The bare-knuckle era is grossly misunderstood by modern boxing fans and boxers as well. Knowing how the story of the second black American to journey to England to challenge for the English heavyweight title ended, I was not eager to read any further. I knew from the outset that there had been a sad ending. I was, however, researching the subject, and had determined to read everything written on boxing, even fiction.

A good novelist will often be able to put more ‘reality’ into his work than a nonfiction writer will be permitted by the strictures of his art to include in his history book. Fraser is a best-selling historical novelist and the author of a highly acclaimed memoir concerning his experiences in WWII. His specialty is dialects of the British Isles. He is so good at English and Scotish slang that his work can be very distracting to the general reader, though it is a goldmine for the researcher. The man has done a lot of work studying the everyday speech of the common people of his country.

George Mac Donald Fraser

1998, Carroll & Graf, NY, 249 pages

Black Ajax is the retrospective story of Tom Molineaux an American slave who managed to fight his way back across the Atlantic, and make the strongest run at Tom Cribb’s heavyweight championship ever made, in two epic battles that were considered to be the best of the era. Unbiased—and outnumbered—onlookers of the time swear that he was robbed by the actions of the crowd in one of the bouts.

With the big splash made by Molineaux it may come as some surprise that he seemingly rose from nowhere and so quickly sunk into oblivion again. Keeping this sorrowful theme in mind Fraser begins the story at the end. The only time you get to see Tom as he saw himself was when he was dying in an Irish barnyard, and rising up to fight another Irishman. These five pages of text are worth the entire price of the book and may perhaps constitute the single best piece of boxing literature I have read—and I’ve pretty much read it all. The story of Black Ajax begins with his death.

The book is then structured as a serious of monologues related by the people Tom met along his way, as if the author strung a series of interviews together as an oral history. Boxers Paddington Jones and Bill Richmond, along with Boxing author Pierce Egan, are the primary witnesses. There are 13 lesser commentators including a New Orleans madam, author William Hazlet and the infamous Captain Barclay, the boxer/promoter who kept a set of weighted gloves for his own use in sparring.

The character that touched me the most was Bill Richmond, another former American slave who was adopted by a British general during the American Revolution after he beat three British soldiers in a bar fight. Bill was to be a pivotal figure in Tom’s life, as his trainer. Bill was a middleweight who had failed to take the white man’s English belt for lack of size, and placed outsized hopes into his younger larger American pupil. Of the boxing people, Bill is the most civilized and genteel by far, and as a character he is the most conflicted.

Fraser raises a luridly shadowed past up before our eyes, which, makes his work like a terrible accident in progress, something that you want to avert your eyes from, but cannot.