Still, I tried to hand the gig over to Gerri. She could write her ass off. She was a top soul-music writer. She had been writing about black music back when few white writers had the stones to venture south to get near James Brown. James Brown was tough on writers—everyone knew that. But Brown respected Gerri. She wrote the Rolling Stone feature on him when he died—the first and last time he was on the cover of the magazine. She was the one to do his book, not me.
But this guy selling his “exclusive story,” he didn’t want her.
I was broke. I had three kids, two of them college-aged. The ex-wife was standing on my head. So I sat there and listened as Mr. Exclusive Story said this and that, dumped a few more candies on the floor, and pointed south. And I followed his pointed fingers and jumped on a plane and that’s how I got here. Watching this jeep roll backward in the woods as I followed in my rental car. Feeling my eyelids getting sore from blinking too much. Sucking on the James Brown vapors just like every two-bit writer who’s ever needed a contract. Fifty-five years old and going nowhere. And not feeling a bit of goodness in my heart toward James Brown either, that’s the other thing. Six months in and I’m just like everybody else who lived off the Godfather. I’m sucking on his vapors, trying to get paid.
CR drove with his head out the door, backing up, gunning the motor.
The jeep whirred to the left and the right, its one headlight shooting from the weeds and into the sky as it rocketed over bumps and holes in the earth before it stopped at the shack. Junk was everywhere. Edgar followed us in his van. I guess he didn’t like the look of that jeep neither.
I knew the place wasn’t gonna be the kind of spot where the welcome mat was written in olde English, but still, I fell onto the porch of that old shack feeling like somebody had been picking at my guts with an icepick. A bare lightbulb illuminated old crates, chairs, kitchen items, an old moped, pieces of cars, all scattered about. The floor was thick with blue Budweiser beer cans. A dog barked furiously from inside the shack someplace. I couldn’t see three feet past the porch into the field beyond. CR and I sat on the porch on crates while Edgar stood. CR lit a cigarette.
“What you do out here all day?” Edgar asked. I was glad he was there.
“Nothing,” CR said.
All three of us laughed.
CR looked at me. “You didn’t bring no beer?” he asked.
He had me there. When we’d talked on the phone earlier, he hadn’t said a word about beer. I would’ve given him a beer if I’d had one, though I was low on cash at the moment, having dispensed huge chunks of money fooling around in nearby Augusta and in various parts of Georgia and western South Carolina, chasing the ghost of the Godfather of Soul. I’d run into more low-level hustlers in one month than I had back in the eighties when I played tenor in blues bands up and down New York’s Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I slid from one chiseler to the next back then, trying to keep my pockets from remaining smooth, beautiful, and empty. But in this world, everybody’s got an itchy palm, hollering about the white man’s evil and chiseling their neighbor at the same time. You don’t know who’s telling the truth, even if you do grease them, which made it all pointless.
“You didn’t say nothing about a beer,” I said. “I would’ve brought a beer if you said something.”
I was hoping CR wouldn’t back out. It was so dark, I couldn’t see his face clearly. This is what happens when you’re chasing a guy who ended up in a crypt in his daughter’s front yard, I thought. You’re standing in the middle of nowhere, hoping you don’t end up in an urn in somebody else’s yard, waiting for answers that may never come.
CR’s stern face broke into a grin. “I should’ve asked you to bring me one,” he said.
Like any starving lowlife seeking a scoop, I promised him a beer the next time, knowing there likely wouldn’t be one. “So did you know James Brown?” I asked.
“Surely did. He’s my cousin.”
“How’s that?”
“His daddy and my grandma were first cousins.”
“Say that again?”
“His daddy and my grandma, they were the children of two sisters.”
CR’s mutt was now roaring and snarling a few feet behind the worn screen door. I could hardly hear CR for all that howling. I moved toward the door to peek at the dog and to make sure the flimsy screen door was locked. That creature saw me and must’ve thought I was a basket of fish; he leaped and barked and snapped at the door, but the screen door held tight. Just in case, I held it shut anyway. I was feeling pretty wobbly. The guys were ignoring the barking, so after a minute of trying to look cool, I took my hand off the door and sat back down on my crate.
CR, sitting on his crate, looked over his shoulder at the snarling dog, and said, “Hush!” The dog ignored him. That mongrel was a distraction. He kept howling.
“Could you say that again?” I asked.
“His daddy and my grandma, they were children of two sisters.”
“Was your grandma his aunt Honey? They say she raised him. He wrote that in his book.”
“Aunt Honey did raise him. My grandma helped raise him too when he was little.”
“Who was she?”
“My grandma?”
“No. Aunt Honey.”
“James Brown’s daddy’s cousin.”
“How’s that again?”
CR looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “What college you say you went to?”
The three of us laughed.
He repeated what he’d said before, loud this time, as if saying it louder would make it more understandable. “My grandma and James Brown’s daddy, they were the children of two sisters.”
I don’t know if it was the dark, or that barking dog, or the late hour, or all that junk on that porch, or my own fatigue, but I didn’t get it. People from down South have a gift for relations that us northerners don’t. I have cousins like that in North Carolina. They twang so deep, you need a translator to understand what they’re saying. But I love them, and they can reel off ten generations and have you related to John Quincy Adams like it’s nobody’s business. It took me months to find CR, and in seconds he’d reeled off some important characters in young James Brown’s life. He was revealing something that no one, not even Brown’s son Terry and Brown’s first wife, Velma, knew. But I couldn’t get it. So I went backward. I got a piece of paper out of my pad. “Let’s draw a family tree,” I said.
“All right.”
I drew the tree, and CR talked, and as he did, he connected one relative to the next, going back decades: Shelleree Scott, Iveree Scott, Saree Scott, and Lydree Scott, James Brown’s grandmother—James’s granddaddy, said to be a man named Eddie Evans, who disappeared—and the two sisters Aunt Honey and Doll Baby. In the three or four hours he talked, the years peeled away and the descendants of the Gaines-Scott family appeared, a family of religious sharecroppers, long on laughs, trusting in God, and bent on a better life. They were tenant farmers and laborers for the white man, living in a town that no longer exists, a town sixteen miles away that vanished into thin air one day in 1951. He connected the lines, with Edgar pitching in what he knew, but CR had the floor, and as he talked, the mystery of the origins of the greatest soul singer in America’s history unraveled before my eyes, right there on that porch, amid all that junk, in the dark. By the time he was done—and his brother Shelleree added crucial elements later—I wanted to reach over and hug him. I wanted to buy him ten beers. He had done what a dozen music writers and historians had not. He had unearthed James Brown’s history. He’d given bone and substance to the history of a man who’d spent his entire life sprinting from his past until he could outrun it no more. He’d explained why no matter how much he said he loved America, James Brown could not enjoy its fullest prosperity: because his own roots were bathed in the worst part of its history.
—
The tragedy of James Brown’s history actually dates back to a story passed down in his extended family on his fa
ther’s side for several generations, nearly back to the Civil War.
At the banks of the Savannah River in Augusta, Georgia, not long after the war ended, a group of white prison guards watching over a chain gang moved to silence one of the workers, a young black boy by the name of Oscar Gaines. It was a hot Georgia day, and young Gaines, who was doing short time for some kind of wrong—perceived or real, no one remembers what sin he’d committed to bring on the white man’s punishment—had grown exhausted and asked to go back to his cell to rest. “I can’t do no more,” he said. “I’m just too hot.”
The armed guards, who were mounted on horses, told him to keep quiet and keep working.
Gaines persisted, saying, “I’m hot. I got to cool off.” A few terse words were exchanged, and the guards got down off their horses. They grabbed Gaines’s hands and feet. “You hot? The river will cool you off,” they told him.
They swung him like a pendulum back and forth while Gaines begged for his life. “Please, boss,” Gaines pleaded. “Don’t throw me in the river. I can’t swim.”
But throw him in they did.
Gaines flew into the river and disappeared. Then, to their surprise, his head popped to the surface. Young Gaines, who’d insisted he couldn’t swim, in fact swam very well. As the guards watched, unable to reach him, Gaines did the backstroke. He did the front stroke. He threw in the breaststroke. He sidestroked some. He belly-stroked. He paddled his feet. He threw in the monkey stroke, the boogaloo stroke, the camel-walk stroke, and, finally, the see-you-later stroke. Before they knew it, Gaines was in the middle of the river and still stroking. He swam clear across the Savannah, climbed out on the other side, and escaped into South Carolina. He never did come back to Georgia.
Young Oscar Gaines slipped into a small town called Ellenton, South Carolina, about sixteen miles from Barnwell, and got a job chopping cotton for a white man who didn’t care what kind of history a colored had with those damned Georgians on the other side of the Savannah, and in fact hoped every one of them Georgians would drop dead from fever and go to hell on account of constant border and white-lightning disputes with them and their kind.
So Oscar Gaines got married, lived a long, full life, and begat three sons, Oscar, Shorty, and Cutter. Cutter was killed in the 1930s by a white mob that accused him of stalking a white woman. He was placed on the railroad tracks and the Atlantic Coast rail line eased his mind. Shorty died in prison. But Oscar Gaines, Jr….Oscar, Jr., lived a long life.
Oscar had a son named John Gaines. John Gaines didn’t walk until he was six years old, so they called him “Six” his entire life. Six Gaines.
Six Gaines had a wife named Iveree Scott. Iveree had a sister named Lydree Scott. Lydree Scott had a son.
That son’s name was Joseph James Gardner Brown, James Brown’s father.
Joe Brown was an only child. He was raised in an extended sharecropping household of the Gaines/Scott/Evans clan, a household full of stories, strong women, and lots of laughs. Joe’s grandfather Eddie Evans had murdered Joe’s grandmother and fled to Florida, but the two had almost a dozen kids, so his mother, Lydree, and all his aunts were raised as a large family by various relatives. Monday they’d stay with this aunt, Tuesday they’d spend with another aunt. “We always knew who family was,” says Shelleree Gaines, one of the many Gaines cousins who was told the story by his grandmother, Joe’s aunt.
That style of raising children in extended family is how Joe Brown was raised. Joe Brown’s father was never discussed, though Joe was the spitting image of a local sharecropper named Bill Evans. It didn’t matter, because everyone was poor and everyone lived together—the Gaines/Scott/Evans family of Ellenton. They cared for one another’s children, sharecropped the land, tended house for white folks, and over the years, worshipped at Book Creek Baptist, St. Paul Baptist, and St. Peter Baptist Church. They were a large, loving family, with lots of quirks. The Scott side, Joe’s mother’s side, was lighthearted. Their late mother, who was murdered, liked the sound, so all her children had -ree in their names. There was Iveree, Tyree, Zazaree, Lydiaree, and so on. To this day, there are -rees in the Gaines family tree in Barnwell County and beyond. The Gaines side, Joe’s great-uncle by marriage, were serious, sharp thinkers, and, when riled, dangerous. They had long memories. If you crossed one of them, they did not forget. The story of Cutter Gaines’s death on the railroad tracks was passed down through the family for years. The murderers were never tried, though everyone in Ellenton knew who they were. In 1971, decades after Cutter Gaines was killed, one of his murderers, then an old man, was lying in Barnwell Hospital when two Gaines boys, Johnny and Shelleree Gaines—Cutter’s nephews—were working there as orderlies. They walked into the man’s room to clean it. The old man, lying in the hospital bed, looked up, spied one of the Gaines boys, and thought he’d seen a ghost. “I thought I killed you,” he said. Johnny Gaines leaped for him, and Shelleree had to pull Johnny out of the room.
Such was the family that raised Joseph James Brown, and later his son James Brown in James Brown’s weaning years. They were hard people because the land made you hard. They were strong people because the land made you strong. They were religious people because only God could help you. “You had to be tough,” Shelleree Gaines told me. As sharecroppers they were tied to laws that kept you always in debt to someone else, laws passed down from slavery and the brutal Reconstruction era that followed it. For generations.
Joe had no sisters, but his cousins Doll Baby and Honey were raised as his sisters, and because they were family and close in age and lived on the same land and, even at times, in the same house, they had similar dreams. The two strong-minded, practical girls didn’t want to pull cotton. They had plans to move to Augusta. That was everyone’s dream in those days. Getting out. Getting to Augusta, or Atlanta. All the young folks in the Gaines clan dreamed of it, but nobody dreamed of it more than Joe.
Joe Brown was a handsome, brown-skinned young man with a firm jaw and a quick smile. He was fast on his feet and a quick thinker, with a stutter that masked an intelligence that he learned to keep to himself in a world where a smartass black kid could find himself tossed in jail for thirty days for sassing a white man wrong—he’d seen that happen more than once. Joe saw those cotton fields of Ellenton and saw his future buried in its long rows. That wasn’t for him. He liked to sing in local juke joints and wear fine clothing. He even joined a local singing group as a teenager and picked cotton in his one silk shirt—he liked fine things that much. He loved playing skin, a card game, and his quick wit made him a hit with the local young ladies. “Uncle Joe,” says Shelleree, “was much of a man.” Cocky and humorous, he liked to have fun, and later in life when his son became rich, Joe was never without a new Lincoln and his favorite things on the front seat: a cigar, a pack of cards for a game of skin, a bag of pork skins, and a jar of hot sauce. His grandson Terry would recall his grandfather Joe, whom everyone affectionately called Pop, ripping up the streets in Augusta in a new Lincoln that James had paid for, extinguishing his cigars on the plush leather front seat. “Pop, this is a new car!” Terry would protest. “I d-d-d-d-don’t care about no d-d-d-damn car!” Pop would laugh, stubbing out the cigar and roaring down the street like a madman, speed limit be damned. He lived well because he’d grown up hard. Life without pulling cotton was gravy.
But Joe knew where he came from. He’d spent his young life hearing stories from his aunts about his great-great-uncle Oscar Gaines, who’d tricked the white man on the chain gang to toss him into the Savannah so he could escape, and his great-uncle Cutter who was murdered, and his uncle Shorty who was a hell-raiser who died in prison, and his grandmother who was murdered by his grandfather.
He slipped out of Ellenton as a young man and wandered over to the town of Bamberg, where he met a fine girl named Susie Behling. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall. Susie Behling was a stranger to the Gaines clan. Bamberg was forty-five miles away from Ellenton, and in the world of mules, wagons, and
no telephones, it might as well have been the moon. Nobody knew much about Susie but that she was musical and religious. Her family could sing. She and Joe had a son named James Joseph Brown, born in Snelling. Joe called James “Junior.”
James Brown later told the world that he was born in Barnwell, in a shack, and that his mother, Susie, left him when he was four or five or six years old. The bare truth is that Joe’s marriage was fraught with problems. Handsome Joe Brown flirted with women all his life. When I asked about Joe in the Barnwell area twenty years after his 1993 death, I heard talk of the women he knew or reportedly chased after. The inside rumor, according to one James Brown friend who asked that her name not be used, was, “Joe and Susie had a fight, Joe pulled out his gun, and Susie jumped out the window and took off running and didn’t stop till she got to New York.”
Kill 'Em and Leave Page 5