What went wrong on Joe Frazier's farm?

Originally published April 15, 1984.
 
THE BIG HOUSE STAYS EMPTY on the Frazier Plantation, except when Billy Boy comes down and clears out the killer snakes. The dogs raid the chicken coop, Skeeter goes at them with a stick in his fist, and Miss Dolly sits by the fire and watches the soaps - guarded by mean young Buster the dog, who bites.
What good is a country dog that doesn't bite?

So this was the ill-fated plantation that Joe Frazier bought for his aging mother, Miss Dolly, after he came to be a champion boxer of sudden wealth and world fame in March of 1971. He had his own house on a hill in Montgomery County, Pa., by then. But down in the Carolina Low Country, where he was born poorer than Job's turkey 40 years ago, Joe Frazier's mother, siblings and 10 grandchildren were living in a homemade six-room house with no plumbing and a ceiling that let the stars in at night.

They weren't complaining, or looking for any handout from the baby of the family. But the champ says he felt ashamed - ashamed to bring his new friends to the family's home in Beaufort County, S.C., ashamed that their lot should be so humble while he was living high in the city, blazing trails to the moon!

It was time to spring Momma from "the cracked-ceiling, wood-stove, no- running-water life," he says. Her husband had passed, and all her days she had been a field hand for the white man, picking musk and huckleberries to make money on the side, never able to have for herself. So when the chance came to buy her a 365-acre plantation, once groomed by slaves like his great- grandparents, the champ could just feel the Lord's pleasure.

"It made me so proud to do for her," says Frazier. ". . . I didn't ask any questions about what kind of place it was or condition it was in. My thought was once you down in the country and you got land, you can do anything. "

Wrong.

Now he's in what Momma calls "this mess" with the Internal Revenue Service - $220,000 in plantation losses that he wrote off on his taxes between 1971 and 1976 as the disasters struck one by one: the drought, the trucking strike, the cattle dropping dead.

"Mr. Frazier simply wanted to help out his family," says IRS lawyer Russell Stewart. Unfortunately, the law - as the IRS reads it - forbids Frazier to deduct losses that result from his generosity.

The champ holds his palm to his forehead, shakes his head hard and says, ''Maybe God is trying to tell me something. "

And Frazier's mother says today:

"I never wanted no plantation. "

THE SUNSETS SMEAR ORANGE ACROSS the sky in the Carolina Low Country, where the sulfur smell of steamed cabbage blows off marshes that look like chocolate pudding, and where some folks paint their doors and window frames a bright ''ha'nt" blue to protect them from the forces of evil.

The nights here can be more than just dark. For true.

You pull into the Frazier Plantation on Old Sheldon Road and drive between two rows of gnarled live oaks that reach for each other overhead like fingers gripping the sky, dripping eerily in Spanish moss. The Frazier place was once part of a huge parcel known as the Brewton Plantation - among the county's largest, and a vestige of an aristocratic planter class that embodied The American South and led it out of the Union.

Miss Dolly is sitting by the fire - her spot - with pipe and tobacco within arm's reach on a glass table suspended from the ceiling. Presiding over the fireplace is a photograph of the champ, looking thoughtful and determined. To Miss Dolly, Joe is Billy Boy. His father nicknamed him that the night he was born in the old house, and that's what she has called him ever since.

The chill comes more often now that she's 74, and Miss Dolly dresses for warmth in knee socks and sweaters; a bandanna covers her head. She's liable to ignore you if she thinks the question's dumb; then, when you least expect it, she tells you what's on her mind.

"I didn't want Billy Boy to buy this place. . . . There was only womens here, I said. If his daddy alive, he be the manager. "

But Rubin was dead; who would run a big spread like that? There was only Miss Dolly, her daughters, Rebecca and Julia, their four sons and four daughters, and the great-grandchildren. The sisters would have to hold down their full-time jobs and work the farm when they came home at night and on weekends! Miss Dolly was happy right where she was in Laurel Bay, counting those stars at night through the ceiling boards. But Joe was as sweet as he could be, she says, and she didn't want to disappoint him.

So he bought the plantation, sight unseen, on the advice of his Philadelphia lawyer. The family made the 19-mile move from Laurel Bay to Old Sheldon Road, near the town of Yemassee. And Joe hired a couple of relatives to run the place. They "didn't know what they was doing," Miss Dolly says. "One fellah, he had belonged to the wife's aunt. And the second one was his brother - and he didn't know nothing about no plantation. All they ever wanted was money. They didn't do no work. . . .

"He lost a lot of money, all right, on paying these people what didn't understand how to run a plantation. "

The two men are long gone - to where Miss Dolly says she does not know. So are the great-grandchildren and all but one grandchild. Not counting Miss Dolly, the plantation family has dwindled to a cozy five:

Her son, Eugene ("Skeeter"), who is 50ish, tries to keep the place in shape. Her 85-year-old brother, Adam ("Pump"), who stays mostly in a back room with the covers drawn up to his nose and the space heater on, is recovering from a broken hip. Her daughter, Rebecca, 42, a onetime garment- union organizer, makes custom drapes for a shop on Hilton Head and sells Mary Kay cosmetics; she would like to open up a beauty shop someday. Her daughter, Julia, 43, works with mentally retarded adults and would like to be a dietitian. And Julia's son, Keith, cleans carpets and drapes for a living.

The farm animals include a pack of happy dogs and mean Buster; two hogs; chickens; turkeys; some cows; and Mister Cat, who likes to curl around Miss Dolly's feet in front of the fire and who will roll over for you if he's in a good mood.

Who could have known things would turn out this way: just living the quiet life on the plantation, not bothering anymore to try and farm it, having their hands full just keeping the growth in check?

It is clear to them now, though, that the omens of disaster were evident

from the start.

WHEN THE FRAZIERS moved in, about two-thirds of the plantation was under water and so grown up around itself that there was no telling what went on underneath. The man who had been living there, ill and unable to keep the place up, had used the plantation primarily as a duck preserve. Joe says he had to use his car as a tractor that first time, to push down the brush, so he could get to the houses, which needed paint and repair. The barn was falling apart, the fences were down, the dikes and ponds were overgrown. "It was a ghost town," says Rebecca. "It was pitiful. "

But the Fraziers, a proud and stubborn lot, Baptist-fired and close to the land, had worked many a field and grown enough vegetables in the sandy loam of Laurel Bay to keep the family fed; they thought they could clean the place up and make a go of it. Joe bought some farming equipment, cows and hogs and seed, and Miss Dolly warmed to the idea of having a place of her own to work.

"Then we started into it," says Miss Dolly, "and it was altogether different. "

The Fraziers had never managed a spread like this one, not more than a few acres, or a cow or two roped by the neck; never tried to flood duck ponds during a drought, or cut deals with wholesalers over crops; never encountered soil as sorry as the plantation's gumbo clay, slick as snot when it was wet and hard as brick when it wasn't. And the alligators and the water moccasins propagating on all that swampland were a downright nuisance.

Rebecca turns to Julia and says, "Remember that day we killed those five- foot rattlesnakes going to my house? Two, one right behind the other, a half-hour apart? I was a little paranoid about that. "

They didn't plant the first year. It seemed to rain every day, and most of their time was spent digging themselves out of mud. Says Julia, "We had to park the tractor at the gate in order to pull the cars" home.

They planted about 40 acres of corn, squash, tomatoes and cucumbers in the second year, and made a fair crop in spite of dry weather, according to Simon Jinks, a family friend and experienced farmer who had rented and worked some of the same land. But the family was late getting the crops in, and there wasn't any market for them. It didn't take long to learn that the small-time farmer is at a distinct disadvantage in today's tomato market. The farmer who makes money in tomatoes, says Jinks, is the farmer with harvesting labor at just the right time, his own packing plants and trucks, and the weather on his side. If the tomatoes are ready to go and you get an inch of rain, they'll turn to blubber. You pinch the skins, and they bleed. Nobody will buy them, and they sour in the field.

The Fraziers' hogs ate well.

Joe, meanwhile, had bought 65 cows and a bull - thinking they would keep the brush in check and bring in money from the beef. But the family "tried to farm all these acres and put cattle in the same spot, and it didn't work," says Rebecca. "The cows got out and went into the corn! "

One year, they had a promising crop of cucumbers, but the trucking industry

went on strike and there was no one to haul the vegetables. Another year, the Fraziers planted squash and cucumbers, some corn and hay, but what the desperately hungry and thirsty cows didn't eat after breaking through the fences died in the field for lack of rain.

There were still the duck ponds, and Joe thought at one point about making the place suitable again for fish and waterfowl. Much of the land in the southern tip of South Carolina is owned by corporations and northerners who maintain it solely for hunting and fishing, and with the marshes flooded the land would be valuable.

The only problem was this: The previous owner had sold off the land containing the watershed that flooded the ponds, and when Frazier bought the plantation, he bought no water source. Had there been enough rainfall, the water would have overflowed onto his property. But there was a drought, and the man who owned the watershed, George H. Bostwick, was not of a mind to flood the champ's ponds. E. Manning Woods, who has been managing property for the Bostwick family since 1953, says Bostwick could have flooded Frazier's ponds, "but then he would have lost his own duck pond! "

Then the cows started to drop dead, and for the longest time the Fraziers couldn't figure out why. It turned out the marsh water had stagnated during the drought and gone bad with parasites, and the cows had drunk it. "Vet cut one open right out there in that old field," says Miss Dolly, "and he showed me that the worm had been eating up the cow inside. "

The farm equipment, meanwhile, was getting worn; the Fraziers weren't making money and started getting discouraged; and even drier weather set in that made times hard for everyone in the region. The simple truth behind the Fraziers' nightmare, says Jinks, is this:

"They are not experienced in managing a large spread on a small acreage" and "the expense to maintain is enormous. . . . They weren't making a return so they couldn't finance it" and "just phased out. "

JOE, MEANWHILE, WAS WRITING OFF all the losses on his federal income taxes - $220,000 in all - on the advice of his Philadelphia lawyer, Bruce Wright. Wright had entered the picture after Joe took the heavyweight title away from Muhammad Ali in 1971 - "the first fight in which he had a tremendous amount of capital left after taxes," says the lawyer.

Originally, Joe wanted to build a house on the old family lot in Laurel Bay, but that land had been passed down "from slavery times," Joe says, "and it was owned by everybody. You couldn't build with all these people's names on the deed. Everybody has to sign, and I couldn't find them all. Then some of my people thought maybe I was going to take over. " He waves his hand in the air. Some harsh words were exchanged, he ditched the idea of building on the family land, and he then asked Bruce Wright to start looking for property to buy.

One day, says Wright, "out of the blue came a letter" from a real estate man in Savannah, Ga., who said he had this farm he was trying to sell for an Ohio-based salesman. The previous owners had included a New York stockbroker, a New York developer, the Brewton Hunting & Fishing Club and James Elliott McPherson, onetime president of the South Carolina Jockey Club, who was buried under a monument in the enclosed cemetery behind the big house in 1834.

Wright contacted a friend in Florida, Arch Duval, who had done a lot of building in the South and who knew something about property values. The two checked the place out together, and Duval assured Wright that it was a sound investment.

It was "definitely" a good buy, says Duval. "That place is probably worth a million dollars today. " Frazier paid $175,000.

"We thought," says Wright, "that it could be a catfish farming operation. "

The years passed, accompanied by the farming disasters, and Joe kept writing them off on his taxes - until 1978. By then, the IRS had repeatedly questioned their validity. The plantation was primarily a home for Joe's mother, not a business, said the IRS. And in the summer of 1981, the $220,000 in write-offs were officially disallowed.

Frazier appealed. The family hasn't farmed anything to speak of since 1979. And Frazier stands to lose the $115,000 he didn't pay in taxes because of the plantation deductions.

"I tell Bruce Wright at the hearing," says Miss Dolly, pointing her finger: " 'You the cause of this stuff today. ' "

She figures that the lawyer pushed her naive son into the deal because he saw Joe had all this money and thought he ought to invest it.

Wright says with a shrug, "It looked to be in good shape to me. "

IF THERE'S SUCH A THING AS AN evil spirit, the sisters figure that it's right here on the Frazier plantation. "We have gotten up in the morning with money in our pocket and for some reason before the sundown is gone something'll come by to take it," says Rebecca. Sometimes they wonder if they would have been better off staying in Laurel Bay, where the briars in the sandy loam stung reassuringly at their feet.

They hadn't even wanted to farm!

"Nooooooo," says Julia, moving her head slowly from side to side. Rebecca: ''No, that wasn't my idea, to farm. "

The sisters figured the good Lord had taken them away from that life, "and nobody was going to put me back," Rebecca says. Then she points across the room at her mother, who is staring into the fire. "She did," she says. ''She's the one that wanted to farm . . . She's a farmer in her heart, loves the dirt, she loves to see things grow. "

The Frazier women are grateful for what Billy Boy gave them. But outside of a few shining moments in this family saga, they have found the plantation experience to be discouraging, antagonizing and bewildering. There was one day in particular that Rebecca felt sure that she had hit the low point of her life.

The garment industry had gone to pot, and she had lost her union job. She didn't have any money, anything of her own. There were children to think of. She was living on the plantation, not wanting to be there and thinking on her life, when she found the remnants of one of the original plantation houses that Gen. Sherman's troops burned down during the Civil War.

"That day I had a chill that crept over me like I never had before in my life since I've been here, because I guess I was so close to the ground and so down on everything," says Rebecca.

She sat down on a pile of bricks from the ruin and cried. "I said, 'Lord, why did You bring us here to leave us like this? We're all alone out here. I've got nothing. No job. No money. The kids. Why? ' "

Finally, she dried her eyes and said to herself, Oh, what the heck. Her son, meanwhile, had planted some rye in the field and egged her on to finish up the job.

''So I had to get out there with a tractor that I had never driven before, with a drag behind us to cover the rye in the fields so that maybe the cows could have something to eat," she says.

Then the rain came and drowned the rye.

THE FRAZIERS SUPpose it's interesting - the descendants of slaves owning a plantation - but the fascination lasts about as long as a shrug. Rebecca says she figures that it's more interesting to white people than to black people, though there was that spunky black man in his 90s who showed up at the door one Sunday. His parents had been slaves there, too poor to leave even after freedom came, and this 19th-century rice plantation had been the inauspicious site of his birth.

"He'd found out a black man owned the place," says Rebecca, "and he wanted to come back. "

The rest are just curious strangers, fewer and farther between these days, who just want a look-see at that plantation the former heavyweight champion bought for his mom when he had the world at his feet 13 years ago.

Nobody would dare go out of his way to cause anxiety to the family of Smokin' Joe, a local hero, though the reflected glory of his accomplishment has spawned annoying publicity from time to time. Like that national magazine story a dozen years back that Rebecca thought made the family out to be ''cotton plopped into Harlem" - quaint and scrappy poor folks, unable to appreciate the finer things.

She raises an index finger and says, "We may be simple folks, but we're not simple-minded. You hear? " There may not have been diamonds and fancy clothes, she says, "but there was enough for everybody, and we kept good whatever we did have. "

There had been 13 Frazier children in all, Joe being the youngest. He'd always been such a big boy that everybody thought he was grown up when he left home at 16 to marry Florence and try his luck boxing in the big cities. He was built just like his daddy, tall and square and thick-muscled. When he was small, he would rig up his own equipment and "punch the bag in the trees," his mother says.

He was his daddy's favorite, a chubby-bellied, slightly bow-legged little boy who ran with kind of a twist and provoked fights with the older children.

''Billy Boy? He was bad," says Rebecca. "He was bad then like the kids are today . . . always into devilment. . . . He got his career started on my tail. "

He remembers himself as a farmboy and a woodcutter who would skip school and sneak down to the military installation to get construction work, or help his daddy make moonshine so the family could get by. His father's father had worked a cotton gin, his mother's mother's mother had been a slave-cook for somebody named Old Man Jockey Brown. And when Joe Frazier was a boy, he worked the white man's fields, like all his people before him, and he called the man ''Boss. "

Some of the South had changed by the time Joe started thinking for himself - but not nearly enough to suit him. "My goal was to be a champion," he says, and he didn't figure there was going to be any of that for him in the Carolina Low Country.

"I wanted to be able to love everybody, not just my black brothers and sisters. It was unfriendly and unfair, and I didn't like it. "

A decade later, Joe Frazier would return to his home state as heavyweight champion of the world. He would address a joint session of the South Carolina legislature - among only a handful of black men to do so since Reconstruction - and he would tell them about those boyhood days, working the white man's land:

"I went to work on the farm and I would say, 'Good morning, boss. ' And the boss would say, 'To the mules. '

"At 12 o'clock, I would say, 'Lunchtime, boss. ' And the boss would say, 'One o'clock. '

"At dark, I would say, 'Goodnight, boss. And the boss would say, 'In the morning. ' "

When Joe Frazier was done telling his story to the state senators and representatives of South Carolina, they all had a good laugh.

JOE FRAZIER IS AT HIS GYM on North Broad Street, on the second floor, in the back room, and he's got this grimy old workout suit on his body and red worn high-top things on his feet. He squirms onto the floor, back against the couch, one leg plopped over the coffee table, mixing up some health concoction in a juice jar and reflecting on "this mess. "

He figures that there are a couple of things he could do with the plantation: turn it into some kind of gym, or sell it altogether.

"I just don't know," he says, shaking his head, telling of how he has plenty of money and doesn't have to do anything for the rest of his life if he doesn't want.

That the family has stopped trying to make a go of it doesn't bother him any. "Momma's 74," he says, "and I don't want her out there chopping no corn. "

If he unloads the place, the sisters say they'll just go home to the old lot in Laurel Bay. Nothing is left there but a chimney in the trees and some junk piles with old beds in them and twisted metal, but they say they'd just build themselves a house, or get a trailer. In the meantime, the plantation is an agreeable enough place for Momma to be. Joe sends her "I-love-you-Momma donations," and drops off a spare car now and then, and the sisters and the mother figure that's gift enough.

They have no desire to be too grateful. They'll just play this hand out on their own, thank you, and wait on the Lord's plan for them.

Rebecca says:

"He must have one."

Index terms: BIOGRAPHY FINANCE TAXATION INTERVIEW FAMILY REAL ESTATE