Smokin' Joe by Mark Kram Jr

Author:Mark Kram, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Down Goes Frazier

Joe and Dolly, shelling beans on the porch at Brewton. Philadelphia Bulletin

Live Oaks draped with Spanish moss engulfed the weathered house he lived in as a boy. In the front yard were bare patches of dirt and the rusted remains of a broken-down car. Out in the back, where some digging would surely unearth the odd jug of corn liquor that had been buried beneath the hog pen years before and long forgotten, a clutch of chickens pecked at the ground and clucked. Not far from the oak tree where he had hung his do-it-yourself heavy bag, which he had loaded with rags and corncobs and bricks, Joe knelt down on one knee, took aim with a .22-caliber rifle, and began squeezing off rounds at a row of bottles and cans. Mostly, he missed; Joe was always erratic with guns, once accidently discharging one into the leather upholstery of one of his cars. With an eye on the laundry she had hanging on a line nearby, Dolly warned him not to shoot holes in her only set of good sheets.

Twelve years had passed since he had shoved off on a Greyhound bus with a change of clothes and a sack of fried chicken. In the wake of his victory over Ali, he had come back in April 1971 with Florence and their five children in two Cadillacs, and with an invitation to speak before the South Carolina State Legislature. He would become the first black male to do so since Reconstruction. In an interview with reporters upon his arrival back in Beaufort, he said he just planned “to rap with those fellas” at the statehouse, not deliver a political speech. The previous fall, South Carolina had overwhelmingly elected a moderate liberal governor, John C. West, who had promised in his inaugural address that under his administration the government would be color blind, but Frazier had visited enough through the years to know that whatever change had occurred had been small, and that “some damn people never gonna change.” Were it not for the fact that, as he said, “I got a mommy down here,” he was not certain if he would ever come back. Seeing her baby boy again, the old woman would say with a gleam in her eye, “Dolly Frazier, mother of the Champ. How sweet it is.”

Only the date on the calendar had changed in South Carolina. Philadelphia Daily News columnist Tom Cushman discovered that when he joined Joe on his trip back home. With a night to kill, he stopped in a tavern on Parris Island to sop up a beer and absorb some local color. Having once served in the Marine Corps, he had heard Parris Island was one of the worst places on earth, given to unbearable heat and swarms of mosquitos. At the bar was a group of drill instructors. “We got into a conversation,” Cushman told me. “Once they discovered I had been in the Marine Corps, I had no trouble talking with them.

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