazie remembered: “We did his chores for him. He did whatever he wanted to do.” Called upon to help bring in water from the pump for his bath, which was taken in the same tub that was used to launder clothes, Billy always seemed to fall asleep instead. According to Mazie, he was a “happy-go-lucky boy” who sucked his index and middle fingers until he was eleven. Whenever his behavior called for disciplinary action, Rubin intervened to spare him. Seeing Dolly take to her switch, he would plead, “Dee, leave my boy be.” With a glimmer of jollity in her eyes, Mazie explained: “If he kicked the dog and the dog ran away, that would be all right. But if I kicked the dog and the dog ran away, I’d get a whuppin’.”
Only years later would it dawn on Frazier how poor they had been. Kenneth Doe observed, “None of us back then were aware of that until the government told us.” At the Port Royal Agricultural and Industrial School, which had been founded in 1901 by Joseph S. Shanklin of the Tuskegee Institute and later became the Beaufort County Training School, classes were given in cooking, farming, hygiene, and sewing. “We would take old clothes and turn them into quilts,” said Mazie. Upon the arrival of the Christmas season, it was customary for the Fraziers to tear apart copies of the Montgomery Ward catalog or Life and paper the bare walls with their pages, each one a window into an inaccessible place that glowed with shiny new objects. No lavish toys were to be found under the pine that had been hauled in from outside, only bags with candy and pieces of fruit. “One year I got a black baby doll,” Mazie said. “My brother got a red wagon.” But whatever the Yuletide lacked in extravagances, Mazie remembered it as a “happy time,” of relatives dropping by amid gales of laughter and of tables groaning with holiday fare—crab stew, fried chicken, roasted pig, topped off with sweet potato pie. Sister-in-law Miriam would prepare raccoon in later years, careful to clean and parboil it before popping it in the oven.
“Before you cook it, you’ve got to strip away the glands,” she said. “And you’ve got to get one that doesn’t have rabies.”
And she would know that . . . how?
“Well,” Miriam explained, “if it just stands there and gives you the evil eye, you better walk the other way.”
So, Joe ate raccoon?
“He did when I cooked it.”
Spirited roughhousing consumed Billy as a child. “He was always into stuff,” said Lisa Coakley, who told the story of how one day her uncle wandered into the pigpen. “He went in there to tease the hog, thinking he could get out of the way before the hog attacked. But the hog ran underneath him and catapulted him in the air. He landed on his left arm.” Holding it, he came running inside with tears in his eyes, “Momma! My arm! My arm!” But Dolly scolded, “Billy, you had no business in that hog pen!” Apparently, the arm was broken but never set in a cast, which caused it to heal with a crook in it that later enhanced his ability to throw his signature left hook. Cured of any lingering curiosity he had had of stepping back into the hog pen, Billy expelled his prepubescent energies in scraps with Annie Green, who was two years older. “You know how kids are—one thing would lead to another and we’d be wrestling in the dirt,” she said. “I beat him every time! And then one day I realized, ‘Hey, he can beat me.’ And then we stopped.” As his hours on the heavy bag piled up and his strength increased, it was not long before other boys began paying him for protection. For twenty-five cents or perhaps a sandwich, Frazer stepped between them and any “scamboogah” that happened along. (Coined by Frazier himself, the word “scamboogah” identified general lowlifes.)
School proved to be a burdensome obligation. Looking back on it, Mazie ventured Billy would have been far less bored if he had entered a tech program. From an early age, he delighted in taking objects apart and putting them back together. “My brother was a person who learned with his hands,” she said. In the seventh and eighth grades at Beaufort County Training School and in ninth grade at Robert Smalls, he underperformed in his classes and scored below average in courtesy, self-control, and—ironically—perseverance. Counted absent sixty-six days during his ninth-grade year, which could be explained part by work and part by playing hooky, Frazier proved to be a perpetual headache for his teachers, one of whom in the comment section of his report card observed: “Joseph is a poor student and is sometimes very rude and ill-mannered.” While Robert Smalls High School had not yet been integrated and thus did not have the resources that white schools then had, Kenneth Doe remembered it was staffed by educators “who would not let you do less than you were capable of.” But Frazier did not see the point of any of it. “I was just there taking up space,” he would say years later. Chances are that school would have held more appeal to him if Dolly had not prevented him from playing football for fear of injury, just as she had forbidden him from wading in ponds for fear of drowning. He did not go back for his tenth-grade year.
Whatever Joe lacked in the way of a formal education was offset by practical knowledge that came with hard living. Given the arc of his childhood experiences, it is no wonder that an unnamed friend years later told The Saturday Evening Post: “He was always a brute, that boy, always a brute.” By his early teens, he had been tossed in the air by that hog (also booted in the head by a mule); spun a car out of control, flipped it over seven times, and emerged without a scratch; proved himself adept at beating back various scamboogahs; and become intimately acquainted with the pleasures of the opposite sex. “I never had a little boy’s life,” Joe would say years later. Manhood came to him at an early age, the imperatives of which were passed down by the example set him by Rubin, who—if he could bring himself to repel the invitations of other women—stood by his commitment to provide for his wife and offspring, even if it required breaking the law by running a still.
Even after Prohibition ended in 1933, it remained illegal to operate unlicensed liquor dispensaries, punishable by fines and/or jail. For the poor in the community, distilling liquor was still a way to pocket some small amount of extra income. Highly commercial entrepreneurs were called “blind tigers,” who could be found traveling on the back roads of South Carolina by the light of the moon, their jugs of liquor distributed around the car in a way that would not leave the rear bumper drooping from the weight of their forbidden cargo. “A lot of corn liquor was made around here,” said Rowland, the local historian. “Not at all of it was for sale, though.” With the help of a government coupon that allowed him to load up on sugar—he would use five pounds of it per batch, along with ten pounds of corn and water—Rubin would let his blend sit in a fifty-five-gallon drum until it turned sour. He would then divide it into five-gallon cans and haul them to the still, where he would pour it into a boiler that sat over a fire. The still would then be capped and the distillation process would occur. “Good, strong liquor,” Joe would call it years later. To keep away prying eyes on days when
they were not aided by the cover of fog, Joe would wave a piece of cardboard at the rising column of smoke in order to disperse it.
The bootleg operation remained a remunerative enterprise as long as Rubin could steer clear of legal entanglements. Either Rubin would deliver the liquor (and stop in and join the lady of the house for a “drink”) or customers would drop by the house to pick it up. According to Mazie, they sold a “jill” (the size of a baby-food jar) for twenty-five cents, a half-pint for fifty cents, a pint for a dollar, a quart for two dollars, and a gallon for eight dollars. But Rubin found himself at odds with law enforcement and was arrested in February 1946 for being in violation of the state liquor code. He told the judge, “Look, I have children and I’m not going to see them freeze or starve from the lack of things I know money could buy. You can throw me in jail, but I’d do it again.” The judge sentenced him to four months on the public works crew. Mazie remembered he worked as a cook on the chain gang. “They worked to keep the highway clean,” she said. “We’d sit across the street and watch them. And then we’d eat with them. They’d build a fire and cook a big pot of lima beans and rice.”
Upset that her husband had been jailed, Dolly told him, “I think you should get out of this, try something else.” Rubin replied, “What can I do? Where can I go?” But it was not just the looming presence of the sheriff that concerned Dolly. There were the all-night parties and the women who attended them. Though Mazie would call him “the kindest man you would ever want to meet,” someone who would pass his own plate of food to a hungry person, she conceded: “Daddy was hell on wheels.” With Joe in tow, he would go out on a Friday evening and come back hours later to find Dolly standing at the door, her eyes ablaze with fury. “Where you been?” she would holler. Only five foot six, she would begin batting Rubin across the room as he covered up. “We had to step between them,” said Mazie, who added that her parents loved each other and that there was never a concern that either would leave. Dolly would shoot Billy a look and say, “And you! You are gonna end up just like him!”
Smokin' Joe Page 3
