In late 2014, two enterprising New York Times reporters, Larry Rohter and Steve Knopper, ambled into South Carolina, peeled the lid off the garbage can, and let the nation get a full whiff of the stench. Their December 2014 front-page story said essentially the same thing Sue Summer had been saying in the Rag That Nobody Reads: that the bulk of Brown’s estate has not reached the children for whom it was intended, that the estate has paid millions to attorneys and creditors, and that it remains mired in lawsuits years later. The next day The Times of London called Sue, interested in pursuing the story. “Now,” Sue says grimly, “they know someone is watching.”
The sad fact is, though, that even if the greatest reporters in the world descend on South Carolina to dig out the facts, this story is knotted up so tight in history that only a local like Sue could figure it out. The case is bound by race, blood, nepotism, and feuds that reach back to slavery and the Reconstruction that followed. Only a local would understand, say, that Adele Pope, the attorney who fought against the same network of bullyboys who threatened to jail Sue, is actually a Hammond; that her great-great-grandfather is former South Carolina governor James Henry Hammond, who once owned the land where James Brown’s house is. Only a local would understand that former attorney general Henry McMaster, who kicked the James Brown case into the court system for an extra five years by rewriting Brown’s will in 2008, was in the midst of a failed run for governor at the time, and that McMaster was a fundraiser for the University of South Carolina School of Law—where Tomi Rae Hynie’s attorney, S. Alan Medlin, is a professor, and which most of the attorneys and judges in this case attended, including Judge Early, who’s done his share of kicking this carcass up the road so everybody and their brother can have a bite. Many of these guys—and they’re mostly guys—know one another. They toss cases at one another. They dine together. They hire one another. “This case is a dairy farm,” Sue says. “They have this political dairy they can feed off of. They keep milking it.”
Sue and I are sitting in her handsome Newberry home at her kitchen table, with its lazy Susan (“which I always took offense at,” she jokes) made by her husband Henry’s grandfather. I asked Sue if she knew of James Brown when she was young.
“Sure,” she says, “but I grew up trying to learn how to shag.” That’s a Carolina dance, by the way. It’s pretty complicated. I tried it and nearly fell on my face. “The shag,” Sue says, “will turn you around a bit.”
You poke deep into this woman’s psyche and you get the same temperature every day. Cool. Determined. A deep stubbornness, a wide streak of kindness, and a long memory for the good. It runs in the family. Her mother raised four kids after a difficult divorce. Her brother Danny came home from the war in Vietnam determined to live a life of purpose. Danny was a helicopter gunner, and after the war spent his middle years with his hand draped not around the trigger of a .50mm gun but around the handle of a church hand bell. He built homes for the homeless in Mexico. He volunteered in church for whatever they asked, and served as a volunteer at the Augusta National’s thirteenth hole, the tough one, one of the holes that make up what they call “the Amen Corner.” That’s where Danny is today. Just a bit of his ashes, snuck in there by a friend, tucked between the azaleas and the green. He reached the Amen Corner in July 1999, at age forty-seven. Cancer got Danny, not the bitterness of Vietnam.
Sue can’t get Danny out of her head. He represented everything her parents wanted the Davis children to be. It’s one reason she continues the fight, walking into hostile courtrooms alone, a sole reporter from the Rag That Nobody Reads, the rag that serves as watchdog for tens of thousands of needy kids who have no voice and deserve a decent shot at an education. For them, the Rag That Nobody Reads is the Most Important Rag in the World. “It’s heartbreaking,” she says of the whole business. “If it weren’t so terrible, it would be funny.” She chuckles bitterly even as she says it.
Sue takes me to the Central United Methodist Church on a balmy spring afternoon. Her granddaughter Eleanor is with us; Eleanor goes wherever Sue goes. The three of us came here so that Sue could show me the beautiful stained-glass windows. “People come from everywhere to see them,” she says. I can see why. The windows were crafted in 1891 by two German immigrants. They are biblical images—Jesus with his lambs, the apostle Paul beckoning to the light, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane comforting mourners. They’re gorgeous and almost defy description. The glass pushes various light and colors into every corner of the wide sanctuary. It’s like the Lord himself is standing directly over the building holding a work light.
Summer points to the huge stained-glass portrait of Jesus just behind the pulpit, his arms outstretched, beckoning. It’s one of the largest Von Gerichten windows still in existence, and one of her favorites. “A storm damaged it,” she tells me. “The congregation raised the money to repair it.”
“How much did it cost to fix?” I ask.
She picks up a hymnal and leafs through the pages. She rubs the book thoughtfully. “Half a million to fix them,” she says. “The congregation raised it somehow. They tell us the windows are worth four million dollars at least.”
“I bet that’s more than the worth of the building,” I say.
She shrugs and remains silent. A strange aura seems to cover the room. I look up. Those stained-glass windows cast a warm, protective glow everywhere about the room. I’ve never seen a church like this before—and I’ve seen a lot of churches.
“How often do you come here?” I ask.
She laughs and places her choral book back into its placeholder.
“If you’re asking do I pray a lot,” she says, “the answer is yes.”
She gets up to leave, picks up little Eleanor, and slowly heads toward the door. There’s dinner to make for Henry, who has stood steady at her side throughout this struggle. Her grown son is coming home to visit. And she has just lodged another written Freedom of Information request, tossed another grenade over the transom so to speak, to see where this James Brown case is being dragged, which could mean another subpoena and court date for a woman who drives a beat-up car and lives in a simple house on a simple road in a simple town in a simple state where nothing, not even a simple gift to poor children, is simple. Thankfully, two local attorneys, Jay Bender of the South Carolina Press Association and Tom Pope, whose father once represented the Newberry Observer, stepped into the fray on her behalf and kept her out of jail—this time. But what happens next? Only God knows.
I watch her now as she walks past the preacher’s pulpit, just under the stained-glass image of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane that holds his arms out in welcome. He smiles warmly over her shoulder as she heads toward the door. And then she’s gone. And the polished glass door of God’s house closes behind her without a sound, silent, sure, and blessedly solid.
She rumbles up to the beaten yellow house in Augusta’s black neighborhood driving a handsome old Lincoln Continental that thunders to a stop. One tire pushes up onto the curb then plops back onto the street, and finally she halts and cuts the engine. It’s a bad parking job. Across the street, a suspicious-looking black dude shuffles along the sidewalk in a loose T-shirt and jeans, peering curiously as the pretty, light-skinned black woman in a beautiful white hat emerges from her car. He lifts a hand to wave at her. The wave is heavy, slow. “Miss Emma.”
“Hey, honey.”
Everybody knows Miss Emma for her church hats. She’s got at least a dozen of them, all shapes and sizes. She’d be hard to miss anyway, with her fine, beautiful self—they called her type a redbone down South when I was a boy. Even now, at age sixty-six, she looks twenty years younger. She’s old-school gracious and old-school southern cool, never poking, prying, never asking questions about personal business or telling her own. Even the nosy neighbors don’t know about her back pain, and the bursitis, and the roaring pain in her hip that knocked her for a loop for nearly a month. She’s allergic to just about every medication and also allergic to asking for help.
She was raised that way, to remember only the good, to speak well of folks, to be kind: she recalls the days of her family’s business, McBowman’s Motor Inn, which for years housed so many of James Brown’s circle for free—Maceo, Rev. Sharpton, Country Kellum, Jimmy Nolen—those were wonderful days. They all ate cornbread and yams and chicken at her kitchen table. Then later when she moved into this house, many of them followed—the Rev himself stayed there. The house is too big for her now. The kitchen counter is too long, and it’s hard for her to lift those heavy pots; the lush couches and chairs that the musicians lounged on when they retreated to her house hurt her back when she leans over to dust them; the beautiful white grand piano they once jammed on into the wee hours sits proudly in the living room, and the Bible atop it has clearly gotten a lot of wear. The guys loved that house. A lot of them have gone on to their reward now. But they always wrote and called from around the world because they loved Miss Emma. And they loved that house. It’s a beautiful house because Miss Emma is in it. And God is on high in that house. God is good. All the time. He’s good to Miss Emma.
She steps out of her Lincoln Continental into the warm Augusta air looking bright and happy, wearing a warm smile, gazing up and down at the old houses, a couple of them boarded and the others, like hers, neatly trimmed. She gazes up and down the street with the air of someone peering at a sandy beach on a sunny island in Jamaica someplace. She sees you standing there, looking confused. She laughs.
“Why you standing over there? You ain’t got to do that. C’mon inside the house and rest your feet.”
I’m walking into the house of one of James Brown’s many women. A woman he loved. And who loved him back like no other.
A woman he called Sis.
—
In 2006, when James Brown began to die—his prostate cancer eating at him, his toenails clipped off, his teeth killing him, knees aching, body hurting from arthritis—one of the first people he began to call frequently while he lay in bed resting was Miss Emma, wife of his best friend, Leon Austin. There were others he would call frequently as well: Leon, Al Sharpton, Charles Bobbit, the former NFL star Al White, his first wife, Velma—he called Velma from his hospital bed as he lay dying, though he never told her where he was calling from—and his son Terry. They all understood him, saw him as he was, and asked for nothing. But Miss Emma had a special distinction. She was neither a man nor a business acquaintance, neither lover nor wife. She was a woman who knew his history, had known him, in a way, more closely than all four of his wives, with the exception of Velma (“she was always his heart,” Emma says), because Miss Emma had been a witness to all three of his latter marriages and their attendant troubles. She grew up in Augusta, met Brown in 1966 after she married Leon, and was the one female friend who talked straight to him. And in 2006, that last year of his life, he’d call Sis at all hours, almost every day when he was home, and sometimes from the road as well, especially when Leon was sick. At two A.M, the phone would ring: “Hey, Sis, you sleep?”
“Not no more, Mr. Brown.”
“How’s Leon?”
“He’s sleep, Mr. Brown. But he’s feeling better. Thank you for asking.”
“Tell him don’t play no more funerals. The next one might be his own.”
“All right, Mr. Brown.”
Click.
The next day at noon the phone would ring again. “Hey, Sis, you know I can’t stand a dirty house. What you clean your kitchen with?”
“I ain’t the one to ask, Mr. Brown. I can’t clang two pots together.”
“You cook that vegetable soup!”
“That I can do.”
“Can you make me some? I’ll be home by ’bout six.”
“All right, Mr. Brown.”
The next day at eleven P.M.: “Sis, what you doing now? You reading? What you reading? You see them hollering on the Swanee Quintet show today? Lord, they put it together, didn’t they….”
It occurred to Miss Emma in that last year of Brown’s life that James Brown, who she always knew was one of the loneliest people she’d ever met, was far lonelier than he’d ever been.
You put a man in a house. You smother him with material things. You call him a star for forty-two years, then tell him he’s through, he’s an oldies act, he’s outlived his own revolution. And then he falls. The fall is long, painful, and there is no one to catch him on the way down. Brown had money. He had fame. He had made a great comeback. But he was short on friends and trust, and he owed everyone. He owed his ex-wives for his behavior. He owed his kids and grandkids for not being the father and grandfather they needed. He owed his out-of-wedlock kids for the horrible way he denied some of them. He owed the cadre of women he’d slept with and abused. But Miss Emma, a woman with a soft heart and a bright outlook, a former employee of his radio station, who nursed his best friend, Leon Austin, toward his own gracious date with death, he owed nothing to, and so those calls to her were free.
“Sis, I might get some work done on my teeth.”
“Didn’t you do that before, Mr. Brown?”
“Gonna do it again.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, Mr. Brown.”
“I’m all right.”
An hour later, the phone:
“Sis, I might get my toes worked on too.”
“Well, you should get that done, Mr. Brown, if they’re bothering you.”
An hour later:
“Sis, you busy?”
“Not really…”
He never called to ask a favor. He just called to talk. He’d talk for hours, about everything from Inca Indians to Bible passages. She’d nod off and wake up and he’d still be talking. Sometimes Leon would answer and Brown would talk so long into the night that he’d hand the phone to her and say, “Emma, you got this.” Then Brown would burn thirty more minutes gossiping about Leon. But favors? Never. He was too proud. The closest he could come would be to imply, and she would understand.
“Sis, when’s the last time you made that vegetable soup of yours? I know I asked before and I guess you forgot.”
“Funny you should ask, Mr. Brown. In fact, I might stir up some today. I’ll bring it by.”
“All right, Sis.”
And off she would go to cook up her soup and bring it to his house in Beech Island, the one that was supposedly locked up tight, from which his fourth wife had been banished, sent off to LA to drug rehab, the house at which his kids would have to make an appointment to see him, the one he built on sixty acres in the middle of nowhere, within sight of the mighty towers of the nuclear bomb plant. She knew about Brown’s paranoia in his later years, had heard what he’d told Adrienne, his third wife, and Mr. Bobbit about those radio towers—how the government had planted microphones in his teeth so they could hear everything he said. She paid it no mind. That was loneliness, she understood.
When she came to the house, they’d sit in his den while he watched television and they’d chat about the old days, about the old Augusta they longed for, where black businesses thrived and black children didn’t have to be forced to be in school, but rather wanted to learn, and wore their clothes straight and didn’t wear their pants around their asses; an Augusta where folks were poor but where drugs weren’t rampant, and parents stayed home and looked after their kids, and if your neighbor spanked a child for doing something, they didn’t have to worry about going to jail or getting shot for doing it. She’d earned her way into that kind of talk with James Brown. Because she was old-school Augusta herself.
Together, they’d seen their world change. She knew he wasn’t the father he could have been, nor the man he should have been. She’d worked as Brown’s personal assistant for several years, back when he owned his Augusta radio station, WRDW, and later as a popular DJ at the radio station. She’d traveled with him, even to Africa. She knew the wives, the longtime girlfriends, the short-term lovers, the one-nighters. In the old days, she’d book the girls in hotel rooms when Brown traveled: one girl on the second floor, the other
on the fourth, another on the third, five of them altogether at one point, Brown running between them all. She got fed up with the whole business after she became friends with his second wife, Dee Dee. “I can’t do this anymore,” she announced to him. She expected Brown to hit the ceiling and holler, “You’re fired!” He did that at his station all the time. He’d hit the ceiling over some small infraction and holler to some poor soul, “You’re fired!” He did that to her a couple of times, but she paid it no mind, because the next day the phone would ring at her office and he’d be on the line saying, “Sis, ummm…what’s the name of that promoter in Milwaukee? You know the one….” and off he would go, chatting about how maybe he’d like to get his memory together so it’d be as sharp as hers, both of them knowing he had a mind like a bilge pump and could recall the names and the phone numbers of two or three dozen promoters without a blink. It was his way of apologizing, saying everything was cool, and sometimes during the conversation he’d even throw in the whole bit about books, because he knew she loved to read, because she’d been a college girl, a Fisk girl, saying “Sis, what you reading these days?” and then hearing about it and piping out, “I’ma read that book too,” and adding if she wouldn’t mind dropping that book by the house later, why, he just had his house man, Mr. Washington, run by that restaurant downtown, the one with the rice and beans that Leon liked, she could pick some of those rice and beans up and bring them home to Leon—just chatting on as if nothing happened. As if him calling her at his office and her answering his phone after he’d fired her the day before was just a normal thing. She didn’t mind. The fact is, she never stopped working when he fired her. She’d finish her day and come back the next. She knew how he was. She could quit that job anytime she wanted. He knew it too.
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