01/15/2025
“I grew up in Beaufort, South Carolina, in a six-room farmhouse with a couple of leaning posts to keep it from fallin’. I came up in a time when men were men. They didn’t wear no earrings.
When I was born, people came to the house and gathered round to see if I was missin’ an arm. See, my dad was missin’ his left hand and part of his left forearm. And those people didn’t realize that my dad’s missin’ arm didn’t have nothing to do with genes. I never asked him what happened. Don’t know what exactly. But the story I heard was that another man tried to kill him in an argument over a woman. You could say that was the root of my left hook. When I was a boy, I used to pull a big cross saw with my dad. He’d use his right hand, so I’d have to use my left.
Had my own car at twelve years old. Left school in the tenth grade. Married when I was sixteen. Ain’t hard to figure out; I was a man at a very young age. I came up in Martin Luther King’s time, and it was really rough. Remember those boys wiped out in Mississippi? There was a problem with a black kid on the farm where my daddy and I worked, the Bellamy farm. The boy had screwed up one of the tractors without meaning to, and one of the Bellamy brothers took his belt off and beat the child in the field. I didn’t think it was right. “Well, if you keep talkin’, boy,” the older Bellamy brother said, “I’m gonna take my belt to you.” And I told him, “You better keep that belt on to hold your pants up.” He didn’t do nothin’. But I had to leave, get on the Dog and head up north. Greyhound. If I stayed, there was nothin’ ahead but bad times.
Nothin’ wrong with an ass whuppin’ every now and then. You take away the ass whuppin’s and what do you get? You get people wearin’ pants below their belly buttons. I’m tellin’ you, you go out these days and see the crack of a young lady’s butt. It’s crazy, man. They should be locked up for indecent exposure. Look here. See? Suspenders! And a belt! I ain’t takin’ no chances.”
Joe Frazier🥊🥊
