Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  “You will not take that picture tonight,” Sharpton said.

  A hasty compromise was reached. The girls took photos with Sharpton and the drivers, but not of the van. Then the van motored on.

  By the time they hit the New Jersey Turnpike just outside Manhattan, dawn was breaking and the word had spread. “We started seeing people in the tunnel,” Reid says. “I don’t know how so many people found out. Rev. Sharpton didn’t call a soul.” The plan was to stop at Sharpton’s apartment building near Sixtieth and Madison Avenue and discreetly move Brown’s casket from the van to a hearse, then head uptown to place his body in a horse and carriage, which Sharpton had arranged at his National Action Network office at 145th Street, to march Brown to the Apollo, twenty blocks south, on 125th Street. But by the time they got uptown to Sharpton’s headquarters, thousands had gathered, and many followed the horse and carriage on foot as it made its sad procession down Lenox Avenue, with hundreds gathering on the sidewalks of Lenox Avenue for twenty blocks, waving, some holding Brown’s picture, some sobbing. By the time they reached 125th Street “we could hardly get the horse down the block,” Sharpton said. “People were everywhere.” It was December 28, just before New Year’s Eve. The rich and famous were out of town. It was mostly the people of Harlem who crowded the sidewalks for blocks in both directions, just as they did in the old days when Brown performed. At one point Sharpton leaned over to the casket and said, “Mr. Brown, you did it again. You sold out the Apollo one last time.”

  Reid, meanwhile, was exhausted from the drive.

  “When I got to the Apollo, they had no place for me to take a bath or change into my suit,” he says. “I fell asleep in the greenroom. When I woke up, someone had brought out a buffet. I got up and put a hurting on that buffet. Yes sir, buddy. I was hungry.” But the scene was chaos. “Nobody knew where anything was. They asked me all kinds of questions.” Reid did his best, organizing an impromptu massive memorial with thousands of mourners in a venue he had never seen before. At one point Sharpton sent for him and said nervously, “Charlie, Mr. Brown’s sweating!”

  Reid came out to take a look at the body. “It’s all these lights on him,” he said. “This lanolin fluid, it’s got to come out.”

  He laughs, recalling the look on Sharpton’s face at the mention of the preservative. “I think he thought Mr. Brown was coming back.”

  When they finally closed the doors of the Apollo—which they had held open for hours overtime—there were still several thousand people waiting for a chance to see Brown’s body, but Reid had to rush it back for the family’s private memorial the following day. He drove fourteen hours back to Augusta, straight to his funeral home, dressed the Godfather of Soul in a different suit, and got him to the private service in time. Then he took the huge heavy casket back to his funeral home for a third time and changed Brown again.

  “I changed him three times,” says Reid. “James was tired, and I was too.”

  That’s when the phone rang. Michael Jackson was coming to Augusta that night.

  Reid took Brown’s body into a plush waiting room. He prepped him, tidied him, then fluffed and tidied the casket. Just like Sharpton, he would make sure his old friend was ready and proper, in good form to meet his visitor.

  —

  Later that night, the phone rang again. This time it was Michael himself asking if he could come see Brown.

  “Come on. We’ll be here when you come.”

  Just past midnight, a caravan of four SUVs pulled into the parking lot. Several silent, grim-looking men in bow ties and suits, bodyguards from the Nation of Islam, got out, and behind them, emerging from one of the SUVs, tall and silent, was Michael Jackson himself. He was wearing a simple shirt and slacks, and his hair was wrapped in a kerchief. No fancy clothes. No fancy entourage.

  Reid led him to James Brown’s body, lying in a plush room in cream-colored satin. Michael stared at it. He gently touched James Brown’s face. He stood there silently for ten minutes. A half hour. An hour.

  After an hour, Reid left the room.

  —

  Michael Jackson had a lot in common with James Brown. He often told friends that his dance moves were influenced by Brown’s. He recalled his mother awakening him when he was six to see Brown perform on TV. Also, the military precision of Michael’s music was a Brown specialty. Even the early Jackson 5 bands were tight units. When I watched Michael rehearse his band at SIR studios in LA for several weeks back in 1984, before his Victory Tour, he was meticulous, working his musicians till they were worn to a nub. At one point he hung them up for hours rehearsing just one hit, a hit on which he had a one-kick dance move. It was just one hit. An ensemble smash—bang—and the dance move with it. But it wasn’t big enough or tight enough for Michael. He tweaked the sound technicians and the exhausted players, among them the talented drummer Jonathan “Sugarfoot” Moffett, originally of New Orleans, and the late David Williams, a fabulous guitarist out of Virginia, until they were red-eyed tired. That was a James Brown specialty as well, working his band to the bone, till it sounded tight as a drum.

  Jackson and Brown shared more than just a similar approach to music and dance. Michael, like Brown, was competitive. He wanted to beat every other guy. Brown, during his biggest years, was bent on crushing the opposition—Isaac Hayes, Little Willie John, Jackie Wilson, and the entire Motown machine. But beneath the competitive edge was a deep respect for his competitors. Sharpton told me that in the late seventies, after soul star Isaac Hayes went bankrupt, Brown visited Hayes’s Atlanta apartment unannounced and knocked on the door. Hayes answered and his face lit up. He said, “James Brown!” Brown handed him $3,000 and said, “Isaac, don’t tell nobody I helped you out. You don’t ever want people to know you needed a handout. When we was rivals, I wanted to beat you. But I want you on your feet when I beat you again.” Jackson was the same: Prince, the Stones, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen—these were competitors that he respected and admired. Also like Brown, he was a fanatic about being seen at his best. He would never allow himself to be caught with his shirt off in one of those horrible National Enquirer photos, or pictured lying on a beach, tummy exposed, or blowing bubbles in Santa Fe someplace. He was religious, though he kept quiet about it, as was Brown. Near his home area of Ellenton, Brown spent thousands rebuilding St. Peter church, where he was baptized and which he visited on Sundays without fanfare, even occasionally singing with the choir. Jackson was raised a devout Jehovah’s Witness, something his mother passed on to her children. At the height of his success, during the Victory Tour, he’d venture out in various cities wearing a fake beard and hat, accompanied by a security guard, knocking on doors, making the missionary visits that Jehovah’s Witnesses undertake. The press had a ball with that, by the way; they talked to folks who answered the knock on their door and practically fainted when they recognized the world’s hottest superstar standing before them in fake beard and hat. I looked the other way when Michael did that kind of stuff, rarely passing that kind of juicy tidbit on to People magazine, which likely would have gobbled it up.

  Michael, like James Brown, had few friends outside of his family. Those two were public property. They were two dinosaurs who walked alone. Two black superstars. And each knew the abject loneliness of the other.

  In 2003, when Michael was facing seven counts of child molestation, Al Sharpton was living in New York, sipping civil rights soup by the gallon, when his cellphone rang. He picked it up. It was Brown. “Rev, where you at?”

  “I’m in New York.”

  “You ought to be out there in California helping Michael out.”

  “Well, Michael’s in trouble.”

  There was a pause for a moment, and Sharpton could feel Brown gathering steam. “Oh, s’cuse me,” Brown said. “I’m sorry. I got the wrong number. I got the American Legion. I thought I called the civil rights headquarters. That’s what you’re in business for, handling people in trouble, right? Pardon me, sir. I forgot who I called.”
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  He hung up. Sharpton called him back.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna help,” Sharpton said.

  But Brown was already giving him a mouthful. “Didn’t Michael come to your headquarters in Harlem when you had a problem?” Brown asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “So a man comes to you. And you’re going to leave him.”

  “I didn’t say that, Mr. Brown.”

  “I didn’t raise you for that,” Brown said. “You go where the rest of them ain’t got the guts to go. The reason they ain’t going to Michael is because they think he’s guilty and they’re scared. I never taught you to be scared.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sharpton hung up the phone, packed his bags, and got on a plane to California. After the verdict was announced, when Michael was exonerated, I watched on TV as Michael was rushed out of the courtroom to the clicking of photographers’ cameras. Michael stood there, tall and ever thin—people forget how tall he was—and next to him, with the trademark James Brown hair, combed with the giant rake comb that his adopted father James Brown had given him, was Rev. Al Sharpton in a suit, the jogging outfit and gold medallion long gone. As the cameras clicked and the tapes whirred, Michael said nothing, but Sharpton, James Brown’s adopted son, said plenty. He said everything James Brown himself wanted to say and would have said if he could have, which amounted to, “I knew it all along. I told y’all. Y’all hung him out to dry without even knowing who he is.”

  —

  Three hours into Jackson’s visit, Reid found himself giving the King of Pop a tour of his facility. Most people shy away when it comes to death, Reid noted, but not Jackson. He asked pointed and thoughtful questions. He asked about the preparation of the body, a subject people usually avoid. “He wanted to know how it was done,” Reid said. “What types of fluid do you use?” Michael asked.

  “He wouldn’t ask a question unless he thought about it,” Reid told me. “That’s how precise he was. Whatever he asked, he was very interested in. ‘Do we freshen it up?’ he asked about James Brown’s body. He asked if we were going to change his outfits. He wanted to know had his hair been done, how it was done.”

  Jackson toured the casket room, and Reid showed him the various models. “Who requested Mr. Brown’s gold-plated casket?” Jackson asked.

  “Well, it’s the family’s decision.”

  “Is that something Mr. Brown wanted?”

  “Entertainers, they always say solid gold,” Reid said.

  Michael laughed and they returned to the chapel.

  Jackson spoke of his love for Brown, the influence Brown had had on his childhood. He was there for five hours. Not once did Jackson sit down.

  Back in the chapel, Reid stood in the back of the room as Jackson lingered over Brown one last time, touching his face, then tidying his hair. Reid looked at his watch. It was 5:30 in the morning. James Brown’s service at the arena bearing his name was scheduled for later that day. But that was later. For now, they were just two men, the Godfather of Soul and the King of Pop. They had lived their fantastic lives alone, on the third rail of fame and fortune, even as they electrified and changed the world. One lay in a gold-plated coffin; in less than three years, the other would be lying in his own. It would be the end of an era. And black America has never been the same.

  William Forlando Brown, age twenty-seven, stands at the practice tee at the Heritage Golf Links, a public course in Tucker, Georgia. He pulls his club back with ease and swats the ball mightily. You watch it soar into the air, four hundred feet if it’s a foot, and there, in that instant, as the ball is pitched against the clear blue Georgia sky, you see the old man’s dream:

  They’ll gather at his house like they do at Christmas dinner. All the suspects. The whole family. The ex-wives Velma and Dee Dee, and Tomi Rae—loving mother of James, Jr., whom Brown nicknamed Little Man, and all the rest of the kids and the grandkids, including Teddy’s daughter. And they’ll eat. They’ll eat what he eats because he eats good food. “Food that’s got grease in it, grease you up, make you limber and strong,” he used to say: rice, beans, smothered steak, chicken. Then, when they’re done, they’ll head over to Barnwell, to St. Peter church in Elko, not far from old Ellenton, where the family got started. Old St. Peter, the renovated church that he gave thousands to, that looks better than any other church in that area, with new wood beams and a new roof and acoustic ceilings and new instruments and a freshly paved parking lot. On Sundays in his last years he’d slip off to St. Peter to sing with the choir, sing his favorite song, “God Has Been Good to Me,” and open his Bible to his favorite verse, the same verse they found it open to at his bedside the morning after he died, the book of Psalms 37:1, “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.” He’d walk in and say hi to his old friends, the minister, his aunt Saree, and his good friend Ruth Tobin and her children—Ruth, whom everybody called Mutt except for him. He called her Sis. He called her every month or so, saying “Sis, what you doin’? You praying for me? I’m praying for you. Pray for me, Sis.” And she did. And to this day, still does.

  They’d sing and pray a while and thank God for everything that he’s gifted them with. And after they’re done, the family—his family—they’ll get back in their cars—his cars. He’s got thirty of ’em, and none has more than five thousand miles on it. They’ll jump in his cars and ride back to Augusta, head over to the Augusta National Golf Course—a white man’s golf course, a golf course that might as well have been on Mars when James Brown was a little boy, and they’ll watch his grandson William Forlando James Brown play a round of a white man’s game. And he’ll say, “I don’t know what he sees in that. But he does it good.”

  Back in Atlanta, William Brown, tall, slim, athletic, with a serious face, dressed in a smooth jogging outfit and golfer’s shirt, watches keenly, his club still held high, as the ball lands about ten feet from its appointed hole. He frowns. “I’m pulling my head too far to the right,” he says.

  If he’s pulling too far to the right, I can’t see it. William is the man James Brown would have been had he been educated. The old man was proud he had a grandchild in college. William Brown and his father, Terry, were the only ones of Brown’s claimed offspring who largely refused to participate in the massive deluge of early lawsuits filed against Brown’s estate by his children and widow. Terry was so disgusted with the lawsuits that he handed all his rights to his son and said, “You handle it.” William, for his part, has followed his father’s path, mostly keeping clear of the legal fray, insisting that Brown’s millions go to the kids exactly as Brown intended. In September 2015, his father—and William, as his father’s representative—was offered a “settlement” of $2 million to essentially capitulate and join the morass of suing parties who wanted to settle the mess by rewriting Brown’s will and spreading Brown’s money around among the children, Tomi Rae, and the education trust. They refused. They want the money to go as Brown intended. Says William, speaking for himself and his father, “Why would we want to go against Grandfather’s wishes? He worked and danced for that. He sweated for it. He wanted poor kids to have a chance to educate themselves. It’s real simple.”

  From the time William, or Flip, as Brown called him, entered college at the University of West Georgia as a political science major, Brown, who paid for his education, checked his grades, grilled him about school, and admonished him no end to finish college and do well in school. The old man laid criticisms on him that set the kid’s teeth on edge at times, but still, the kid could take it. When Brown walled himself off from the world and announced that his kids would have to make appointments to see him, William said, “The hell with that.” He climbed the fence and showed up in his grandfather’s living room.

  “What you doing here?” Brown asked.

  “I’m here to see you. I don’t need an appointment.”

  Brown loved that kind of moxie. He made the kid work harder in school. He ind
octrinated the kid in his ways. One day, while the two were sitting on the porch of Brown’s Beech Island house, he handed the kid a broom. “Sweep that grass,” he said.

  William swept. For an hour. Two hours. In the hot sun. Three hours. He was exhausted. But he wasn’t going to quit in front of the old man. Finally Brown said, “Okay, quit it.”

  William was furious. “What’s the point of that?” he snapped.

  “If you don’t have an education, that’s the kind of job you gonna have,” Brown said.

  So the kid listened. And he did well in school. And when he neared graduation at the University of West Georgia and started thinking about his future, he decided to do what his grandfather did.

  He decided to chase a dream.

  His dream was to be a professional golfer. He bought a golf club. Then another. Then a set. Then he got a job in a golf store. He sought out golf fanatics, and golf coaches, and finally pros. He read books. He studied the game. He practiced on public golf courses—no private clubs for him, he didn’t have the money. Over the course of the next eight years, his game evolved. By 2014, he’d worked himself to the outskirts of the PGA. This is a guy who didn’t even make his high school golf team, who was an all-county trumpet player at Stephens County High School, not a golfer. The thought among his teachers was that William would become a musician, or a lawyer, but even back then, he’d already decided, he didn’t want to be the next James Brown. He liked the trumpet, but he loved golf. He loved being outdoors. He loved the air, the space. He loved the competition. Today, the kid who couldn’t make his high school squad is one of the most promising young golfers in the southern region.