THE BOXER'S LAMENT

A story

You won't find Vermont Falls on a map anywhere, not unless you go back thirty or forty years, and then you'd have to be looking for it in the first place. Vermont Falls was a small, dirt poor, Black community, two miles from the Maine coast. It isn't there anymore, and hasn't been for a long time; it died out when they shut the Cannery. It was a fishing village made up of ramshackle shanties that looked like they were carved into a malignant hillside. The single street it had looped around itself like a wet rope twisted over on its side. The shacks were two or three rooms, and still had dirt floors; some had scrap pieces of wood for flooring, looking like giant jigsaw puzzles; others had porches tacked onto them like an afterthought. The shacks bore a multitude of colours that made you think maybe they ran out of paint and used whatever was available. From a distance, the place looked like an old patch-worn quilt someone left out in the rain.

The shacks sat on a hill overlooking the winding Naragaugus river. The windows were blackened on the inside by wood smoke drifting up through worn out chimney pipes, while the glass sparkled like mirrors on the outside. Most of the windows were splintered, and I used to think the cracks looked like spiders' webs when the sun crested the hills and broke through the trees. They patched the windows with tar paper, and cardboard, and when the winter wind blew cold and harsh from the wild Canadian north, the windows would rattle, whistling through the invisible gaps like tiny teeth chattering in the night.

Vermont Falls was a town isolated by distance, as much as it was isolated in Time. It seemed that there was always a sense of desperation that clung to us like a heavy cloak. The town was home to the exiled heroes of former generations—escaped slaves who won their freedom with the Underground Railroad, but lost their souls to the Commerce of living. It was sharecropping the sea, they said, while others asked what difference it made, as long as it was theirs to crop. It was subsistence living that included trade with other communities. I think it was why Uncle Sam came back. He needed familiarity.

The low rolling hills were full of colour in the fall—like a postcard in a corner store, or the kind of picture you might see on a calendar somewhere and send off to a friend. The trees grew down to the water's edge, darkening it in the distance like part of a watery plain. It's what gave the place its sense of soul. The trees; the water; the landscape; they were all a part of you that couldn't be left behind. They were the Holy Trinity that spelled out "HOME".

As much as I might love the ocean now, I miss the trees of my youth. The trees of Vermont Falls stood in ruddy contrast to the muddy lanes bleeding into steep trails that led down to the river. In winter, we'd sled down the trails to the frozen slough below; in summer, fishing nets and lobster traps needing repair had to be walked up the trails at the end of a long, frustrating day—where the day's laundry would lay spread out on brittle, sun-burned grass by women grown old before their time.

The air was stagnant; it had a sluggishness to it, and a certain listlessness that left you gasping for breath. Heavy clouds came sweeping in off the coast—dark, rolling, cumulus giants that blackened the sky, tumbling over themselves on their way out west—looking for all the world like they were going to trip over the horizon and stumble out of sight forever. Storms would break in on your thoughts without warning—but Uncle Sam always knew when to come in from the porch. And always there was the smell of dead fish and drying mud that got caught up in your clothes, and stayed there; it was a part of your life, your identity; it was what set you apart from others. Life was mixed in with the smell of oily food cooked on blackened wood stoves, or else the smoking fires for the fish and lobsters. It got so that we never noticed the choking blue smoke hanging over our heads as much as we did the storm clouds. We waited for the wind to blow everything out to sea so that it smelled clean and fresh the next day.

In the morning, you'd hear the piercing scream of gulls picking their way along the river, or else painted up against the sky riding on invisible air thermals. They looked beautiful. Almost abstract. I'd sit in the hills for hours listening to the rickety wharf coughing up against itself in the distance. The river was a living, breathing thing, hidden under a sheer lace of blue fog. It was the lifeblood of the village.

Uncle Sam managed to escape Vermont Falls. His was the greatest success. As difficult as life may have been for us during the Depression, life for Uncle Sam as a boy was almost impossible at the turn of the century. Uncle Sam was twelve years old, Mamma told me, when he ran off to Boston. He moved into the house Mamma lived in outside of Boston. There was Mamma, and Mamma's first husband, Black Johnny, as well as three children, and Uncle Sam. Mamma called them the Olden Days, because that was before she met Daddy, and before she had me. It was before she came hobbling back home to take care of her father. She didn't have anywhere else to go after the fire; losing your family will leave you with a gut-wrenching pain, where feelings of guilt haunt you forever, Mamma told me. I didn't think it explained why she had to move back to Vermont Falls.

  Uncle Sam spoke with a girlish, lisping voice. He spoke like he knew he had to convince me of everything he said. He knew I didn't believe him, and probably never would--while the crowd of five old cronies that sat with him every day nodded their heads as they passed their bottles of shine back and forth. Uncle Sam used to be a boxer, a mauler and a brawler, he told me with a quick laugh. He was always quick with a laugh, his large shoulders jerking up and down under his worn-out terry cloth bathrobe, not at all in sync with the lisping voice he had.

When I asked him if that was why his ear was like that, he laughed again. He had a large, permanent, cauliflower ear, and a flat nose—flatter than the one I remember Daddy having.

He told me he was born with ability. He had a combination of fast hands, and lightning reflexes—as well as a cast iron jaw. He was quickly accepted by the fighting world, lauded over, and loved by legions of fans. He was respected in every corner of the world, except here in the States he said. Here, they referred to him as "The Boston Tar Baby". It's funny how in this strange, new, age of political correctness, they've changed his name to "The Boston Terror" now, as if it changes everything now that he's gone. But his portrait was on the cover of every sporting magazine in the country, and on trading cards, cigarette packages, and match boxes, too.

Sometimes he sent me inside to find the old cigar box he kept his pictures in; he'd want to show them to his cronies. He'd start handing the cards to me like I was the curator of his personal picture gallery. It was like looking at the portrait of a stranger; not the Uncle Sam I knew, but a handsome young man standing with his hands in front of him in that typical boxer's stance of the day.

He'd ask me what picture it was, and I'd tell him, passing the pictures on to the old men sitting with him. There were magazine articles for me to read—because like him, the old men sitting with him couldn't read—newspaper clippings, programs, and old ticket stubs from different fights he’d fought. There were pictures of him in London, in Paris, in Mexico City, and even Berlin. There were captioned drawings from magazines, and grainy, sepia coloured photographs.

Once, I found the picture of a young woman that seemed out of place, and paused. I asked him who she was, and he clammed up, snatching the picture from me and hugging it to him as he rocked himself back and forth on his chair. I watched him staring out into nothingness, refusing to answer my question. His cronies told me to leave him alone. A man doesn't have to account for anything in his life they told me, especially to a nine year old girl.

I watched Uncle Sam put the picture back in the box, closing the lid tight, and holding the box firmly on his lap. He reached out for the other pictures suddenly, snapping his fingers at me, and telling me to give them back--hissing at me to give them back—stuffing them in the cigar box. He held the box on his lap, rocking himself back and forth in his chair again, refusing to talk to me or his cronies, for the rest of the day.

Uncle Sam's career spanned twenty-four years. He fought more than three hundred fights. The first job he ever had was in a fight club he said, sweeping the gym floor for less money than the food he ate. He told me he was drawn to the sights and sounds of the gym like a man needs air to breathe. There's something about the smell of sweat, and the sound of a heavy bag, he said. He told me different stories from the ones he told his cronies, and I'd sit beside him rolling my eyes, knowing he couldn't see me, never thinking any of it was true. He made it sound like he was unbeatable; a boy fighting men and beating them. I never knew if I could believe him half the time. Every man I've ever known has some level of exaggeration when he's talking to a child—girl or boy, it doesn't matter which—and Uncle Sam was no exception.

He said he turned pro in 1902, when he was sixteen years old. He started winning fights against bigger fighters. He took on all comers. He said that was his problem right from the start: he was too good. After a year he beat Joe Gans, the Lightweight Champ of the time—but they said both of them weighed in at too much and the title was taken from him. He beat Gans in fifteen rounds he said, and after the decision was reversed, Gans refused to fight him again.

As a welterweight, he took on "Barbados" Joe Walcott—the World Welterweight Champ, fighting him to a draw. "Barbados" Joe never was as good as everyone said he was, he smiled. He took him to a draw though, shaking his head as he thought about the fight, maybe thinking he should have won. He was always making himself sound like he should have won every fight he ever fought.

In 1906 he fought Jack Johnson, the only name I was familiar with. "Little Artha" he called him. After that, he said, things changed. He gave six inches and thirty pounds to Johnson, and took him to a decision after fifteen rounds, only going down twice. He said whenever "L'il Artha" knocked him down, he'd get back up and stand toe to toe with him, giving him a good what-for. He said Johnson busted him up pretty good—breaking his nose up in the first two rounds of the fight, but he never quit.

Two years later, Johnson beat Tommy Burns and became the World Heavyweight Champ. Johnson refused to give Uncle Sam or any other Black fighter a title shot. Johnson stood to make more money by taking on White trash contenders, because they were less skilled than him, and he could have more fights.

Uncle Sam was forced to fight for smaller purses, in smaller venues. He fought White men, and the only reason they fought him was because he was better than anyone else. They knew he'd taken Johnson to a decision—something no White man had been able to do. He was only making three dollars a fight. He said they were looking for the White Hope, even if they had to go through him. But Black fighters were stronger, bigger and hungrier than White fighters, and had more to prove. He didn't fight them because he thought they deserved a chance, but because by defeating them, he thought he might get a second chance with Li'l Artha.

  Sometimes he'd list off the names of men he fought: "Irish" Terry McGovern, "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien; the twins, Mike and Jack Sullivan; Packey McFarland, Jimmy Clabby, and Jack Britton. All good men, he claimed, and Irish Whites out of Boston. When his cronies sitting outside with him named off other fighters—dozens of names they remembered—Uncle Sam sat nodding his head as if he remembered each and every one of them.

At the end of his career he was a self-defeated man; he’d been broken and tamed like the wild animal they said he was. He was drunk most of the time, and practically blind. He said he had an operation once, but it didn't take; after that, he went entirely blind. That was in 1932 when I was fourteen.