Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  The Rev puts his fork down, reaches for the pen, signs the autograph, then chats with the guy for several minutes as his food gets cold, listening patiently as the guy tells some corny story about nothing. Finally the guy leaves, happy.

  The Rev turns to his food, his expression blank. The warm veggies are cold. The tea is too. He reaches for his fork and tosses some veggies into his mouth. “Everything I am today,” he says, “a lot of it, is because of James Brown. The most important lessons I learned, I learned from him. He was like my father. He was the father I never had.”

  —

  Spin back the clock to New York City in the 1960s, before a delightful Jewish mayor named Ed Koch walked the streets joking and asking, “How’m I doin’?” When Staten Island was still called Richmond and the South Bronx was newly decimated, destroyed by urban planner Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway, which ran through its heart like a butcher knife, sending working-class families fleeing to the suburbs. Back then, Queens was suburban bliss, for black families anyway, most of whom had backpedaled there from Brooklyn and Harlem. Even Manhattan was different tundra, much of it rough land. The Upper West Side was a place where you could get your head bonked in. Times Square was a run-for-your-life situation, with whorehouses and X-rated strip and video joints; and over in Hell’s Kitchen, Irish and Italian mobsters were hard at work killing each other—rumor has it that the gangsters cut up corpses at the bar downstairs from the beaten flat at Forty-Third and Tenth where I write these words. New York was a fifteen-cent subway ride to a world spookier than voodoo. It got worse in the seventies. Drive out of the Lincoln Tunnel in those years and a squeegee guy with a face that looked like a combination wire hanger and mop would suddenly appear, covering your windshield with glop and spit, daring you to pull off without dropping a quarter in his hand, which looked like you could get tuberculosis from just looking at it. New York was funky. That was Alfred Sharpton’s New York. It was mine as well. We’re close to the same age.

  Sharpton grew up in Brooklyn, got a taste of middle-class life in Hollis, Queens, for a short spurt, then later was swooped back into the urban jungle of Brooklyn after his father abandoned his mother. He was a boy preacher at Washington Temple Church of God in Christ, one of the oldest and largest in Brooklyn, a child phenomenon who gave his first sermon at the age of four, steeped deep in the soup of black religion. He toured with gospel great Mahalia Jackson at age eleven and was tutored by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., as a kid. In the sixties, when he was a teenager, he was swept up by the civil rights movement, but he was an outsider. Most of his teen friends were black nationalists or Panthers, but Bible preaching and the gospel did not sit well with the little red Mao books that soul brothers were carting around Brooklyn in those revolutionary days, particularly his conservative bent of Pentecostal holiness. Sports? Football? Basketball? He avoided those. His gift was his tongue.

  He joined Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket at age thirteen, then joined Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), but the ultrareligious Pentecostals trusted neither Martin Luther King nor the black radicals like Malcolm X—in those days New York City was Malcolm X’s town—nor the white kids who wore SDS buttons and were screaming against the Vietnam War. Sharpton admired both King and Malcolm X; he shared common ground with all of the radical movements, yet fit with none of them. How do you follow God in a world that is gray? What do you do when black power turns out to be a cobweb of continual adjustment, where the Baptists like King and Jesse Jackson looked down their noses at the Pentecostals like him—even as they needed a young voice like his? He saw no space for himself, so he created his own.

  Guess who was the guy who showed him how to do it?

  “I met Mr. Brown when I was seventeen,” Sharpton tells me. The previous year, he says, PUSH fell apart, and so in 1971 he started his National Youth Movement, a voter-registration outfit. Brown’s oldest son, Teddy, joined that movement, and the two were friends for about a year until Teddy’s sudden death. At that time, a local New York DJ named Hank Spann introduced Sharpton to Brown during an event at the old RKO Albee Theatre in downtown Brooklyn, to honor Teddy and get black youth to register to vote.

  Even now, forty years later, Sharpton, a master of the sound bite, a man who rarely shows his true face, who will keel over before he shows hurt in public, mists a bit sentimental as he pushes back into the memories of his first actual conversation with Brown. They met at a Newark theater to discuss the upcoming voter-registration concert, before a scheduled Brown performance. Just before the curtain rose, Sharpton was ushered into a backstage dressing room. Standing there, combing his hair in front of a mirror, was the Godfather himself. I asked Sharpton, “Were you floored?”

  “Are you kidding? The only recreation I ever did with my mother and father was we’d go see Jackie Wilson and James Brown every year at the Apollo. When I met Adam Clayton Powell, I felt I had met the man close to God. When I met James Brown, I thought I had met God. It was like that. I was swept up.”

  Brown was very abrupt and businesslike. “He looked at me full, said, ‘What do you want to be, son?’

  “I said, ‘Excuse me?’

  “ ‘What do you want to be?’

  “ ‘Well, I’m in civil rights.’

  “ ‘I’m gonna show you how you get the whole hog.’

  “ ‘Excuse me?’

  “ ‘Gonna show you how to get the whole hog. But you gotta think big like me. I’m going to make you bigger than big. You got to do exactly what I say. Can you do that?’ ”

  Half of it Sharpton didn’t understand. It would take him a year before he could translate the South Carolina twang and rat-tat-tat of Brown’s garbled, fast-and-furious delivery, terms that sounded half crocked and some made-up. But he heard the magic words: I’m going to make you bigger than big. Sharpton agreed to do exactly as Brown said.

  Brown gave him instructions on how to promote the upcoming voter-registration show. Sharpton, still a teenager, walked out of the room thinking, I’ve never promoted anything in my whole life. A show was not church. A show was not a sermon. A show involved tickets, and money, and businessmen—promoters—who wanted their money back if things didn’t work out. And fights, maybe. And cops sometimes. This wasn’t some change-the-world rap session with brothers who wore MAO buttons, or some heart-to-heart conversation with his white classmates who marched around hollering about Vietnam. It wasn’t anything like preaching under the protective arm of the minister of his home church, who treated him with love and kindness. This was real money. Real business. And if you screwed up, well…

  He decided he wouldn’t screw up. The kid got busy. He spent the next few weeks posting signs, seeking out promoters, calling on radio disc jockeys and volunteers, hustling up customers for a James Brown concert in Brooklyn to register blacks to vote. He called on friends, neighbors, friends of friends, hustlers, scoundrels, militants, church parishioners, and teenagers like himself who were wild about James Brown. He hauled posters and tape and staple guns around on the subway, and on the bus—for he would never learn to drive himself—hanging up posters in East New York and Bed-Stuy, Jamaica, St. Albans, Hollis, and Harlem, declaring far and wide: James Brown is coming to Brooklyn! Come see him. Come register to vote.

  A few months later, Brown came back to play the event. Sharpton, not knowing how ticket sales were going, walked into the RKO Albee and saw a full house. He was summoned backstage again and ushered into the RKO dressing room to wait for Brown. When Brown walked in, he didn’t look at Sharpton. Instead, he looked at his manager, Charles Bobbit.

  “How’d he do, Mr. Bobbit?”

  “Mr. Brown, the kid did all right.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Bobbit?”

  “He sold out both shows.”

  Brown turned to Sharpton. “You did everything I told you?”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Brown.”

  Brown nodded, clearly pleased. Without another word, he turned on his heel, marc
hed out onto the stage, and his band hit. Sharpton watched from backstage as Brown wowed the audience in his first show. Between shows, he was summoned to Brown’s dressing room again and found his idol sitting with his hair in curlers under a hair dryer. Brown shouted out at him from under the dryer, unable to hear Sharpton’s responses. Now Sharpton could barely make out what he was saying because of the blowing hair dryer, but followed along as best he could.

  “Son, you know how I made it?”

  “No sir.”

  “I was an original. There was nothing like me before me. If you’re scared to be an original, tell me now. We won’t waste no time.”

  “I was a boy preacher, Mr. Brown.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Sharpton shouted out the answers over the noise of the hair dryer, telling Brown he was born with the Word in his heart, that he could preach before he could read, that he was always different from his classmates, that he wanted justice for those who didn’t have it. “I want to be like Jesse Jackson—”

  Brown cut him off. “No you don’t,” he said. “You don’t wanna be the next Jesse Jackson. You want to be the first Al Sharpton. It’s something special you got, but listen to me. My own kids don’t listen to me. If you listen to me you can do this all over the country. You can register voters, real young people, ’cause those guys out there in civil rights ain’t got no heart. You’re a kid from Brooklyn, you got heart. But you got to be different.”

  Brown left New York, returned two weeks later, and summoned Sharpton, telling him, “Pack your bags. We’re going to LA.”

  Sharpton packed his things, climbed aboard Brown’s private plane, and didn’t come back to New York for fifteen years. He left New York City as Alfred Charles Sharpton, a seventeen-year-old boy-wonder preacher. He returned as Rev. Al Sharpton—the Rev—one of the most powerful, charismatic, controversial, and unique figures in African American history. The friendship would last the rest of Brown’s life.

  —

  There are many great creative alliances that have existed in the American artistic diaspora. Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein, the creators of the great Broadway classic West Side Story, come to mind. The Miles Davis Quintet, featuring John Coltrane with Cannonball Adderley, is another. Miles and Gil Evans. Sinatra and Basie. Conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra is one of my personal favorites. But there is nothing in American history like the collaborative mix of Al Sharpton and James Brown.

  It is a collaboration that defies easy explanation, and one that is easily overlooked by Brown’s historians, most of whom are commercial music writers and not stupid enough, like me, to attempt to explain the amorphous blend of black politics, culture, and music that helped shape the man. Amiri Baraka in Blues People, Guthrie Ramsey in Race Music, Teresa Reed in The Holy Profane, and Samuel Floyd in The Power of Black Music are among those who have done it to greater effect than I ever can. But here is my layman’s view:

  The entertainment world and politics are more similar than most realize. Every time I go to Los Angeles I am astounded by the similarities between Hollywood and Washington, DC: Money. Power. Influence. Sex. Scandals. Parties. Phoniness. Posturing. Communication as an aphrodisiac. The only difference, it seems, is that in LA the folks are prettier, whereas in DC, they pick your pocket with one hand while saluting the flag with the other. But the basics are the same: business and power. Trying to cram yourself into the tight keyhole of power and fame in either world is hard no matter what your color, and black Americans who manage to squeeze into that tight space are often deadlier than their white counterparts when it comes to slashing those coming up behind them. America likes its black stars one at a time: Barry White or Marvin Gaye, Bill Cosby or Flip Wilson, Sammy Davis or Johnny Mathis, which makes the numbers game a bad one. At his height, in the sixties and seventies, Brown saw himself as a one-man hit machine versus Motown and its powerful cadre of heavy hitters, with each side clamoring to get into white radio, where the giant money was. There were others whom Brown competed against: Jackie Wilson, Joe Tex, Little Willie John, whom he admired, Isaac Hayes, Gamble and Huff, the O’Jays, the Spinners, and Teddy Pendergrass. But the two heavyweights, the Ali vs. Frazier of the record business, were at least for a time Motown versus James Brown. They were the big horses. And both could run hard.

  In that crude paradigm, Brown was Joe Frazier, the thundering, dark-skinned heavy hitter out of the North Philly ghetto, and Motown was Muhammad Ali, the light, right, sweet-talking kid from Louisville, Kentucky, who was outrageously interesting and who painted Frazier unfairly as an Uncle Tom. Brown was not fond of Berry Gordy and his Motown crew. He respected Gordy, but deep down he felt resentment toward the light, bright, educated, acceptable-to-white-folk folks that Berry and Motown seemed to represent. The trials and sufferings of the deeply talented Diana Rosses, Smokey Robinsons, Gladys Knights, Stevie Wonders, the brilliant Motown songwriting teams like Ashford and Simpson, the unsung sidemen like bassist James Jamerson, all of whom paid their dues, did not move him. Brown had climbed to stardom through the Mount Everest of routes, the chitlin circuit, beating off hard-swinging southern competitors like Little Willie John, Joe Tex, the Midnighters, and Little Richard, performers who could pummel your head musically on the bandstand—and some, like Jackie Wilson, who could pummel your head off of it. Brown always felt like a cornpone southerner to his northern black counterparts, who, he believed, had been tricked by the northern white man’s cleverly veiled racism. His manager Buddy Dallas, a white southerner, tells the story that in 1988 Brown was staying in the Presidential Suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in LA while comedian Bill Cosby also happened to be staying there. Cosby, who grew up in the tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia, sent up a plate of collard greens to Brown’s room as a joke. Brown was furious. “I’m gonna take these greens to his room and shove them up his ass,” Brown said. Dallas had to talk him down.

  Brown’s prejudice against the likes of someone like Cosby, who was more educated, refined, and somehow a more “light-skinned” or “accepted” Negro, stayed with him his entire life.

  Sharpton was a political version of Brown’s music, but more versatile. He reflected Martin Luther King’s religiosity but favored Malcolm X’s directness. Sharpton preached the Word, but unlike the conservative Pentecostals for whom politics was kryptonite, he went at it with the guts of a Brooklyn gangster. Sharpton was young, unafraid, funny, and able to go 360 degrees in ways that Brown could not. With his satin tongue, he could talk to a CEO or play the dozens with Brown’s gang of yes-men. Brown surrounded himself with men he trusted—they were mostly men—who were like him: southern, country, tolerant. They were admiring of his idiosyncrasies, willing to eat what he ate, live like he lived, and believe what he believed. Says Brown’s son Terry, “He trained you to keep it tight. Don’t talk. Do. And watch the money.” Many, like Brown, packed .38-caliber pistols in their britches and were not afraid to shoot: Baby James, Henry Stallings, Brown’s cousin Willie Glen, and Johnny Terry, who served time in juvenile with Brown and worked as a Famous Flame for a stint. They were generally loyal, hard men. The record business was a rough game, and Brown needed protection. When he showed up at a venue, he usually wanted a certain amount of cash up front. No matter what the problem at the venue was, or who the promoter was, or what the money deal was, if James Brown showed up and the promoter did not have that bag of 50 percent of ticket sales—thirty or forty grand or sometimes more, in cash, Brown’s favorite line to the promoter was, “Can you sing ________?” and he’d name a song.

  The answer was invariably “No.”

  “Well, you will be singing it if my money’s not here.”

  During the late seventies, as Sharpton remembers it, the mob had a strong hand in the music business, and when Brown came to New York to play his favorite venue, Harlem’s Apollo Theater, certain mobsters, Sharpton remembers, would call Brown and make offers. “They’d say, ‘Jimmy’—those types called him ‘Jimmy�
��—‘Jimmy, do you need a loan of thirty grand to help you along? We can help you out, keep your show running smooth. Pay us back when you can.’ ” Brown always refused. When they threatened to beat him down, or release rats into the theater and let them run through the crowd during his Apollo shows, Brown said, “Let ’em,” and sent his hit squad, Baby James, Henry Stallings, and other guys who, Brown boasted, would kill a man for a thousand dollars, into the audience with orders to watch the room and deal with all comers. He often felt cornered in the North, a place where some promoters and radio stations, for example, took his payoffs—pretty common in those days—and refused to play his music. At bottom he felt America’s North was more racist than the South, a belief tested years later by Sharpton, who pushed New York City to near madness with his protests. Brown’s response to northern racism was to carefully select men who were blank slates and shape them into a kind of army that shared his own ideas. Charles Bobbit, Brown’s personal manager and a former member of the Nation of Islam, was one of those, as was Brown’s younger son Terry. Those two were sharp operators, men not formally educated to the highest order but with minds like bilge pumps, men who could walk into a room and suck the details out of it in seconds, learn who owned what, who did what, who owed whom, then figure out exit strategies and angles to survive. Terry worked for his dad on and off during Brown’s great success years, selling radio ads and handling Brown’s money and discreet elements, but father-son arguments kept Terry clear at times. Bobbit was a loyal soldier for a good part of four decades. But Brown’s greatest child, his greatest invention outside of his music, his greatest contribution to the social fabric of America, may well not be a song, but rather his ability to identify a young man who was hungry, talented, willing to take orders; bold, cunning, quick on his feet; and who could recognize the intricate twists and turns of race in America well enough to take on all comers. Rev. Al Sharpton is the class A, the summa cum laude graduate, of the James Brown school of thought.