Smokin' Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier

By Mark Kram, Jr.

A gripping, all-access biography of Joe Frazier, whose rivalry with Muhammad Ali riveted boxing fans and whose legacy as a figure in American sports and society endures

History will remember the rivalry of Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali as one for the ages, a trilogy of extraordinary fights that transcended the world of sports and crossed into a sociocultural drama that divided the country.

Joe Frazier was a much more complex figure than just his rivalry with Ali would suggest. In this riveting and nuanced portrayal, acclaimed sports writer Mark Kram, Jr. unlinks Frazier from Ali and for the first time gives a full-bodied accounting of Frazier’s life, a journey that began as the youngest of thirteen children packed in small farm house, encountering the bigotry and oppression of the Jim Crow South, and continued with his voyage north at age fifteen to develop as a fighter in Philadelphia.

Tracing Frazier’s life through his momentous bouts with the likes of Ali and George Foreman and the developing perception of him as the anti-Ali in the eyes of blue-collar America, Kram follows the boxer through his retirement in 1981, exploring his relationship with his son, the would-be heavyweight Marvis, and his fragmented home life as well as the uneasy place that Ali continued to occupy in his thoughts.

A propulsive and richly textured narrative that is also a powerful story about race and class in America, Smokin' Joe is unparalleled in its scope, depth, and access and promises to be the definitive biography of a towering American figure whose life was galvanized by conflict and whose mark has proven lasting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062654489

Mark Kram, Jr.

Mark Kram, Jr. won the 2013 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing for his first book, Like Any Normal Day: A Story of Devotion. Articles by him have appeared in The Best American Sports Writing and will be included in the forthcoming anthology, The Great American Sports Page. The Society of Professional Journalists honored him with the 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award for feature writing. Formerly a sports writer in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore, he is the son of the late Mark Kram, the acclaimed journalist for Sports Illustrated and author of Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. He has edited a collection of his father’s magazine pieces, Great Men Die Twice: The Selected Works of Mark Kram. He lives outside Philadelphia.

Book preview

Dedication

FOR CORY AND OLIVIA

Epigraph

A CHAMPION IS SOMEONE WHO GETS UP WHEN HE CAN’T.

—JACK DEMPSEY

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: The Love

Chapter One: Billy Boy

Chapter Two: The Hammer or the Nail?

Chapter Three: Cloverlay

Chapter Four: Asswhuppings

Chapter Five: Sky Larking

Chapter Six: Give Me a Hamburger

Chapter Seven: The Fight of the Century

Chapter Eight: Down Goes Frazier

Chapter Nine: May Pops

Chapter Ten: Boogie, Boogie, Boogie

Chapter Eleven: Sons

Chapter Twelve: Man to Man

Acknowledgments and Sources

Index

About the Author

Also by Mark Kram, Jr.

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Love

Joe Frazier, 1968. AP Images

His straw fedora tipped at a jaunty angle, Joe Frazier shuffled through the door of his upscale apartment with a pocketful of lottery tickets and something for Denise, his loyal companion of forty-one sporadically stormy years. Whenever he would go out to play a number at a convenience store—typically ten dollars a throw, now and then more if he had a hunch the stars were favorably aligned—he would spot an item as he strolled through the aisles, impulsively buy it in bulk, and bring it back for her as a small acknowledgment, the way an appreciative house cat drops an expired mouse at the feet of its owner. A week before, he had exited the elevator behind a handcart bearing eight cases of soda pop. Today, he showed up with enough paper towels under his arm to sop up an oil spill. Look what I got for you! he said, his weathered face unfolding into a wide smile. Forever amused by these impromptu deliveries, Denise Menz would think of how she and Joe always had paper towels with them whenever they crisscrossed America by car. Afraid of planes but not of weaving in and out of tractor trailers on the highway at upwards of 110 mph, he would use them to swab himself down with rubbing alcohol instead of stopping at a hotel to take a shower. Denise would later say, Funny what you would remember.

The apartment was on the twentieth floor of a building that overlooked the Ben Franklin Parkway, at the far end of which the Rocky statue stood sentry at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With her background as an interior designer, Denise had given the space an eclectic look that embraced a masculine color scheme. While Joe found it amenable enough, he yearned for the five-thousand-square-foot loft above his North Philadelphia gym, which Denise had decorated in the style of a 1970s bachelor pad and had outfitted with accents that included a leopard-spotted chaise lounge in the bathroom. For the better part of three decades, he had holed up amid the consoling shadows of 2917 North Broad Street, the very place where he had whipped his body into shape for his epic showdowns with Muhammad Ali and where years later he would still don an old robe and pad downstairs to paw at the heavy bag. But Joe was in uncertain health, the abode was cold and damp, and Denise and others were concerned that he could no longer climb the steep stairs to his quarters without falling. Plus, there were unending tax hassles. So Denise had procured the spot in Center City where the two now lived.

By virtue of a reportorial acquaintance with Joe that dated back to my father, Mark Kram, who covered him for Sports Illustrated from the early days of his career, I stopped in to see him one day in June 2009 for a piece I was thinking of doing for an overseas magazine. At sixty-five, his handshake was still firm, scarcely the grip of a man rumored to be in declining health. Word was that he was battling diabetes and high blood pressure, and that he still had not recovered physically from a car crash in 2002. Surgeries had followed on his back and neck, yet he remained in some degree of pain, which his eyes betrayed as he lowered himself to sit. Even so, he appeared full of cheerful contentment, far removed from the enduring portrayal of him as an angry and unforgiving man so incapable of letting go of the hatred he harbored for Ali. That Joe was elsewhere on this spring day.

Joe relaxed at his dining room table and picked at a bowl of cherries. As Denise checked on the ribs she had in the oven, Joe and I found ourselves on the subject of his old R&B group. With Joe as the lead vocalist and principle financier, Smokin’ Joe and the Knockouts played the club circuit back in the 1970s. Overhearing this turn in the conversation, Denise chimed in: Joe had a deal with Capitol. He cut some forty-fives. We have a stack of them around here somewhere. The act never climbed to the heights Joe had hoped, yet the songbird in him was still apt to soar with unbidden spontaneity, even given the presence of an audience of just himself. With a raspy voice, he launched into a rendition of My Way, the lyrics of which had been personalized for him.

I’ve come a long, long ways

And like they say

It took some doin’ . . .

I fought them fair

I fought them square

I fought them my way. . . .

Remember that one—‘My Way’? Joe asked, his eyes crinkled with merriment. Paul Anka rewrote some of the words to it just for me.

His way was the hard way. In the ring, he lived and died by the simple yet daring principle of engagement that in order to deliver one bone-crunching blow, it was frequently necessary to absorb three in exchange. With a left hook that was by acclamation an instrument of doom, he would leave behind a crimson trail of swollen eyes and broken jaws in his quest for his place in history. One opponent would say that the volume of punches Frazier had battered him with was so unrelenting that it was like getting hit by four hands. When another was revived back in his dressing room, he began tying his shoes on again until one of his handlers had to break it to him that he had already been knocked flat. Even Ali would say of his war with Frazier in Manila: It was like death. Closest thing to dying I know of. For his legions of fans, he possessed the raw power of Rocky Marciano—the Rock—who had set the standard for perfection when he retired with a 49-0 record in 1956; others claimed he swarmed his opponents with the intensity of Henry Armstrong, who fought 181 bouts in the 1930s and ’40s and won championships as a featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight. Whoever one supposed his antecedents were, Joe exuded an atavistic joy inside the velvet ropes that was his and his alone. Only one outcome seemed certain whenever Joe charged into action: someone would end up in the emergency room.

On his excursions across Philadelphia in later years, he had a prepared answer for anyone who asked how he was doing. With an air of playful exasperation, he would shake his head sadly and reply with a shrug, They’re tryin’ to get me! No one ever knew to whom he was referring, but it could have been anyone—the taxman, a woman he had been with the evening before, or perhaps some phantom of a bigoted world that was never far away. He had grown up in Jim Crow South Carolina, where African Americans remained entrapped in a plantation culture that subjected them to indignities not so far removed from the experience of their enslaved ancestors. When he came to the North as a young teenager, he endured degradations no less oppressive than the ones he had encountered back home in Beaufort. Even as he came into his own as a professional athlete in the 1960s and ’70s, which afforded him the proximity to white money and the sanctuary it provided, he came face-to-face with black-on-black hate language in his exchanges with Ali. From cradle to grave, it would be a journey galvanized by conflict.

Unimposing for a heavyweight, at just under six feet tall, he was a beloved overachiever who once said of himself, I’m a small piece of leather, but I’m well put together. In an era that would come to be looked upon as the golden age of the heavyweights, Joe did not back up an inch as he battled his way toward a place at the top. Even as his opponents pummeled his head again and again, he advanced upon them with a gallantry that thrilled crowds. Fans could see themselves in his clock-in-early, leave-late work ethic. While he did not possess the height or personality of some of his peers, no one would ever have cause to question the size of his heart or his courage under fire. Few men in the annals of the ring produced moments as indelible.

Far more than just an appealing athletic proposition, the rivalry that commenced between Frazier and Ali on March 8, 1971, was a cultural happening that exposed the deep fissures in American society. By an accident of circumstances, they ended up in the crosshairs of an argument far larger than themselves. Ali: exiled from the ring for his evasion of the draft during the Vietnam War and scorned for his conversion to the Nation of Islam. Frazier: up from the abject poverty of the South Carolina Lowcountry and later a dead-end job in a Philadelphia slaughterhouse, the involuntary hero to that sector of society in lockstep with the white chauvinist ethic of TV character Archie Bunker. By the end of their trilogy four years later, we would learn as much about ourselves as we would about either of them.

For forty-one rounds of concentrated, pedal-to-the-floor action, they pushed each other to the very edge of human endurance. Frazier won their initial encounter at Madison Square Garden, the celebrity extravaganza that was billed as The Fight of the Century. Ali claimed their January 1974 rematch at the Garden in a somewhat less compelling tactical effort. Then there was the final act: Manila. On a scorching morning in October 1975, Ali prevailed in their rubber match when Frazier, battered and unable to see, was stopped by his cornerman from answering the bell for the fifteenth and final round. For his strivings to end in capitulation was no more agreeable to Frazier than asking him to swallow a cup of lye, particularly in light of the rumors that would persist for close to forty years that Ali himself had been on the verge of quitting.

Whatever heights of athletic achievement they drove each other to inside the ring, they dragged each other down in a running feud outside of it. For Ali, it began as a showy ploy to draw attention to himself and pump the gate. Even as he poked at his opponents in disparaging ways and could be boorish in the eyes of his decriers, his act was looked upon by his devotees as the greatest show on earth that did not employ a trapeze artist. Loud, funny, and irrepressibly original, Ali peppered his oratory with amusing doggerel that heightened the fervor of his fans, if not his standing in literary circles. But he crossed a line when it came to Frazier, who grew irritable as Ali turned from playful to hostile. With the cameras rolling, Ali called him ugly, a gorilla, and an Uncle Tom. Frazier shot back and called Ali by his slave name—Cassius Clay. Increasingly furious as Ali branded him a pawn of white establishment figures such as Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo, Frazier brooded that Ali had turned some portion of the black community against him. Privately, Ali told him that he was only whipping up fan interest that would reap a big payoff for both of them. But it annoyed Joe when Ali settled down in Philadelphia during his exile and began showing him up in public. When Ali heckled him on the street one day in Center City in 1970, Frazier became so incensed, two of his associates told me that he threatened to take a tire iron to him and finish him off before they ever stepped into the ring.

The hard feelings Ali had stirred in Joe waxed and waned in the years that followed. On the day I was with him at his apartment, he had slipped behind the public face that those closest to him had encouraged him to wear and laughed off the Butterfly with an air of letting bygones be bygones. On other days, I was with him when his annoyance spiked like a fever, his voice full of anger and hurt that some say he carried to his grave. As the years unfolded and Ali grew infirm with Parkinson’s disease, as his speech became slurred and his hands increasingly quivered, Frazier appeared to take cruel pleasure in the adversity that had befallen Clay. Look at him, and now look at me, he told me and others. Who do you think came out the winner? Somehow, he had convinced himself that his signature was embossed on the physical wreck Ali had become. Even as his friends reminded him that Ali was a sick man and implored him to back off, Frazier could not help himself from battering his erstwhile rival with verbal haymakers. For those who had followed the dips and curves in the acrimony between the two, Joe seemed like a Japanese soldier on some island in the Pacific who had not yet heard that World War II had ended. Incisively, author David Halberstam observed in an essay, Technically the loser of two of the three fights, [Frazier] seems not to understand that they ennobled him as much as they did Ali, [and] that the only way we know of Ali’s greatness is because of Frazier’s equivalent greatness. Whatever truth there is in that, there was no equivalency between them when it came to the accumulation of what Joe called the love.

The love was money. In terms of sheer earning power, Joe was no more in the same league with Ali than he was with Otis Redding as a singer. But Joe did well for himself during and in the aftermath of his career, far better than he could ever have dreamed of when he was a boy helping his father cook moonshine in the woods. By 1970, even before he and Ali each earned a colossal $2.5 million for the Fight of the Century, he had become ensconced in the comforts of the upper middle class. He and his wife, Florence, had five children, all of whom attended good schools; they lived in a $125,000 house on two and a half acres in a fashionable Philadelphia suburb; he had four hundred thousand dollars in cash in the bank and a variety of investments; and he had indulged himself with the acquisition of assorted automobiles, including a gold Cadillac with not one but two telephones; a Corvette Stingray; and a 1934 Chevrolet, with which he was forever tinkering. To the everlasting horror of the consortium of Philadelphia businessmen who backed him, he also owned a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, which he tricked up and boasted that he got up to 110 mph on a straightaway. Forty years later, he was still bringing in a handsome living from appearances and such, yet there would never be enough love on hand to offset his swelling obligations to the Internal Revenue Service and others. With the exception of assorted pieces of memorabilia, he died in 2011 with no assets to speak of and only a few dollars in the bank.

Given the penury from which he sprang and the disadvantage of just a ninth-grade education, nothing had prepared Frazier for the vast sums of money that would come into his life or the international fame he would achieve. Early on, his day-to-day affairs were overseen by his investment group, Cloverlay, which saw to it that his taxes were paid. But once he parted ways with them in 1974 at the end of an eight-year run, it was not long before his finances fell into disarray. And as his marriage to Florence unwound over a period of years, he answered the siren call of the opposite sex with alacrity yet endeavored to be a vigilant provider. By Florence and five other women, he had a total of eleven offspring—six daughters and five sons. Whatever ephemeral comfort Joe found in the arms of others, however it eased the pain that had settled into his bones from years of being hit, it came at a price that converged with his yen for gambling and certain investment reversals to leave him in the red. At the suggestion of a confidant that he declare bankruptcy, Joe said flatly, No, I’ll pay back every penny I owe.

Even though he would fight two more times after Manila, clubbed into submission by George Foreman in their 1976 rematch and dragged to a draw five years later by the obese ex-jailbird Floyd Jumbo Cummings, he turned with renewed gusto to singing and began managing young boxers at the gym. Chief among them was his son Marvis, who had shown promise as an amateur heavyweight and who had escaped death when he sat out a scheduled trip to Poland in which fourteen American boxers perished in a plane crash. Joe had a premonition and commanded Marvis not to go. But Joe could not save his oldest son from swift annihilation in the ring, which came first at the hands of reigning champion Larry Holmes and later by the buzz saw that was rising star Mike Tyson. By disposition a sweet man who possessed none of the raw killer instinct that Joe had, Marvis became an ordained minister and remained a ubiquitous presence at his father’s side. He accompanied him to his appointments and acted as a voice of caution in his ear. When an occasional well-intentioned friend would buttonhole Joe and talk up the possibility of a comeback—which would leave his father with a gleam of temptation in his eye—Marvis would take the friend aside and gently say, Please, leave Pop be. Joe told me more than once, Every father should have a son like Marvis.

Big-hearted in ways that the crowds would seldom see, Joe looked upon the work he did with the boys and girls at the gym as more than just boxing instruction. Only a few would have any chance in the sport in which he had distinguished himself, yet he understood that his calling was far larger. For the ones with nowhere to go but the streets when school let out, he provided a place to work off the simmering rage that poverty breeds. For those who came to him with some ability and the same dream he once had, he provided a bed to sleep in at the gym and a couple hundred dollars each week to get by on, the way Cloverlay had given him a leg-up years before. Along with Marvis, he worked with his other sons, daughters, and assorted nephews and nieces, who would come to appreciate and indeed love him not just for his hallowed accomplishments in the ring but also for how he gave of himself to them in large and small ways. As he sat with me that day in his apartment, it did not escape him that the way forward for him had been paved not just by his own hard work but by the help of others.

I was born into animosity, bigotry, hatred, and white water/colored water, he told me. I look back on those days and I think: Well, you are a better man because of them. The world has changed to the point where we now have a black president. But the youngsters still need to be shown that someone cares.

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