The Devil and Sonny Liston (2 page)

·

The name of Liston, which represents English, Scottish
,
and Irish bloodlines, is ultimately of Norman origin
,
and it is believed that the first Liston to leave Normandy for England came with William the Conqueror, the first Norman king of England, in the invasion of 1066. This progenitor settled in the Essex lowlands
,
where to this day the parish of Liston and, within that parish
,
lands designated Liston Manor commemorate the Listons' presence as a knightly family.

In the twelfth century, in one of the early invasions of Scotland,
some Listons settled in the East Lothian region of that country. (Centuries later, the first minister from Great Britain to the United States after the British acknowledgment of American independence was Sir Robert Liston. who died in Edinburgh. the administrative center of the Lothian region, in 1836. in his ninety fourth year.)

It was later in the twelfth century.in
11
71, that a Liston accompanied Henry II to Ireland and was granted land in Limerick
,
the richest agricultural area in the country's south. The Listons held the land for almost five centuries, until 1655
,
when the subjugator Oliver Cromwell confiscated it and gave it to the Bishop of Limerick. The Listons dispersed then to the various outlying townships and beyond. By 1665
,
there were Listons in America.

Martin Liston was born in Virginia in December 1798. He
moved to Georgia
,
where he married Caroline Elmira Tranum, who was born there in 1813 and who there gave birth to a son, Henry
,
in 1837. From Georgia, the Listons moved to Mississippi.

The western division of Choctaw County, where the Listons
settled, became Township 17
,
Range 7, of Choctaw County, in the area that in 1870 came to be known as Poplar Creek.

But back then, when Martin Liston was drawn to the rich soil
south of the Big Black River and east of the Mississippi flood
p
lain, it was a place without a name, a land of hills and open meadows, wild piney woodlands
,
and swamp overgrown with cane; a land of panthers, bear, wolves, and deer. The Big Black Bowed as clear as springwater in those days, and there were no towns. The future Montgomery County seat and self
-
styled "crossroads of North Mississippi," the town of Winona, on the "yan"
side
-
that is to say, north -
of the Big Black, would not be incorporated until
1861; Poplar Creek not until 1870
;
and Kilmichae
l,
an outgrowth of one of the region's earliest settlements, also on the yan side of the Big Black
,
not until1890.These were the places, unnamed and then named, that circumscribed all that branch of the Liston family.

Martin Liston was one of the founding members of the Bethel
Methodist Church, established in the 184
0
s about seven miles southeast of what was to become Kilmichael. He was also one of the founders of Biddle Schoo
l,
organized twenty years later, about two miles east of Bethel Church.

Caroline Liston bore six children in Mississippi: Robert
,
William, H.J., Susan Emmaline Amelia, Fanny, and Martin Liston, Jr. The son known as H.J., barely thirteen, died in the fall of 1870.

The oldest of them, Robert C. Liston, was born in October of
1845. In 1878, he married a twenty
six
year
old Poplar Creek girl named Eudora Wilson. They brought into the world six children who died at birth, in infancy, or in youth. But others survived be yond childhood: Verdie, Wiley, Alma, Edith, Willie, Renfro.

Martin Liston died, age seventy, in the spring of 1869. His wife,
Caroline, died, age seventy
four, in the last cold days of 1887. Their son Robert C.
Liston died in the spring of 1913, five years after the death of his wife, Eudora. Robert C. Liston's son Wiley, born in 1882, came to own much of the land around Bethel Cemetery in Poplar Creek, and was a member of the Masonic lodge there; Robert C. Liston's son Willie, born in 1890, was appointed postmaster of Kilmichael in 1935 and was also a member of the
Masonic lodge there. He and his wife, Hester Loraynne Jordan, had five children. One of them, William Harry Liston, Jr., born in
1931, co
-
founded the Winona law firm of Liston
-
Lancaster and is today the eldest member of the only family to bear the Liston name in Montgomery County.

Bill Liston remembered his father telling him what he had been told of those days before the Civil War. "They had a few slaves. When they were freed, they stayed on the farm."

Of the ten or more million Africans sold into slavery from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, few were brought to market in the land that came to be called the United States -
far fewer than a million -while Brazil and the Caribbean colonies alone accounted for more than seven million.

Nevertheless, when England and the United States abolished slave trading in Africa in 1807, it was much to the disappointment of the West African
alaafin
,
kings and chieftains who thrived on their harvest of flesh.

The first federal law prohibiting the importation of slaves from
outside the United States came into effect in 1808
,
nine years before Mississippi became a state. While slave
smugglers continued to operate downriver in New Orleans, Mississippi's involvement in the foreign
slave trade was slight, and most of her slaves came from other states, either through direct purchase, professional traders, or the migration of their owners.

By 1840, there were more slaves than white folk in Mississippi.
Yet less than ten percent of those white folk were slaveholders, and Choctaw County was among the Mississippi regions where slavery was rare. What few slaves there were in Choctaw County were found on the small farms of the settlers.

The Martin Liston homestead was one of those farms, valued at
a meager $290 in 1850
,
the year that Choctaw chief Greenwood
Leflore's real estate was valued at $8
0
,
000
.

A proper surname was a nicety that few slaves knew, and upon Emancipation, it was the common practice for freed slaves to adopt the family name of their former owners. Thus, the few slaves that had worked the Liston homestead came themselves to bear the name Liston after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December
1
86
5
.

Alexander Liston was born into slavery on the farm of Martin Liston in October 1840. Fannie, his wife
,
was born into slavery in March 1838. They dated their marriage to 1866, the first year of their freedom, although by then they had four children: Ned, Rachel. Joseph
,
and Frank
,
all of them born into slavery on the Liston farm.

Although courthouse fires in 1874 and 1881 destroyed most of the old records of Choctaw County, Montgomery County land records of 1884 show that Robert C. Liston laid hold of almost forty acres in Poplar Creek in the fall of that year. United States Homestead Certificate Number 10768 shows that Alexander Liston laid hold of a little over
1
6
0
acres of land neighboring that of his former master's son in the fall of 1896.

White Liston, black Liston: they remained together, in a once nameless place of pine and cotton that became Beat
5,
Poplar
Creek, Montgomery County, Mississippi.

By the end of the century, Fannie Liston had given birth to nine children, six of whom survived. Among the survivors was Sonny Liston's father, Tobe, born in January 1870.

In 1889
,
Tobe Liston married a woman named Leona, also known as Cora, who in the span of the next twenty years bore him thirteen children, seven of whom survived: Ernest, Bessie
,
Latt, William K., James, Helen, and Cleona.

·

Ned and Mary Baskin were born into slavery on the nearby Liston farm. Both of them were sixteen when they had their first child, Willis
,
in 1858. A daughter
,
Martha
,
was born in 186
0
.

Martha Baskin got pregnant by a man named Joe McAlpin. The child, a daughter named Helen, who became Sonny Liston's mother, was born in 1897. Another child by Joe, a second daughter
,
named Ida, was born in 1900.

Joe up and left when the girls were very young. Martha later
married Charles Berry, a farmer from North Carolina who was eighteen years her senior and by whom she had a third child, again a daughter, named Lesla, born in 1917.

Jessie Hemphill Golden, one of the elder sisters of the local
black community, laughed fondly when recalling Charlie Berry, who she said was known, for reasons that were not known, as Spodge. "He was a tall, ugly man with a round, hard head." She told of a storekeeper in Kilmichael who kept two big, heavy staved barrels outside his shop. One of these big barrels was empty: the other was full of flour. If you could knock over the empty barrel by butting your head into it, you got the full barrel for free. Charlie Berry, with that round
,
hard head of his, brought home a lot of flour that way. And once, on a bet, a man took a two by four to the crown of that head.

Martha's eldest daughter, Helen, grew up wanting nothing to
do with the curse of these men's names, neither the father that had abandoned her nor the stepfather with the round
,
hard head. She chose to be known by her mother's maiden name and called herself Helen Baskin.