Kill 'Em and Leave (3 page)

The reason? Brown was a child of a country in hiding: America's South.

There is nowhere in the USA quite like America's South; there is no place more difficult to fully understand or fully capture. No one book can get close to the man because he comes from a land that no one book can explain, a land shaped by a history of slavery and oppression and misunderstanding, whose self-definition defies simple explanation and pushes out any impression you may try to lay upon it. The South is simply a puzzle. It's like the quaint, loyal housewife who, after forty years of watching her husband spend Sunday afternoons sprawled on the couch watching football, suddenly blurts out, “I never did like your daddy,” pulls out a knife, and ends Hubby's football season for good. To even get close to the essence of the reasoning behind that act is like trying to touch the sun with your bare hand: why bother. You cannot understand Brown without understanding that the land that produced him is a land of masks. The people who walk that land, both black and white, wear masks and more masks, then masks beneath those masks. They are tricksters and shape-shifters, magicians and carnival barkers, able to metamorphize right before your eyes into good old boys, respectable lawyers, polite society types, brilliant scholars, great musicians, history makers, and everything's-gonna-be-all-right Maya Angelou look-alikes—when in fact nothing's gonna be all right. This land of mirage produces characters of outstanding talent and popularity—Oprah Winfrey being the shining example. It is peopled by a legion of ghosts that loom over it with the same tenacity and electric strength that propelled a small group of outnumbered and outgunned poor white soldiers to kick the crap out of the northern Union army for three years running during the Civil War 150 years ago.

The South almost won the Civil War, and maybe they should have, because America's southerners play-act and pretend with a brilliance that is unmatched. They obstruct your view with a politeness and deference that gives slight clue to the power within. Outside the looking glass, they are chameleons, whistling “Dixie” and playing slow and acting harmless and goofy. But behind their aw-shucks veneer, behind the bowing and scraping and Moon Pies and cigarettes and chitchat about the good old Alabama Crimson Tide and hollering for the Lord, the unseen hand behind them is a gnarled, loaded fist prepped for a diesel-powered blow. If that hand is coming in your direction, get out of the way or you're likely to find yourself spending the rest of your life sucking your meals through a straw.

No one is more aware of the power of America's southerners than the blacks who walk among them. There's an old slave saying, “Go here, go there, do nothing,” and the descendants of those slaves are experts at that task. They do whatever needs to be done, say whatever needs to be said, then cut for the door to avoid the white man's evil, which they feel certain will, at some point, fall on them like raindrops. Brown, who grew up in a broken home and spent three years in a juvenile prison before he was eighteen, was an expert at dodging the white man's evil. He had years of practice covering up, closing down, shutting in, shutting out, locking up, locking out, placing mirrors in rooms, hammering up false doorways and floorboards to trap all comers who inquired about his inner soul. He did the same with his money. From the time he was a boy who bought his own ball and bat with money earned from dancing and shining shoes for colored soldiers at nearby Fort Gordon, Brown kept his money close. When he became a star, he had a secret room for cash in his house. He buried money in distant hotel rooms, carried tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, around in a suitcase; he kept wads of cashier's checks in his wallet. He always had a back door, a quick exit, a way of getting out, because behind the boarded-up windows of his life, the Godfather's fear of having nothing was overwhelming in its ability to swallow him whole and send him into a series of wild behaviors. I once asked his personal manager, Charles Bobbit, who for forty-one years knew James Brown as well as any man on this earth, what Brown's truest, deepest feeling about the white man was.

Bobbit paused for a moment, looking at his hands, then said simply, “Fear.”

That fear—the knowledge that a single false step while wandering inside the maze of the white man's reality could blast you back home with the speed of a circus artist being shot out of a cannon—is the kryptonite that has lain under the bed of every great black artist from 1920s radio star Bert Williams to Miles Davis to Jay Z. If you can't find a little lead-lined room where you can flee that panic and avoid its poisonous rays, it will control your life. That's why Miles Davis and James Brown, who had similar reputations for being cantankerous and outrageous, seem so much alike. Each admired the other from a distance. Those who knew them describe them similarly: hard men on the outside, but, behind the looking glass, sensitive, kind, loyal, proud, troubled souls working to keep pain out, using all kinds of magic tricks, sleights of hand, and cover-up jobs to make everyone think “the cool” was at work when in fact the cool was eating them alive. Keeping the pain out was a full-time job, and Brown worked harder at it than any black star before or after. “You did not get to know James Brown,” says his lawyer Buddy Dallas, “because he did not want to be known. In twenty-four years of working with him, I have never known a person who worked harder at keeping people from knowing who he was.”

I still drive by that old house in Queens. I don't know who lives there now. Word is that four different people owned it before Brown did. One of them was said to be Cootie Williams, trumpet player in Duke Ellington's orchestra. All four owners, I'm told, lost the house, till Brown got hold of it. James Brown, however, did not lose that house. He owned it for nearly ten years and sold it at a profit in 1968, three years after he shook my sister Dotty's hand.

For years, that house was a mystery to me. For years, I wanted to set foot in it, to know what went on inside there. Now I don't want to know anymore. Because I already know.

J
ames Brown used to tell this joke: There was a lawyer who worked the same case for twenty-five years. While working the case, the lawyer had a son. He bought his son toys at Christmas. He bought him a bicycle, a train set, books. Later on, he bought the kid a car. He sent the son to college. When the son got out of college, the lawyer sent him to law school. His dream was that his son would someday join his law firm. The son followed his father's wishes. He joined the firm right after he got his law degree. The father was delighted. “This is great, son!” he said. “Now I don't have to work so hard.” He went on vacation, leaving the business to his son. While he was away, the son took a look at the case that the father was working. When the father returned from vacation, the son said, “Dad, I have a surprise for you. I solved the case. It's finished.”

The father said, “You fool! We've been living off that case for twenty-five years. Now we're broke.”

So it was with the life of the greatest soul singer to grace modern American history.

James Brown lived off the “case,” the high moral ground, of African American life.

During the civil rights movement, which was his heyday, he epitomized that striving and pride of the African American struggle. Yet since his sad, dispirited death in an Atlanta hospital in 2006, the facts of his life have become twisted like a pretzel beyond recognition, which is how, sadly, a lot of black history ends up—on the cutting room floor of some Hollywood filmmaker, filed under the heading of “black rage” or simply “black story.” There's no room for so many of the details that really make up a man or woman when you hide them under those headings. The legacy of caring, insight, trust, and sophistication that makes up black American Christian life and culture is fragile compost for the American storytelling machine, which grinds old stereotypes and beliefs into a kind of mush porridge best served cold, if at all.

Today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Brown, one of the most recognizable entertainers in American history, is tumbling toward history as an enigma. The public—especially poor children of all colors and backgrounds, to whom he left his fortune—has no idea who he is. The story of his life as told in the plethora of films, books, and documentaries serves more as a feeding ground for the entertainment industry, which plays out his history as a strange blend of fiction and nonfiction rather than as a true reflection of the troubled soul who lived underneath the pompadour hairdo. But then again, why try to get it right? Black history in the United States is low-hanging fruit for anyone who wants to play Tarzan and swing down into the open jungle of African American life to pluck the easy pickings. You can make a few dollars in the storytelling world that way. It's free money.

Case in point is the Big Kahuna, Hollywood, which weighed in on Brown in 2014 with the biopic
Get On Up
. In an opening scene, James Brown, clad in a sweat suit and bearing a shotgun, strides into an Augusta, Georgia, office building he owns, interrupting a meeting of white insurance executives who had rented one of the conference rooms for a seminar. They stare in terror as he launches into a tirade that ends with, “Which one of you gentlefolk hung a number two in my commode?” Then his shotgun accidentally discharges into the ceiling—BLAM! Brown stares at the ceiling and mutters, “Good God.” Then he scans the quaking executives and spots the offender, a cowering, quivering white woman trembling on the floor in terror. Brown approaches. He tells her to sit up, pats her paternally on the knee, and gives her a stern lecture, saying, “You did right by yourself.” Then he hears a police siren and says, “Awww shit…I got to go!” He then leads the police on a wild, high-speed car chase, in which he drives through two Georgia state police cars set as a barricade across the road, destroying them both.

It's a funny scene.

Problem is, it's mostly fiction.

According to FBI material concerning the 1988 incident, James Brown never discharged a rifle in that room. He walked in with an old hunting rifle that, his manager and attorney Buddy Dallas says, didn't even have a firing pin in it. He placed it in a corner, asked those in the room not to use his private bathroom, then turned to leave. As he was leaving, someone in the room reminded him that he'd left the old gun in a corner, and he said thank you, picked up the gun, and left. He didn't say, “Awww, shit…I gotta go!” James Brown rarely cursed. “I knew him more than forty years,” said Charles Bobbit. “I heard him curse maybe three times.” Adds Buddy Dallas: “In twenty-four years, I never heard Mr. Brown utter a curse word.” And James Brown driving through a police barricade and destroying two Georgia state police cars? Not in Georgia, he didn't. Brown was a black man from the South. He wasn't stupid. In fact, it was the other way around. The cops destroyed
his
pickup truck. They caught him after a low-speed “chase” not far away and reportedly fired seventeen bullets into the truck, two of which entered the gas tank—with Brown still inside the truck. Brown was terrified. He later complained that after he was taken into custody, a cop in plain clothes—nobody ever did figure out who—walked up to him while he was cuffed and seated in the station and punched him in the jaw, knocking out one of his teeth.

The police were mad. And I understand. Years ago, when I was a cub reporter at the Wilmington, Delaware,
News Journal,
a friendly Delaware state trooper gave me a piece of advice about police car chases. “We don't like them,” he said. “Because we can get killed chasing down some idiot.” That's the part they don't show on television: the cop coming home, hands shaking, nerves shot, after running down a drunk doing ninety miles per hour on a twenty-five-mile-per-hour suburban street filled with kids. Brown was in the middle of a bad run that year. His life had collapsed. His great band had disbanded. The IRS had cleaned him out to the walls, twice. He had outrun his own musical revolution. At fifty-five, he'd fallen into relative obscurity, and was smoking PCP, a hallucinogen, a habit he began in midlife after years of eschewing drugs. He had turned to drugs because his career had nose-dived and he was depressed. His marriage to his third wife, Adrienne, also a reported drug addict, was a mess. His father, Joe Brown, to whom Brown was very close, was in the hospital; when Brown saw the cops following him after he left his office, he was, pitifully and desperately, trying to get to his father, one of the few people in the world who loved him unconditionally. At that point in his life, everybody he'd cared about, with the exception of a few close friends and select family, had left or he'd driven away. He was a physical mess. His knees were going—arthritis was killing him. His teeth, which had required several operations, hurt so much he could hardly eat at times. He'd arrived at his Augusta office building that day, portions of which were rented out to other businesses, saw an unlocked door, and, according to his son Terry, recalled in his drug-addled memory that someone had recently slipped into his office and stolen his wallet. Thinking his office was being robbed again, he got mad and did what many a country-born, God-fearing South Carolinian might do. He walked in there with his rifle—and spent the next three years in jail because of it.

But that's not in the movie. And why should it be? Movies are simple. And Brown's life was anything but that. Thus one of the most humiliating events of Brown's life was played for laughs in a movie distributed around the world for millions to see—a film of half-truths, implying that his beloved mother, for example, who left him when he was a child, was a whore and a drunk who bummed a hundred dollars off him at the Apollo after he became a star, leaving out the fact that he took his mother back into his Georgia home after discovering her and reunited her with his father; a film that depicts his father, a gentle, funny, country man who worked hard and deeply loved his son, as a stereotypical child-beating, wife-beating, cornpone country hick—a ticking time bomb of black fury, sitting at a forlorn table in a cabin in the woods with his son James, singing a song lifted straight from anthropologist Alan Lomax's collection of Mississippi chain-gang recordings. And the thing that would hurt James Brown most of all: the portrayal of James Brown himself, a proud man who spent his entire career trying to show, as southerners do, his best face; a guy who sat under a hair dryer for three hours after every show, because he always wanted the public to see him “clean and proper”; a man who'd spent his childhood so disheveled and dirty in appearance that for the rest of his life he kept a house as clean as a whistle and shined and cleaned himself to a tee, insisting that he be addressed as “Mr. Brown,” and addressing others, even friends, by their surnames. Yet audiences around the world are treated to a full two hours of James Brown acting like a complete wacko in a film that is roughly 40 percent fiction and that shows not one iota of sophistication about black life or the black culture that spawned him. The film portrays the black church—in this case the United House of Prayer, one of the most unusual and beloved sects of twentieth-century black Christian life and an important source of African American music—as a kind of howling extravaganza, and shows the other usual stereotypical puff and smoke: the big black “aunt” announcing to young James Brown, “You special, boy!”; the good loyal white man as manager; and the black musicians who helped Brown create one of America's seminal art forms as a bunch of know-nothings and empty heads, including a scene showing Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, a musical pioneer and co-creator of American soul music, making a complete fool of himself—a scene that Pee Wee says never happened. Tate Taylor, the white director of
Get On Up,
is also the director of the acclaimed
The Help,
yet another white version of black history. “I despise most everything that's been written about him,” says Emma Austin, seventy, who knew Brown for more than forty years. “I can't stand to look at most of it.”

But that's show business. And some of that public persona Brown created himself. But here's something only a musician might think about: that film was co-produced by Rolling Stones impresario Mick Jagger. More than forty years earlier, Brown and his band of nobodies—a bunch of unknown black sidemen called the Flames—smoked Jagger and the Rolling Stones on the T.A.M.I. show. Before the show, Brown was told by the producers that the Stones, the new rock band of the moment, a bunch of kids from England, would have the honor of closing the show. According to Charles Bobbit, the producers didn't even give Brown a dressing room. He had to rehearse his dancing on a sloped carpet on the auditorium floor. (The film
Get On Up
portrays Brown in a dressing room.) The snub charged Brown, and he hit the stage a man possessed: he and his high-stepping band left it in cinders. When Jagger and the Rolling Stones followed, they sounded like a garage band by comparison, with Jagger dancing around like the straw man in
The Wizard of Oz.
It's all online. You can see it.

Or you can see Jagger's version of it in the film
Get On Up
. Or hear Jagger's version of James Brown in the documentary
Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown
(2014), which he also co-produced. Today Jagger is rock royalty, James Brown is dead, and Inaudible Productions, which oversees the licensing of Jagger's Rolling Stones catalog, administers James Brown's music as well.

That's a bitter pill to swallow for those who knew the real James Brown. “Mr. Brown didn't even like Mick Jagger,” fumes Charles Bobbit. “He had no love for Mick Jagger.”