Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [23]
Slave history of the low country supports that view. Class distinction based on skin color was drawn almost from the beginning of the settlement. Mulattoes, the fair-skinned progeny of white slavers and African women, were the emerging group and favored by owners. They got the better jobs and a big share of the largess (such as it was) that was handed down on the whim of their masters. Purebloods from Africa, seen as nonadaptive, resented sharply the superior airs of the mulattoes, who were too eager to conform to white culture. In various rebellions that were often chronic, the mulattoes were rarely included in conspiratorial plans; the blooded didn’t trust them.
While Frazier would later call Ali a “half-breed” in Manila, the phrase was not just a passing comment of frustration; it leaped out from a tribal flash of racial memory. Always able to feel the lancing invective with which Ali assaulted him, Frazier began to see it as an orchestrated campaign to crush any respect he had in the black community. Blacks who understood the mulatto and pureblood equation winced. On display every day in the streets, it was now being played out in a large public way.
The Muslims, it should be pointed out, mirrored the age-old divide of color. Their leader, Elijah Muhammad, was “color struck.” He taught his followers that they were descended from “Asiatic blacks,” meaning that they were from Arab stock, not from the sub-Saharan Africa. Elijah was a light man, and so were a large part of the Muslim hierarchy; the so-called sub-Saharans in the movement had subordinate roles. When Malcolm X established contacts with newly independent African nations, he was admonished for associating with “these people.” Unlike Malcolm, Elijah would avoid travel to sub-Saharan Africa during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1959. During at least two later visits to Africa, Ali himself would remark that African women would be more attractive if they had a little white blood in them.
The young Frazier and his family were on the rim of the culture, the father Rubin being too much of a pragmatist and survivalist to become lost in the world of the black art. But his mother, Dolly, was never far from it, often telling the kids stories of the always looming Dr. Buzzard. She smoked a corncob pipe and was sensitive to spirits. A swarm of crows meant death, a strange noise in a walk by a graveyard meant that “the people were buried alive.” She worked in fields, tomato canneries, and picked crabs by hand on a small assembly line, with endless hours that rarely yielded more than five dollars a day. They lived on a ten-acre farm that Joe and his father tried to work with two mules; the earth didn’t give up much except watermelon; no vegetables for the table. Hard sun and flooding rain ran easily through the wood-tin roof of the six-room house that had no phone or plumbing, only an outhouse nearly a hundred yards away.
Rubin was a one-armed man, having lost his left wing over a woman. Her full-time lover was jealous, suspected Rubin, and shredded his arm with a pistol. He was lucky, he could have been hit by what they called a “ten-cent” pistol composed of lye, human urine and honey that disfigured, a prospect not to the liking of a ladies’ man such as Rubin. He once told Joe that, in all, he had fathered twenty-six children, an attainment of high order that Joe hoped to duplicate, such was his admiration for his father. When Joe was born, his father named him Billy, after his rugged old Ford that never let him down on the dark back roads he raced through. “He gonna be my left arm,” Rubin said of the baby. By