One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (3 page)

They couldn’t have done it without Barnwell. Republican voters there were chased from polling places, and the few blacks appointed to political office were shot at and otherwise harassed. The same year that Isham Kearse and Hannah Walker were murdered in the swamp, South Carolina passed a revised state constitution, a blueprint for rebuilding white power. Crucial to the new order was a poll tax levied on all registered voters. Registrants had to read and write a paragraph from the Constitution, an effort meant to dis-enfranchise black majorities. From the constitution of 1895, it was a short sprint to white voting majorities all over South Carolina, and then passage of a spectrum of laws that, together, constructed segregation.

W
hen James was four, he heard his parents fighting. “Take your child,” said Joe, fixing Susie with the responsibility. “You keep him, Joe, ‘cause I can’t
work
for him,” she answered. Then she left.

James had few memories of his mother from his early years. After she left, Joe and James moved around the immediate area, as
Joe found and lost work. When he did road work or picked vegetables on a farm, James stayed with aunts or one of Joe’s girlfriends. Later, James would talk about his solitude in the sand hills and piney swamps of the area as almost a gift. Most people, he explained, are taught early on what not to do—he was out in the woods by himself, and he missed that lesson. He learned to listen to his own instincts and trust his own reasoning.

In the early 1930s, Joe was a turpentine man, harvesting the gum from longleaf and slash pines. This was especially harsh work, dating back to the colonial era, when pitch was used to waterproof sailing ships. It broke down hands, knees, backs; its methods unchanged since before the Civil War. Overwhelmingly, it was black men’s toil. “Turpentine Negroes,” polite whites called them. A worker was charged with a “drift” of trees, some five thousand or so; as a chipper, Joe probably used an axe to scrape the bark off the pines.

Workers were assigned to camps, primitive enclaves of wooden shacks, dogtrot houses, and lean-tos that sheltered up to several hundred men. Camp life followed its own rules, which were looked down on by black city dwellers. Turpentine men burned scars into the trees with acid that would also eat away their fingerprints, and in this and other ways, these men were blunt-force individualists who set themselves apart from society. Self-sufficient and unfree, they carried a swagger and a desperation; they displayed a revelry that was earned. Historian I. A. Newby wrote that segregation in South Carolina was so thoroughly destructive that “black communities in the state were never organized. In fact, they were not communities in the true sense of the word.” This was not quite so true in the turpentine camps, where a sense of identity lifted up its head.

The men built cooperages, stables, and blacksmith sheds in the camps. There was church for those that wanted it. “Those that believed in worship service, they would meet around each other’s house, sat and talk the bible or stuff,” recalled Anthony Green, a turpentine man. “The others that didn’t, if they were drinking moonshine, they got together and drank the moonshine. They shot
dice, they done the gambling and all that kind of thing.” There was usually a piano around, and guitars, and wandering blues musicians who traveled the region en route to paying gigs and would play for loose change.

It came together on Saturday nights at the juke. These were small venues run by an ambitious camp worker, usually from out of the house he lived in. Fish, hamburgers, and moonshine were for sale, and women might be available. Jukes provided leisure for those who worked fourteen hours a day and were a place to blow off steam. They were also violent places, where men gambled and fought with fists, knives, and guns.

In the camps Joe Brown learned all kinds of ways men can win and lose money with dice, and he would take this knowledge with him when he left. He knew how to make applejack moonshine, which he sold on the side. Joe was good with a knife and was able to play a little harmonica. He sang songs by Sonny Terry and Blind Boy Fuller, North Carolina bluesmen who passed through, and played guitar, perhaps along with Tampa Red, one of the itinerant musicians who frequented the region. A Georgia-born bluesman and one of the great bottleneck guitar players, Red played the camps, and even wrote a song called “Turpentine Blues”:

As Red could see, the Carolina forests were being decimated; the ceaseless hacking and scraping weakened the trees, hastening a need to cut them down and send them to mills.

For turpentine men, the season began in April or May and lasted until November. James Brown was born at the beginning of turpentine season, in May. Soon enough, if things followed their usual course, the son would take a job in the camp beside his father. Except that the naval industry was fading, and the Depression was on.

Barnwell thrived on farming, and farming had provided Brown’s family sustenance for generations. But now the land itself was sick. Cotton was an important regional crop, and prices had dropped steeply, from thirty-nine cents a pound in 1919 to ten cents by 1930. Worse, the boll weevil was infesting the cotton fields, savaging the plants. Black farmers were put out of business, and the state did little to assist them. In 1938, the Barnwell County Department of Public Welfare filed a report with the state that bared the county’s problems. “Proceeds from farming have decreased for the last ten years…. Due to the fact that farming has on the whole been a failure for so many years and due to the fact that our county affords very little industrial employment, we have many needy families.”

People ate what they found. Corn was husked, the kernels washed and boiled in lye. After a rinse, the whitened hominy was fried with bacon grease and seasoned to taste. Mush or cripple was made by cooking a hog’s head, feet, and maybe a jaw, in a salted broth. Corn was added and the mixture then fried to a thickness. This was once what slaves had been fed on the plantation, but in Depression Era South Carolina, the poor white folks were eating it with relish.

Pellagra was widespread in the district. Country people who relied on a diet of corn pone, fatback, and molasses did not get sufficient vitamins, and the state began distributing yeast to the impoverished as a supplement. As the Depression wore on, however, the anti-pellagra program was reduced to handing out cottonseed meal, to be stirred into soup or hot water and eaten.

To one writer, James said he and his father moved to Augusta, Georgia, in 1938; to
another, he declared it was in the second half of 1939. The crops were dying, resin wasn’t running like it had, and Susie was gone. For Joe Brown, it was time to leave for something better. Much later, Joe would put a frame around the big picture. “White folks, some young white folks, run
away
from America. They ashamed. Black folks, they run all over, up North, everywhere, tryin’ to get
into
America.” Joe and his son were leaving Barnwell by foot, walking to America. But before Joe and the son who started calling him “Pops” could try to get there, they had to enter the twentieth century. That meant leaving the pines. They had to break with all of it—the unchanging rural disenfranchisement and stomping for fish and the slavery by another name that was the turpentine camp.

Back there was a medieval poverty and labor that ground you into sawdust. Up ahead was a background to be proud of, the Aztec empire, Geronimo’s throne, the warrior clans of the Cherokee.

There was Joe, James, and Minnie Walker, Joe’s aunt, who had been there when James was born. They carried what they had, and walked forty miles to Augusta.

Chapter Two

THE TERRY

G
eorgialina, it is called. A native who knew the place better than most once entered a succinct definition into the Congressional Record: “a region of the Savannah River Valley which includes a number of cities and towns on both sides of the South Carolina and Georgia state line.”

The statesman who so crisply defined it, Strom Thurmond, was the elected leader of Georgialina. It defined him as much as he defined it. But, walking a bridge across the Savannah River one unremarkable day around 1939 was someone who would one day be Georgialina’s most famous citizen. Save for a few years when he lived in New York City, James Brown never strayed from Georgialina. It was who he was, and he knew every inch of it. He knew what the people there—white and black—thought, and why they did the things they did. He knew where you could get a good T-bone steak and the address of “Caskets & More.” He knew the back roads where you could outrun the sheriff. He even knew Strom Thurmond.

Along with golf’s Masters Tournament, Brown is what people around the world think of when Augusta is mentioned. He didn’t always love it, and as for the people of Augusta, well, many of them didn’t love Brown. But, as he said a thousand times easy, Augusta was home.

Augusta looks like a biscuit sitting in a plate of gravy. Rising above everything else is “the Hill,” the elite resort settlement of big homes and Old South charm, and surrounding are the flat lowlands fanning out to the Savannah River. The split in altitude accents a split in the city’s character. “It is a town with a fascinating case of schizophrenia,” wrote Dorothy Kilgallen. “It is beautiful with gambrel roofs and lacy ironwork, creeping vines and colonial porticoes; it is brash with jazz brasses and roulette wheels and chuck-a-luck and slot machines and strip-teasers and a sweet-talkin’ disregard for laws that the folks don’t like.”

Up on the Hill was the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, and the Partridge Inn, a symbol of Augusta’s splendor. James Brown lived down below, where the gravy ran the thinnest.

Pops, Minnie, and James moved into the house of a relative on Twiggs Street. It was in the African American part of Augusta, a neighborhood called “the Terry.” Augustans in the 1930s used the term as a shortening of “the Negro Territory,” but originally it was an Irish enclave called Verdery’s Territory. After the Civil War, when the Freedman’s Bureau moved emancipated slaves into the neighborhood, the name changed, but the territory remained much the same. By 1933, the Terry comprised perhaps fifty blocks; here and in the surrounding neighborhoods of the southeastern part of the city lived most of Augusta’s 20,000 blacks, composing about 30 percent of the population. There was also a small Chinese community in the Terry, dating to the building of the Augusta canals in the nineteenth century.

The showcase of the community was the Golden Blocks, a corridor at the intersection of Ninth and Gwinnett streets that formed the African American business district. The black-owned Penny Savings and Loan Company, and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, a bastion of black education, were both on the Blocks. Nearby was the Del Mar Casino, owned by John “Slow Drag” Crim, gambler, financier, provider. Just off Gwinnett on Ninth Street was the sumptuous Lenox Theatre, built by a quartet of
black businessmen tired of the treatment they got in Augusta’s white-owned theaters, and designed by G. Lloyd Preacher, one of the finest white architects in the South.

Constructed in 1921, the Lenox was the northern outpost of those nine Golden Blocks, a dignified edifice of Greco-Roman design whose stage displayed the cream of black show business. Ads for the Lenox exclaimed “It is your theater”; from its stage, black soldiers were sent off to World War I with brass band music and hurrahs, and blacks held public meetings there to discuss civil rights. But if it was an inspiration, the Lenox was also within walking distance of the impoverished cottages that also defined the Terry. The streets of the neighborhood were unpaved sand and clay and bisected by tiny lanes with colorful names: Thank God Alley, Electric Light Alley, Slopjar Alley. In the front of the shotgun shacks, morning glories climbed up faded wood fences and across porches. Behind the shacks were outhouses, chicken coops, stacks of wood, and almost certainly a cast iron pot, resting over a fire pit. The day’s meals would be cooked here; afterward, lye would be made from wood ashes mixed with animal fat, and with lye the women would do the laundry of the whites that hired them.

Saturday was shopping day in the Terry, and blacks from the countryside came to buy supplies. Farmers hawked produce, and on the streets one could purchase sassafras, raw peanuts, hogshead cheese, sorghum, shoes, magic roots. Sunday was less than a day of rest: Church services started at two in the afternoon so that the women could first make supper for their white employers. Augusta had an abundance of places for African Americans to worship, with five black churches built even before the Civil War had ended.

Near the home on Twiggs was the United House of Prayer for All People, a large plain building with crepe paper hanging from the rafters and a sign over the door proclaiming: “Great Joy! Come to the House of Prayer and forget your troubles.” There was also a Moorish Science Temple, a southern expression of fledgling Islamic black nationalism. Members numbered more than three
hundred, and were required to wear fezzes and turbans; men sported long beards.

There were able leaders in black Augusta, entrepreneurs and clergymen whom whites felt they had absolutely no reason to acknowledge unless there was an emergency. African American purchasing power was limited, home ownership almost an aberration; in 1940, of the 7,718 homes lodging blacks, fewer than 19 percent were owner-occupied. Only about 2 percent of Augusta’s blacks were classified as professionals, and more than 90 percent of those were teachers. African American political power had been made illegal thanks to the white primary system, which kept blacks away from the polls for decades.

In the early 1930s, voting restrictions were working
too
well, in fact, and many whites in this city of 60,342 were complaining that they, too, had been knocked off registration lists for not paying property taxes (one of the restrictions meant to exclude blacks). Barred from the political process, citizens of the Terry had little hope that housing inspectors, say, or the Board of Health, would be of any assistance. Black power was apolitical power, it flowed from those who could raise and spend money in the community. The mark of a respected black businessman was to have set up a recreational center or financed church renovations or a Boys’ Club, because here, success meant spreading wealth around the neighborhood.