The Devil and Sonny Liston (6 page)
Read The Devil and Sonny Liston Online
Authors: Nick Tosches
It is impossible to tell how big the figure of small, slight
,
slaving
Tobe Liston loomed in the solitary estrangement and taciturn brooding of his son.
What little the son knew of his past he would leave behind him in the Arkansas dirt, where it belonged. But in that greater part of the soul that had nothing to do with knowing or leaving behind, he would never be shut of that past
,
as he would never be shut of masters or slavers or those who, like his father, gave life and cast a curse upon it at once.
"The only thing my old man ever gave me
,
"
Sonny would say,
"was a beating."
He never said more than that, and he never said elsewise. In fact, that was about all he would ever say of his childhood. And, just as those copper
colored welts the coroner discerned years later were the scars of something more palpable than any figurative or virtual slavery, so these few grim words evinced wounds that deepened unseen beneath those other, mere welts:
wounds that left him not so much the brute beast that the world at large perceived him to be, but a man as hurtful as he was hurt, as deadly as he was deadened, and whose soul beneath the layers of its scar tissue was to others hidden and unknowable, to himself a dark and dangerous place rarely to be visited and never to be delved.
UNKNOWN
NEGRO #1
A
RRIVING IN ST. L
OUIS
IN I946, HELEN LISTON
found a job at a shoe factory and a place to room, at
101
7
O'Fallon Street, in the black part of town near the waterfront of the Mississippi. In time, her son Charles fled as well, seeking her. "One morning," he said, "I got up early and thrashed the pecans off my brother-in-law's tree and carried the nuts to town and sold them.
That gave me enough money to buy a train ticket to St. Louis. I figured the city would be like the country, and all I had to do was to ask somebody where my mother lived and they'd tell me she lived down the road a piece. But when I got to the city, there were too doggone many people there, and I just wandered around lost. But one morning, I told my story to a wino, and he says I favor this lady that lives down the street. He took me over to
the house."
In a variation of the tale of the pecans, young Sonny arrived in downtown St. Louis in the dead of night. Some cops found him, lost and wandering. They took him to an all-night cafe. Someone there knew where his mother lived, on O'Fallon, and the cops took him there.
"I say, 'Sonny, why you come here?' And he say, 'Mama, I got tired of that cotton patch.' "
That is the way she would tell it. But by some accounts, nobody, including her, called or knew him as Sonny back then. That name did not come until later, after other cops delivered him to another place.
There were stories later that Charles tried to go to school in St. Louis, but that the kids in the elementary class shamed him, laughed at him, because he was so much bigger than them, like a grown man from the backwoods set among them to learn to read and write. And his mother claimed that he held jobs, at a poultry packing plant, at an ice house. But the earliest documentary evidence of the existence of Charles Liston shows no sign of school, no sign of dead chickens.
By the early winter of 1949, Liston had fallen in with another, younger Arkansas native, Willie Jordan, who lived on North Tenth Street, not far from the two room place where Liston and his mother then lived, at
100
6
O’
Fallon Street. There was a third man, whom they knew only as James, who then joined up with them. The three of them hung out at a tavern, a cheap beer and ribs joint, down the street from the home of Charles
’
s mama.
The St. Louis police first became aware of them on December
30, 1949, the Friday night after Christmas, when a young clerk, Anthony Bonmarito, filed a report at the Fourth District police station.
The victim reported that about 8:45 o'clock this P.M., he was walking west on Biddle street and when on the southwest corner of 8th and Biddle streets 3 negroes who are described on the reverse of this report came up behind him and pulled him into the vacant lot on the southwest corner of 8th and Biddle streets and took from his person his brown leather billfold which was in his left hip trouser pocket and which contained about $45.
00
in various denominations of currency, personal papers and
1
Yale lock
key, after which time they ran north on 8th street making their escape.
The Description of Persons Wanted, on the second page of
Complaint Number 94710, lists the strong arm offenders as #1
Negro, #
2
Negro, #3 Negro, the latter two reduced to ditto marks beneath the first.
Biddle Street lay one block south of O'Fallon, in the Mississippi waterfront area where the downtown black and Italian neighborhoods merged. The lot where Bonmarito was robbed was at the corner of North Eighth Street. Three nights later, at about a quarter past five on the evening of January
2
,1950, Anthony Tocco, a fifty nine year old Italian immigrant who lived on Biddle Street, had just closed his vegetable store on North Seventh Street and was walking north on the west side of Seventh when "three negro men emerged from an alley between Cole and Carr on Seventh Street.
They "threw dirt in his face, and then beat him and dragged
him into the alley where they knocked him down and kicked him, and one of the men took from his right side trousers pocket $9.00 consisting of nine one dollar bills, and they ran west in the alley towards 8th Street, making their escape.
Tocco refused medical attention when offered.
"
In the space designated Means of Attack on the offense report, Complaint Number 346. Girard G. Dorsey, the Fourth District captain in command, typed: "Dirt -Fist -Feet.
"
The Description of Persons Wanted, on the second page of Complaint Number 346, describes the strong arm offenders simply as
"
Three Negro Men
.
"
At about ten past seven on the Friday night of January 13, an eighteen year old white dockhand named William James was approached by "three negroes
"
while walking near his home on North Eighth Street.
"The #
1
Negro struck him in the mouth knocking him to the street," whereupon "all three negroes held him down"
and robbed him. James pursued his attackers as they ran north on the west side of Eighth Street, then west on Mullanphy to Tenth Street, then south on Tenth, into an alley, where James lost sight of them.
The take: six dollars in folding money, a buck-fifty in change. Description of Persons Wanted: #
1
Unknown Negro, #2 Unknown Negro, #3 Unknown Negro, the latter two once again reduced to ditto marks beneath the first.
Later that night at the tavern on O' Fallon, the "#
1
Negro," Charles Liston, was drinking with his cohorts and another neighborhood character, thirty-five-year-old Sterling Belt, originally of Louisiana. Belt had a second-hand
1
948 Mercury sedan that he had bought for $1395 from the Goldstein used car lot less than eight weeks before. Willie Jordan suggested that they could take down some easy money by robbing the night attendant at the Wedge Filling Station nearby at O'Fallon and Broadway, and Belt agreed to be the driver in his fine new second-hand sedan.
Belt drove to Broadway and Biddle, parking the car on the east side of Broadway, about twenty feet north of Biddle. It was going on midnight. Liston, Jordan, and James walked to the next corner, O'Fallon and Broadway, and went round back of the gas station. They looked through the rear window and saw that the attendant, Frank Moran, was alone. A drunken soldier in uniform walked haplessly their way.
Liston took him by the neck from behind with a right-arm stranglehold and curved him backward like a sapling. Jordan went through the soldier's pockets. He found one nicke
l,
which he kept: and they sent him on his way.
Liston, Jordan, and James went round front, entered the station, went to the toilet then left. They returned minutes later, and Jordan asked the attendant to sell him a quart can of gasoline. When the attendant stepped toward the door to get the gas, Liston took
him from behind as he had taken the soldier boy. James went through the attendant's coverall pockets, and Jordan removed the metal money changer from his belt. Liston let him loose,
and Jor
dan told him he had best not call the cops. The three men ran down Broadway to the waiting Mercury, and Belt drove back to the tavern at Ninth and O'Fallon, where they divided the money: about ten bucks each for Liston, Jordan, and James: three bucks for Belt. Liston bought a bottle of whiskey, and they drove across the river to East St. Louis, Illinois, in the early-morning blackness.
Late the following night, Saturday, January I4, Liston met Jordan and Belt again at the bar on O'Fallon. Sterling not only had his fine sedan with him this night, he also had with him a fine Hopkins and Allen .32 caliber break-top revolver. Jordan suggested they take a ride and look for - the phrase is from the report of Jordan's subsequent interrogation by the police -
"a likable place of business to hold up." Driving west on Market Street, they came upon a joint, at
15
02 Market called the Unique Cafe. Inside there was a lone counterman, whose name was Leroy Andrew Nelson. Belt parked nearby, at the corner of Fifteenth and Market. He took the gun out from under the front seat, gave it to Liston, told him he could use it. Liston took the gun from him and shoved it in his pocket.
Again, Belt stayed in the car. Liston and Jordan entered the diner. Liston pulled out the gun, but Jordan grabbed it from him, stuck it toward the counterman, and announced, "This is a holdup." Liston took what there was to take from the cash register, and they ran out the door to the car. They came away with twenty-three dollars in paper money, fourteen in coins. This time, Belt's cut would be doubled to six bucks.
The night
,
motherfucker, was theirs. They drove north, came upon a filling station at Easton and Prairie avenues. There was only one attendant
,
a black man named Wilson Miller. Liston held the gun, then handed it to Jordan and cleaned out the register.
Two joints in under twenty minutes. They returned to the tavern at 901 O'Fallon
,
and recommenced drinking and divvying the take.
In the Saturday night cigarette smokehouse neon dark of that dive
,
Charles Liston
,
who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future beyond the drink in front of him and the smoky dark spare refuge of this barroom from the bone cutting, river
-
heavy dank and freezing chill
,
knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere. He did not see that one could be nobody with a capital "N." It was the name that Odysseus took
–
outis
-
Nobody -
when he killed the great Cyclops.
Maybe, for Charles Liston, a big fine car like Belt's, a big fine gun like Belt's to get it with; a fine silk suit, maybe, and a fine store
bought bitch to wear with that suit
-
the vista of his future extended that far, maybe.
But beyond that, nothing. For the truth, and the young stick up man Charles Liston knew it, was that Charles Liston was not good for a damned thing in this world except for chopping cotton and robbing people. He could not read, he could not write, he could not do much of anything else that this world demanded in exchange for what it called good, honest pay. It was not to labor, like his mama, on an assembly line that he had fled the dirt roads and cruel poverty and cotton fields of Arkansas. It was not to find here
,
in some white man's downtown sweatshop factory, the same bitter seed of bare existence that God - Methodist or Baptist or whatever His white ass was -
had tossed him in Sand Slough. It was not to find here
,
amid the fancy paved avenues and asphalt and radio music and electric lights and pretty, white folk parks of this place
,
another Morledge Big House; not to find here, instead of one hated father, a world of hated fathers. All he had were his body and his wits
,
that sum of self which in the end is all that anybody has, though few are stripped down to it
alone; and his wits failed to perceive that his body -
his body
,
which was bigger and stronger and tougher than any other man's, either in the backwoods and farmlands of Arkansas or the big city of St. Louis; his body, which had allowed the child to haul a man load of bales and which allowed the man to bend other men backward
,
like Sand Slough willow switches, with the force of only one arm -
could be used for anything else other than hauling or strong arming. And that was because these things were what he knew and what he could do. He was not a fool. No.
But what there was of wisdom in him told him that
,
between breaking one's back and breaking the backs of others, between being the victim of sinful injustice and being its deliverer, it was better to break than to be broken. Fuck right and wrong, neither of which had been a friend to him; and fuck that honest pay shit. Let others get it, and he would take it from them. For Charles Liston knew one thing: it was easier to rob folks than it was to chop cotton.
In a hallway near that beer and ribs joint, sheltered from the freezing rain, was twenty four year old Patrolman David Herleth.
"I decided to stake out down in that area and see if I could catch this sucker," he said many years later of his pursuit of the Unknown Negro.
From where he was, Herleth could see the tavern
-
a "rib station." he called it; a "beer joint that sold ribs."
"It was a cold January night," he remembered.
"Now here's about four
,
five
,
six jobs," Herleth told me, "and the guy" -
he was talking about Liston
-
"wore the same clothes all the time. Dumb street kid. Yellow and black checked shirt. He got the name of the Yellow Shirt Bandit."
(The January 14 police report of the Wedge Filling Station rob
b
ery described
"
#1 Unknown negro" as "wearing black chauffeur
cap, yellow shirt & brown trousers." Other, earlier reports gave other descriptions.)
It was going on two o'clock in the morning.
"I was about to give up and go to the station and get warm," Herleth said.