Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  Some outsiders never understood that. Danny Ray did, though. He was an insider too. Good old Danny Ray, the great MC for Brown, was the guy whose main job for forty-five years was to place Brown’s cape on his shoulders onstage during his “Please, Please, Please” routine and help him offstage, the one who at the top of each show would say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing the star of our show, Mr. Dynamite himself. Soul Brother Number One. The Hardest Working Man in Show Bizness! Mr….Jaaaammmees Brown!” Danny Ray, skinny as a rail, who back in those days was as lush as a bowl of cherries and the sweetest man who ever tipped a cup of joy juice to his mouth—poor Danny Ray got fired like it was lunch at the post office. He got axed in Brown’s radio station one time for some offense—some long-forgotten transgression, something stupid—but he hit Brown’s hurt button somehow and Brown let him have it: “You’re fired!” he yelled. Danny Ray turned to leave, and Brown said, “Where you going, Danny Ray? Ain’t nothing out there for you. You got to stay here with me.”

  Danny Ray turned around to stay, only to hear, “You’re fired!”

  Then, “Where you going?

  “You’re fired!”

  It was madness. Many at the radio station could not take it—the bounced paychecks, the drunk station manager, and Brown’s rages and constant calls. DJ Youngblood, a well-known, thoughtful radio voice from Atlanta, scored his first major job out of college at WRDW, and recalls, “James was a conflicted man. His drive and determination was good and admirable. He liked me. He did appreciate and respect education. But the pay was embarrassing. The way he handled people was horrible. He’d fire people for simply asking for their money. If you saw him on the left side of the street, go to the right side.”

  That was the flip side of the coin, the side for those who weren’t let in. But behind the looking glass, behind the bluff and the ranting, the rages, the hollering, and the shouting, was a man who was so torn by conflict that he snuck off to smoke cigarettes so that no one would see him. Here was a man who rarely drank or cursed or let down his guard in public—which meant in front of people, in front of anyone, period; an incredibly lonely, overwrought, and sensitive man. A man who lived alone inside himself.

  Miss Emma understood him because she understood his best friend. Leon Austin always dreamed big, but when his dreams fell short, he took it with a shrug. “What difference does it make?” Leon would say. “We’re together, you and I. We’re the whole world, you and I.” That meant everything to her. And that was something Brown did not have. He would complain, “I can’t walk two feet down the street in Japan without getting mobbed, Miss Emma. But here in my hometown…” and he’d trail off and say nothing. She understood: He never felt big at home. Never felt appreciated in his hometown. Watching Augusta decline as a metropolis was, for Brown, like watching the air hiss out of a balloon. What’s wrong with us, Sis? Brown would ask. There was no easy answer. When a black man’s dream is deferred, when he fails in the matter of the heart, when he watches a town he gave so much to fall away to pieces by forces beyond his control, who can he blame for that? Drugs? Crime? When his dream fails or is deferred, where can he be allowed to show hurt, show the pain in his heart, show his own suffering when the stage lights are gone and it’s dark and he’s alone, and the very town he loves seems to reel beyond seeming repair and is unable to repay him for what he gave?

  “I’ve never met anyone in my life,” she says, sitting in her parlor cradling a cup of tea and carefully pondering the memories, “that worked harder to hide his true heart. Mr. Brown worked at that very hard. He had a sensitive heart. If you knew that about him, there was not much else you needed to know.”

  —

  It’s a dangerous business trying to show the yawing valleys and precipitous peaks of a man’s life in these Internet-happy days. All it takes is one bozo to get on the Internet and say, “I slept with him,” and the whole of a man’s respectability and reputation topples onto itself like a house of cards. The gossip machine of the Internet can destroy the life of the most anonymous of citizens. Imagine what it did to Brown—a wounded child who became a superstar and later a man in hiding. Michael Jackson, who adored Brown, suffered similarly. In the six months I covered Jackson for People magazine, I was the only writer, by dint of circumstance or coincidence, allowed to watch him rehearse his band. He was meticulous in his rehearsal, attentive to every detail. The musicians left those rehearsals exhausted. I’d never seen a guy rehearse so hard. Yet in those years, Jackson was seen as a freak, a wannabe white man. He was far deeper than people ever knew, and compassionate to a fault. I met his mother, a sharp, kind, deeply religious woman, and after meeting her I saw where he got it from, saw why a man so private and tender, so kind and talented, had to hide the private person he was. Jackson, like Brown, left millions to children. Like Brown, he felt deeply misunderstood and wounded.

  James Brown hid everything, and in the game of instant information he lost big-time, because the information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and stereotypes into fact with such ease and fluidity that after a while, you get to believing, as I do, that the media is not a reflection of the American culture but rather is teaching it. As long as James Brown was selling records, he let that craziness run. He didn’t care. The media worked in his favor and helped fuel his success. But it killed his public reputation, and once the success was gone, once the head disappeared, the body followed.

  Instant information turns the cauldron of race and class into a concoction of doublespeak, and if you reach in and try to make sense of it, you’ll yank your hand out holding nothing but air and the resolve not to use the n-word again. Big deal. Whether you decide to use the dreaded n-word changes nothing. In the instant-information Internet age, every truth contradicts another truth: Brown was crazy. Brown was a genius. Brown was a woman basher. Brown was abused by gold-digging women. Brown was cheap. Brown would give away his last dime. Stick your finger in the dike to cover one lie and water bursts out of another hole. You have to choose what to believe. And therein lies the real story of James Brown, who was more southerner than he was black or white, more sensitive artist than he was superstar.

  Miss Emma peers through the blinds in her window, out to the rough tundra of what once was a booming middle-class community. The smell of low country, the freight-train whistles howling in the distance, the abandoned slaughterhouses, the old smell of the canal, the dangerous, deserted rail crossings near Walton Way—Augusta is a foreign country now to the blacks who remember it from the forties and fifties. If you’re a yuppie looking for a Starbucks, Miss Emma’s side of town will make you feel about as lonely as a Hong Kong bartender on a Sunday. Almost every street is spotted with homes that are boarded up tight. There’s a vacant old school building around the corner, a half-empty strip mall up on Gordon Highway, a closed Winn-Dixie, a dollar store, a Mr Cash pawn shop. They rent furniture for today and sell futures in church for tomorrow in places like these. At the convenience store down the street, I saw two black guys in line each wearing the uniform of a different security-guard outfit. The poor guard each other down here. This is the real Augusta, not the one they show on ESPN every spring, the city of the sparkling Augusta National shows and Tiger Woods—the guy who, blacks snicker, forgot he was black until he got into trouble and then found out he was black after all. This is James Brown’s Augusta. Miss Emma’s Augusta. And to some degree, the Augusta of us all.

  Miss Emma lowers the blind and takes a seat on her couch. “It would break his heart to see what Augusta has become now.”

  I point out that they built a statue for him. They named an arena after him. The mayor knew him. The folks here liked him. They still have his Thanksgiving turkey giveaway, and the Christmas toy giveaway.

  “Charity was not Mr. Brown’s stripe,” she says simply. “He despised it.” He wanted to help poor children, she explained, not by giving them something but by educating them. By giving them a reason to wor
k. “He wanted his money to help poor children be something. He said that many times. Not to be tied up in court someplace.”

  “But he’s famous here,” I argue.

  She shrugs and looks away, sadly shaking her head. It was Brown’s dream to bring jobs and joy to this town. His vision was to see children happy. But he could not account for lack of business acumen, relatives who would slice his money up, a cousin’s son who would burn his office to the ground, his radio stations going belly-up, the divorces, the business ideas gone to pot, the women who tired of his abuse, the bands who quit. Everyone wanted more and he had no more to give. “He carried so many people,” she says. “And so few people wanted to carry him. He always moved with the best intentions. And when it didn’t work, it hurt him. He hid that from people. Because people used him. And after a while, he didn’t know who to trust. If Mr. Brown let you in his inner circle, it meant he’d trust you with his life,” she said. “If you didn’t form an opinion against him; if you kept an open mind, no matter what he did—and no matter what you did—you were a trusted ally.”

  The door knocks. A young guy enters bearing cold Coca-Cola. I realize with a start that it’s that strange-looking fella I just saw walking aimlessly down the street when she pulled up. Miss Emma smiles at him and his face lightens into a shy grin as he drops two Cokes onto the coffee table. She thanks him and discreetly slips him a few dollars.

  I grab a Coke. I pop the lid and lift the can to my lips.

  Without a word, Miss Emma vanishes from the sparse living room. She returns with a glass. She picks up the Coke can and pours the drink into the glass.

  Mr. Brown smoked cigarettes, she said. “He never wanted people to know he smoked. He didn’t want young people seeing that. Would never let young people see him drink. He was not much of a drinker anyway. He was a proper man.”

  But what about the drugs? And his relationship to women? The beatings, the cruelty?

  She thinks a long moment, her brown eyes staring at me thoughtfully. She takes a deep breath. “Even at my age,” she says, “I’m embarrassed to shame my parents. And they’ve been dead for many years. I was taught you don’t talk low on somebody. Especially if they’re dead. A lot of people have said a lot of things since he died. And some of those things, a lot of them, are not true. Or exaggerated.”

  I say, as gently as I can, that it doesn’t change the facts. The man had four wives. He reportedly slept with some of his female singers. Had all kinds of fights with women. I’m told his treatment of Motown singer Tammi Terrell was terrible. He was charged with rape, and he had at least four outside children besides the six he claimed—I’ve heard as many as thirteen. This kind of bad news ain’t the same as stealing your best friend’s lunch money.

  “Mr. Brown,” she says, “thought a woman should be changed.” Shaped, she says. Treated like a pet. Molded into his ideal, with minks, and plastic surgery, and new cars. With money. “He was part of that generation,” she says. “A lot of men from his era thought that way.”

  I argue that while Brown spent thousands on his wives, on plastic surgery, drug treatment, liposuction—according to Buddy Dallas, he spent $50,000 on Tomi Rae’s drug rehab and replaced thirty-two of her teeth—that still didn’t give him the right to treat his wives cruelly.

  “I can’t speak to all his business,” Miss Emma says. “The things that happened between him and all those women is over my head. But I’ll say this. His wives, the ones I knew, were good women. Except,” she adds drily, “I can’t speak for that last one. I didn’t get to know her very well.”

  It was nearly lunchtime on December 29, and funeral director Charles Reid of Augusta was sitting in his office trying to stay awake. James Brown had been dead for four days, and the circus that surrounded his death—the media blitz, the howling of the relatives who began squabbling, and the hundreds of details involving his memorial services—had beaten Reid to near senseless exhaustion. He hadn’t slept in four days.

  He was about to place his head on the desk and close his eyes for five minutes when the phone rang again. He picked up. A voice on the other end said, “Michael Jackson wants to come see James Brown.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. We’re leaving LA by jet in about an hour.”

  Reid hung up the phone and moved from his desk. He was bone tired but there was still much to do.

  The chaos surrounding Brown’s death, up to that moment, had been like nothing Reid had ever experienced before. Brown died on Christmas Day. The next day his family, including Al Sharpton, gathered to plan his memorials and decided to hold three: the first at the Apollo in Harlem, the site of the recordings of Brown’s great live albums; the next a private one on December 29 in South Carolina for the family; and the last on December 30, a public one in Augusta at the arena, newly renamed in Brown’s honor.

  Reid was exhausted from the harrowing blitz of preparation for three separate funerals, and getting the casket in place was the worst professional nightmare he’d ever experienced. The family had ordered a gold-plated casket at a cost of $25,000. Reid had to special-order it from an outfit in Nashville. The casket was scheduled to arrive in Augusta at 6:30 P.M. on December 27, the day before the Apollo memorial eight hundred miles north in New York City. Initially, they had planned to fly Brown’s body to New York in a private jet with the family, but that night, Reid had called Sharpton and explained a major problem.

  “The casket is too heavy for a small jet. You’ll need to find me a bigger plane.”

  Sharpton suggested a commercial plane.

  “It won’t work. The casket doesn’t arrive here till six-thirty tonight,” Reid said. “The last big jet leaves Atlanta about eight. We don’t have time to get the casket, move the body into it, and get it to Atlanta in time. You’ll need to find me a bigger plane.”

  Sharpton called everyone he knew. An attorney in Florida had a big jet, but it was out of commission. New York mogul Donald Trump said he would be happy to send his plane, but he was having it fixed out in California.

  Sharpton called Reid, exasperated. “I can’t find a plane.”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Reid said. “It ain’t gonna work.”

  “Are you sure the casket’s going to get here at six-thirty?” Sharpton asked.

  “Yeah, it’s on the way.”

  Sharpton hung up and came to the funeral home. The two men tried to figure out solutions while they waited for the casket to arrive. Reid, normally a cool customer, used to the kinds of crises that accompany death and burial, when families are flustered and dismayed, was flummoxed. It wasn’t just the logistical problem of getting Brown’s body to New York, or his phone ringing off the hook nonstop with calls and requests from all across the globe that bothered him. This was a personal issue. He’d known James Brown most of his life. His father, Charles Reid, Sr., a civil rights advocate and one of the most successful black businessmen in Augusta’s history, had been a friend of James Brown for nearly fifty years. The two men were once business partners, co-owners of a popular Augusta club called Third World, which was mysteriously burned to the ground in October 1973 by a suspected arsonist who was never caught. Reid had presided over the funerals of Brown’s father, Brown’s third wife, Adrienne, and many of Brown’s friends and employees. This wasn’t a job. This was a duty to a loyal friend.

  He racked his brains as Sharpton, usually not at a loss for words, sat in glum silence. Finally Reid spoke out. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. You told me the viewing in New York is eleven A.M. I’m going to put his body in the back of the van. I’ll get me a driver, and we’ll just ride it up there. We can get there in twelve to fourteen hours.”

  Sharpton said, “You think you can make it?”

  “We’ll leave at nine o’clock tonight. That’ll get us there by eight or nine in the morning. You go up by jet with the family. I’ll meet you at the Apollo.”

  “All right,” Sharpton said.

  Sharpton
departed and Reid called two drivers, one of them William Murrell, James Brown’s longtime driver. Then he rushed home, showered and shaved, and grabbed a suit from his closet and threw it into his car. He drove back to the funeral home and waited while Miss Ella Overton, Brown’s longtime hairdresser, styled Brown’s hair one last time. She had tears in her eyes as she combed his hair with the big rake combs that only Brown used and only Brown knew where to obtain. When the old woman was done, Reid carefully prepped and dressed Brown, gently placed him in the heavy gold-plated casket, then hauled the casket into the van. “That thing was so heavy,” Reid said later, “it dropped the back of the van down several inches. The front was sticking up in the air.”

  The lopsided van was about to roll out of the funeral home when the door opened and Al Sharpton walked in.

  “I thought you were flying back to New York,” Reid said.

  “If you’re gonna ride to New York, I’m gonna ride,” Sharpton said. “I’m gonna stay with him all the way. Mr. Brown would have never left me.” Sharpton placed his suitcase in the van, patted Brown’s coffin, and said, “I’m ready.”

  —

  They rode all night, four of them: Reid, Sharpton, Murrell, and a second driver, Sharpton’s hand resting on the casket for most of the journey. They stopped for gas only. At a rest stop in North Carolina in the middle of the night, two of the store clerks, teenage black girls, saw Sharpton emerge from the odd-looking van with its back end nearly touching the asphalt and put two and two together. One of them grabbed her cellphone and ran out to take a photo. Sharpton erupted. “What did you do that for?” He did not want them taking a picture of an awkward-looking, hopped-up van sitting at a gas pump in the middle of the night, bearing James Brown’s body. Brown would never have allowed it. James Brown, who had never stepped out in public unless he was decked out, who had his hair done before and after each show, whose house was so clean you could eat off the floor—Brown would never be caught in public in a shoddy way. The man made an entrance. Come important and leave important, Rev. Kill ’em and leave, Rev. Kill ’em and leave.