Smokin' Joe

by Mark Kram, Jr.

  * * *

  Never one to hold her tongue or back down in an argument, Dolly drew a red line when it came to the expression of racial vitriol in her house. Growing up around her in the 1960s, grandson Rodney Frazier would remember once seeing some depiction of white antagonism on television and exclaiming, “Those crackers are treating us like dogs!” only to have his grandmother admonish him. “Listen,” the old woman would say, “so long as you live with me, there will be none of that. God sits on his throne and looks upon his children as equal. If there is wrong in the world, just reward will come in the end.” To her offspring and theirs, she preached a gospel of fairness and respect, certain in her belief that “right would prevail over wrong.” But she understood that day was still far off, which is why she lectured her young on how to get by in the South: Never look at a white person in the face. When you pass them, keep your eyes down on the ground. And never, ever give a white woman even a passing glance, which was what led to the lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Rodney Frazier explained, “When something happened, it heightened the fear in the family. We would say: ‘Did you hear what happened to so-and-so? The same thing can happen to you.’” He shrugged and added, “So you went along to get along.”

  Contrary to the perception that Joe escaped Beaufort a step ahead of a lynch mob, the truth is far from cinematic and played out over a period of years in the deep shadow of Jim Crow. Indignities accumulated upon him in a slow drip, day by day. One either had to become inured to it, or pack up and leave, as Langston Hughes observed in his poem “The South”: “And I, who am black / Would give her many rare gifts / But she turns her back upon me. / So now I seek the North— / The cold-faced North. . . .” Frazier left not because he was in any imminent danger but because he sensed that by staying he would indeed come to a disagreeable end. By temperament, he did not like being pushed around, nor did he like seeing anyone else pushed around. In an interview with Esquire in 2006, he would point to an incident that occurred at the Bellamy Farm in which he came to the aid of a fellow black youth who had accidentally “screwed up one of the tractors” and found himself in a heated exchange with one of the foremen. Given the peril that such encounters held and knowing her boy, it became clear to Dolly that he would be better off elsewhere.

  Whatever contrived harmony existed between the races hinged on the adherence by blacks to a wide range of humiliating inequities. Even if the white hierarchy in Beaufort adopted a somewhat more benevolent stance on race relations than in other jurisdictions in South Carolina, such forbearance did not come with an engraved invitation to Sunday dinner. “We stayed in our lane, and they stayed in their lane,” said Tom Bolden, a Beaufortonian who married into Dolly’s side of the family. Whenever there would be episodic conflict, the white establishment placed the blame squarely on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. The Beaufort Gazette shouted in a headline in March 1944: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RACE TROUBLE? The Gazette—the very same paper that published an ad from a local seafood distributor that supported the war-bond effort by exclaiming, “Every Fish We Wrap, You Help Kill a Jap”—placed the blame on “the Dirty Politicians in the Country.” An unsigned editorial argued: “We are having no trouble with Colored people except which [is] agitated by outsiders.” Blame fell to “Mrs. Roosevelt,” who “wants social equality in the South to help put over the Fourth Term of the New Deal.” Frazier would remember being compelled to eat lunch out in the field, “like a bow-wow.” And when he showed up at work each day, it was always the same exchange, which Frazier would always get a chuckle from retelling:

  “Workingman arrives, says, ‘Good morning, boss.’

  “Boss says, ‘To the mule.’

  “Comes lunchtime and the workingman says, ‘Lunchtime, boss.’

  “Boss says, ‘One o’clock.’

  “Quitting time and the workingman says, ‘Good night, boss.’

  “Boss says, ‘In the morning . . .’”

  While young Billy did not go looking for trouble, he did not flee when it came looking for him. In his autobiography, he observed: “Big things, little things: Beaufort never stopped letting you know you were a nigger.” Given his standing as local bruiser, street fights became commonplace. There was always some scamboogah who stepped up to challenge him. “He did not back down from anybody,” said boyhood friend Isaac Mitchell. “White or black, he’d fight if you wanted to fight. He wasn’t a bully, but he didn’t allow anybody to bully him.” Frazier liked to tell of an encounter he had at age fourteen with an older white teenager, who shouted at him from behind the wheel of his car, “Get out of the street, nigger!” Billy shot back, “Come and do something about it, cracker!” With a big crowd looking on, Billy floored his tormentor with a left hook and continued hammering him with punches as he lay on the ground. When the young man begged for mercy, Billy let him up. The two shook hands. On another occasion, Billy whipped a marine who had taunted him with racial slurs and did it so impressively that the marine declined to press charges when the police showed up. The bloodied leatherneck told Frazier, “You beat me fair and square.”

  Luck would have it that in this case Frazier circumvented the judicial system, which in Dixie was a crapshoot if you were black and either the victim or alleged perpetrator of a crime. Not a great deal had changed since the late 1880s, when it was not uncommon to come across published accounts of racial disparity in the justice system: Two white men and a black man go into the woods. The black man is shot dead. The white men testify later in court that they had heard “a noise” behind them that they feared was “a snake” and fired upon it. They are acquitted. Thus, it would come as no surprise when fourteen-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. was arrested in March 1944 on circumstantial evidence in the slaying of two white girls, ages eleven and eight, in the rural South Carolina community of Alcolu. With only an unrecorded and unsigned verbal “confession” coerced from him with an ice cream secured for him by a deputy, Stinney was convicted in a one-day trial by an all-white jury that took just ten minutes to deliberate. No appeal was pursued by his white public defender. The ninety-pound youth was so small that they had to place a Bible under him in order to hook him up to the electric chair. He became the youngest person ever executed in the United States. A judge would overturn the verdict in 2014 on the grounds that Stinney had been denied a fair trial, provided no effective defense, and deprived of his Sixth Amendment rights. Observed Kenneth Doe, who became a pastor: “This was a heartless land.”

  Word of what happened up in Alcolu only gave a face to the fear that was in the wind, of how disposable black lives were in the hands of judges and juries. The very same spring that Stinney was being rushed to judgment, Edward Feltwell, the sixteen-year-old white son of a marine warrant officer at Parris Island, confessed to the rape and murder of an eight-year-old white girl. Two weeks before Stinney was executed at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, Feltwell received a twenty-year prison sentence. Exactly how much of that he served remains unclear. The Federal Bureau of Prisons cannot verify that he completed any of it. Records indicate that he was married in North Carolina in 1957, worked as an electrician, and died in Jonesville, in 1995. He had two daughters. None of this came as any surprise to Doe, who observed that the scales of justice were only balanced if the black community could find a way to apply leverage. To elucidate, Doe cited an incident that occurred in the 1920s. “A white boy spit on a black boy,” he said. “The black boy grabbed a stick and broke his arm. Of course, the law came. But this is what happened: the adult men of the black community went to a white grocer in the area and said, ‘If this boy goes to trial, your business is closing down.’ And he never went to trial.”

  Given how at odds his disposition was with the prevailing culture, it is no surprise that Frazier would weigh his circumstances and conclude that “there was nothin’ but bad times ahead.” Moreover—and perhaps more significantly—there was no foreseeable way that he cou
ld better himself in Beaufort. Employment was menial, sporadic, and low-paying. Upon running afoul of his boss at the Bellamy Farm, he found work unloading crates at the Coca-Cola plant and later got a job raising rafters at a government housing site on Parris Island. To pick up extra money, Frazier and a friend, B. A. Johnson, seized upon broken-down cars that had been abandoned by marines on the roadside until payday. The two would siphon off the gas for their own use and strip the vehicle of its parts, which they sold. With the exception of his disorderly behavior in street fights, this juvenile dalliance with larceny was as far as Frazier would step toward the wrong side of the law. No indication exists in South Carolina records that he was ever arrested.

  Joe looked upon himself as a man at that young age. With what he called “the mind of a twenty-two-year-old” at the age of just fourteen, he found himself in relationships with two teenage girls, Rosetta Green and Florence Smith. The young women became rivals for his attention, if not a commitment. With Rosetta looking on, Florence asked him: “Billy, who do you love?” Frazier told her he loved them both. According to his autobiography, he believed that “a man can love as many [women] as he can love.” Neither woman wanted any part of such an unconventional arrangement, yet each would bear him not one child but two before he turned nineteen. Although his entanglement with the two women was resolved when Frazier eventually chose to marry Florence, it would remain a complicated arrangement among the three.

  Florence Smith was an attractive young woman with cute braids. By nature, she tended to be timid. She lived fifteen miles away from Laurel Bay on St. Helena Island, the only daughter of Hector and Elise Smith. Hector worked as an electrician on Parris Island, Elise as a housekeeper. Along with Florence—who they referred to endearingly as “Lady”—they had three sons, including one who drowned as a young child. Hector kept a close and loving eye on Florence, whom he hoped to see one day attend college, as she had been at the top of her high school class and had the ability to go far. So when she turned up pregnant, he became irate, eyeing Billy with scorn and sizing him up as a hooligan from Laurel Bay.

  Even Frazier would have had to concede that he was something less than optimal son-in-law material. With no prospects of a steady job, two children on the way by two women, and a disposition that placed him in the crosshairs of conflict, he began looking beyond the county line for a place where he could settle down and better himself. His brothers Bubba and Bozo had gone to Central Florida to work in the orange groves; Bozo later hired on as a longshoreman in Tampa. Mazie and Bec had traveled north to Philadelphia, where both found jobs in the garment industry; Bec later became a union organizer. Tommy settled in New York, where he also worked in the garment industry. Upon dropping out of school, Frazier arranged to join Tommy and his wife, Ollie, in New York. He asked his friend Isaac Mitchell to come along.

  “Oh, man, you can do better going north,” Billy told Mitchell.

  “Yeah, but I’m still in school,” Mitchell replied. “You know my mother and father ain’t gonna let me, especially my father. I can’t go home and say I’m packing up and leaving.”

  Billy shrugged and said, “I gotta go. I gotta help my family.”

  At the beginning of the Great Migration, the journey from the Sea Islands to New York was engaged by steamboat, by way of Savannah or Charleston. (“There’s a boat dat’s leavin’ soon for New York, come wid me, dat’s where we belong, sister,” was how Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward enshrined the passage in the lyrics of Porgy and Bess.) By the 1920s and ’30s, the preferred way of traveling was by train on “The Chickenbone Special,” so-called because black passengers who could not get served at railroad restaurants would carry shoeboxes full of food; all that remained by the end of the trip were some chicken bones. By the 1940s and ’50s, the Greyhound bus became a popular alternative for passage. Choosing to go by bus, fifteen-year-old Billy Frazier borrowed the fare from his cousin Charles Middleton. With a single suitcase that contained a few odds and ends of apparel and a change of church clothes, he boarded the Dog by himself in Beaufort for the journey to New York and sat in one of the middle rows, only to be ordered by the driver to move back as additional white passengers got on at each stop. As the bus coughed and wheezed up Route 301 and the hours crawled by, he peered out his window at the passing shopfronts and signage, the small towns giving way to vast fields and then to ever-larger cities. In his lap was a paper bag with some cold pieces of fried chicken.

  Chapter Two

  The Hammer or the Nail?

  Joe and Yank Durham, 1966. Philadelphia Bulletin

  From across the crowded and noisy gym at the Twenty-Third Police Athletic League in North Philadelphia, his voice boomed with an authority unlike any other. No one had the set of vocal cords that Yancey “Yank” Durham possessed, or used them with such agility as a tool of persuasion. He had a basso profundo that oozed honey. Assiduously, he polished his delivery by taking correspondence courses to enhance his diction, which was always precise in polite conversation yet invariably peppered with profanity. New York Times columnist Red Smith once observed: “If a person who did not know Yancey Durham heard him talking in the next room, he would assume that the voice belonged to an actor or preacher or con man or politician. . . . Yank was a little of each.” With a slender mustache, his hair spotted with flecks of gray, he dressed in tailored suits, drove a Cadillac, and favored big cigars. He carried himself with the imperial air of a U.S. senator.

  With a towel over a shoulder and a Q-tip behind an ear, Durham had labored in relative obscurity for years, his eyes always on the gym door in search of a young fighter who could turn a dollar. Raised across the Delaware River amid the urban decay of Camden, New Jersey, he had had nine bouts as an amateur fighter, not including eleven more unsanctioned events on what he called “bootleg cards.” On one he shared billing with “Two Ton” Tony Galento, who had been flattened by Joe Louis during his “Bum of the Month Club” tour but not before he had dropped Joe himself. Durham earned ten dollars for these appearances. “They’d give you some flunky name and you’d fight,” he said. World War II interrupted his fledgling career and effectively ended it when a jeep ran over him during an air raid in England. With both legs shattered, his skull fractured, and assorted ribs broken, he was in and out of hospitals for two years and would never overcome a slight limp. He found employment as a welder for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which would later provide him with a pension that supplemented the disability pay he received as a veteran. Through the 1950s and early 1960s, he was a fixture at the Twenty-Third PAL, where he worked with assorted amateurs with the objective of turning them pro. None of them would come within even hailing distance of the brass ring.

  Philadelphia gyms were abattoirs in which only the bravest survived. They were scattered across the city in run-down buildings, in walk-ups above auto shops or in basements, and were known for the unpoliced mayhem that occurred in those small sixteen-by-sixteen-foot rings during sparring sessions. Crowds would stream in off the street as word spread of an impending encounter, and bets would be placed on the outcome. Veteran trainer George James told me, “When Georgie Benton was boxing Harold Johnson, you could hear a pin drop. Both of them staring each other down, daring one another to throw a punch so the other could counter off it.” In 1960, outweighed by sixty pounds, Benton found himself in a sparring session with the formidable Sonny Liston, two years before Liston pummeled Floyd Patterson for the world heavyweight championship. “Sonny was a brute,” Benton told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “We got into the ring and he started swinging at me. I had to outbox him, sticking and moving, sticking and moving.” By the third round, Liston was so enraged that he had not yet pinned down the elusive middleweight that he began launching wild shots at his head. To the eternal relief of the understandably petrified Benton, his manager stepped in and stopped the action before Georgie ended up a casualty of the so-called Philadelphia “gym wars.” Even with headgear and oversized gloves, the savage engagements in these spar
ring sessions could be more perilous than the actual paid events for which the boxers were preparing. By whipping an opponent in these informal settings, it conferred upon a fighter a certain street cred—“King of the Gym.” And yet doing so did not herald longevity for either combatant, as Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stan Hochman once observed: “Philadelphia gym wars shortened more careers than cocaine.”

  The Twenty-Third PAL stood at street level at Twenty-Second Street and Columbia Avenue, with big windows looking onto two rings in a long, narrow interior. Overseen by Hammond E. “Duke” Dugent, a genial cop who looked upon it as a sanctuary from the corrosive elements of urban life, the gym produced some of the top headliners of the 1950s and ’60s, including Gil Turner, Sugar Hart, Bennie Briscoe, and Gypsy Joe Harris. The star-crossed Gypsy Joe was just a boy when he hid in the doorway with a pursuer on his heels, only to glance through the window, grow curious, and go inside. Yank would have a hand in training him, along with Briscoe and others in the 1960s. But only when Durham became acquainted with Joe Frazier did he come face-to-face with his destiny. When Dugent pointed him out in early 1962, Durham was not particularly impressed. Joe was flabby and pigeon-toed. He had come to the gym to drop twenty or thirty pounds, so he could get back into some clothes he had grown out of and perhaps enhance his appeal to women. But appearances were immediately forgotten as soon as Durham and his partner Willie Reddish eyed him hitting the heavy bag. The sound that emanated from the blows Joe tagged it with produced the same singular acoustic effect that Ted Williams created when he squared off on a baseball.