Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [22]
A big man of large gestures, Durham had a deep, magisterial voice and an easy personality. When he and his sidekick Willie Reddish walked into a ring in satin smoking jackets, you half expected someone to give them a brandy and a cigar. Yank, without being overbearing, relished attention. He had never been in the big time before, just a respected presence at the PAL gym in Philly. He had been an amateur boxer, then in the war a Jeep hit him, broke both his legs and put him in a hospital for over a year. He was a welder when he found Joe—and an ace hustler like Joe’s father, Rubin. He made corn liquor at his house (just like Rubin), and used Frazier in the early days to deliver it. He promoted card games and all-night craps games. “Gimme a smoky room and lots of suckers,” he used to say, “and I’m a happy man.” When he cut deals for Joe’s fights, he made backroom deals for himself, but he always gave Joe the details of them. Joe loved him like he did Rubin. “As long as I’m alive, no matter what happens,” Yank said, “this kid’ll never want for a buck.”
It wasn’t until Ali began to humiliate Frazier about his blackness, tried to turn him into a white pawn, that he started to respond about his youth and bleak times. The last of eleven children, Joe was raised in Laurel Bay, not far from Beaufort, South Carolina, the otherworldly low country that was the oldest and most historical settlement of the slave culture in the nation. The people there were perjoratively called Geechee, but they were actually Gullah and they spoke a language of their own. They had their own way of living, had a silent contempt for whites, and were suspicious of other blacks, who viewed them in turn as backward and dangerous, a people who had not moved beyond slavery. They were in fact a proud, independent people who clung to African ways (to assimilate was to lose their souls) with small adjustments for reality. Once there, you could never forget the people or the land, filled with large trees weeping Spanish moss, thousands of whispering, steaming waterways that easily concealed bootleg stills and smuggling. “I remember the nights,” says Burt Watson, who grew up there. “You couldn’t see your hand.”
So did J. E. McTeer, for decades the High Sheriff of the low country; no power was larger there. He was a diligent man, benign, and ultra-sensitive to the culture. He was convincing once when he said that the “Geechee threw a bone on Ali before their first fight.” What kind of bone? “The most awful,” he said, “a black, catfish bone.” If Frazier knew a bone was in play, he said, he didn’t have to know much else, such was the enabling power of the belief in it. In order to deal with the Gullah and earn their respect, McTeer became a scholar of their thinking to the point that he became a feared purveyor of “white magic.” He wrote a book about the Sea Islands, remarking how the blackness of night was a heavy weight, how the people “rushed inside at dusk, saying nothing aloud inside of what they believed and feared.” It had an extra blackness, he wrote, “carried here by their forefathers, sensed rather than seen.” Drums beat across the swamps, “root doctors” knelt on their knees in graveyards at night and dug for the juju that would cure illness and bring good times to their patrons or evil