One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (5 page)

Soon Brown formed his own vocal group with Graham, mixing that gospel music of the streets with pop and blues, songs by Amos Milburn, Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, and Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey. They called their group the Cremona Trio, because one of them played a Cremona guitar. The Trio sat in the front row of the Lenox on talent night, charged up to the stage, and sang a version of Louis Jordan’s “Caledonia,” winning first prize. They lasted about three or four years, getting paid fifty dollars a night to play shows for white officers at the nearby Camp Gordon army base.

In the days after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the city placed armed guards at the bridge that Pops and James had crossed by foot. The Lenox Theatre added the Abbott and Costello feature,
In the Navy
, to their lineup. But a bigger impact World War II had on the Terry, and all of Augusta, was that within forty-eight hours of the attack, Camp Gordon was officially opened. A huge military base, Camp Gordon came about due to the efforts of the mayor of Augusta, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, and a young circuit court judge from South Carolina—Strom Thurmond—who lobbied the Roosevelt Administration to build a base in Augusta for the coming war. Ground was broken in 1941, and soon a blighted area called Tobacco Road—the subject of Erskine Caldwell’s novel, its sprawl of poor country whites now a national embarrassment to Augusta—was wiped off the map. In its place was a 56,000-acre training site, home to three divisions in World War II, the 4th Infantry, the 26th Infantry, and the 10th Armored. Camp Gordon transformed the Terry. There were construction jobs for blacks, and suddenly thousands of soldiers were arriving at the train depot on the edge of the neighborhood, with money in their pockets.

Ninth Street lit up with clubs and honky-tonks, giving soldiers a place to drink and be entertained. Aunt Honey and other local entrepreneurs were ready to capitalize. No longer was the Terry a place old white Augusta could afford to ignore, because so many white newcomers were failing to ignore it. Augusta had already
been fairly comfortable with vice before the war, and the influx of young men made the city lose its residual inhibitions. To compensate, the city flirted with the French system for controlling rampant venereal disease among soldiers by registering prostitutes and requiring them to undergo checkups. Unfortunately, local leaders chose to register only black prostitutes, the result being a public health emergency and complaints of racial scapegoating.

A report in the
Chicago Defender
in 1941 noted that “White soldiers stationed here by the thousands are said to be following an old southern custom by seeking ‘social equality’ with colored women ‘after sundown,’ and the eager desire for commingling on the part of the whites is allegedly causing no end of trouble for those entrusted with the management of the city.” Police began arresting African American soldiers seen with women; this led to the detainment of whole families who were innocently strolling the neighborhood. Black soldiers from the North started fighting back against the harassment, and accounts of race riots in the Terry reached the national black press.

Meanwhile, blacks observed how German prisoners housed at Camp Gordon were getting paid to work the grounds of the Augusta National Golf Club, and to pick peanuts, corn, and potatoes across the Savannah River. “They sing and whistle, seem to enjoy work,” enthused the
Augusta Chronicle
. “Farmers are delighted.” Such news stories left a bitter taste in the mouths of black Augustans, who felt the government was doing more for the enemy than it was willing to do for them.

Southern politicos and the army were concerned enough about unrest, declassified military records show, that a military plan was quietly put in place, should racial troubles overwhelm civil authorities. A report titled “Secret District No. 4 Fourth Service Command Racial Disturbances Plan City of Augusta, GA,” written by unnamed army officials at Fort Benning, worried over the stability of elected government in Augusta. Plans included using troops from Camp Gordon and the Georgia State Guard to seal off the Terry.

In the end, all of it—the
scapegoating of black Augustans as carriers of venereal disease, the racial brawls, the cordon sanitaire around the ghetto—failed. Curiosity is hard to police, and there was too much money to be made in commingling; the joints kept jumping, whites kept coming to the Terry for companionship. And young James Brown was making what he could off their visitation. He and Willie Glenn were carrying sandwiches and Red Rock cream soda to the troops; on his own he worked as a tout, taking cash from the recruits and steering them to Aunt Honey’s brothel.

Some kids learn about the world through reading: This one learned from watching money move around. Here are some of the jobs Brown had before he was sixteen: He picked cotton, cut down sugarcane, collected bottle caps, ran errands, delivered liquor, shined shoes, racked balls at a pool hall, and helped out at a Chinese grocery. None of those jobs taught him anything he didn’t already know from living in a whorehouse. Brown came to see there was not too much a stack of greenbacks couldn’t buy, and whatever it was, by definition it wasn’t worth having.

Brown projected a powerful sense of determination. He could take a punch and come back with another. He believed in himself. As childhood friend Leon Austin put it, “If nobody else loved him,
he
loved him.”

When he was young, Brown’s Aunt Honey bathed him, and once as she was cleaning his arms, she saw the hairs on them fall in a “crossways” pattern. It excited her, because she saw it as a mystical sign that he was marked. “I’d say, ‘What are you talking about?’” Brown remembered. “She’d say, ‘See the sign.’ She said I was going to be real wealthy.”

Good things, bad things, either way, events could feed an impression. When James was seven, Pops and a pal got the boy drunk on mint gin. After about half a bottle, James was so sick the adults stripped him naked and put him in a baptismal font of a small church, “so I could come back to life,” Brown said. He looked at his life and what he saw was not suffering or scorn: In his
conscious mind, Brown turned it all into a mark of difference. He could be tortured, but when he survived it, he would brandish that survival as a sign that he was special.
You
would have died, but James Brown did not. He had already been born dead.

He was with his dad one day at the filling station where Pops worked, hovering in a dirt-floor shed with an old air compressor sitting in the corner. The levee out back kept the ground soaked. While Joe changed tires and a couple of white guys sat on boxes, jawing, James, twelve or thirteen, observed. He wanted to hear what the guys were saying, and as he leaned against the air compressor, first with one hand and then another, a short circuit in the machine sent an electrical current coursing through him. His shoes started smoking. He could not let go. It seemed like minutes passed while the men did nothing. His mind went to a place past agony, and he felt a slackness, a feeling like a balloon was filling up inside him. The feeling he had wasn’t painful; he was flooded with a sense of invulnerability.

Eventually they shut the machine down, and Brown could smell the burnt hair, his ears ringing. The men tried to take his sneakers off, but they were stuck to his feet. Four minutes—that’s how long he says he was electrocuted. Four minutes that created a sensation around the neighborhood, and created in him a sense that nobody could stop him, that he could not be killed.

He was told he was ugly, he was small, he didn’t even own a pair of store-bought britches. He was not like other folks. He bore a sign, and early on he learned to read it. Brown took the worst thing that had happened to him—being electrocuted while a bunch of crackers sucked on their co’ colas—and found in it a blessing.

“I knew one thing—that I was different,” is how he put it. “People would pay ten cents to see me dance because I was different.”

Chapter Three

THE BLACK SATCHEL

T
he Bon Air gazes, like the Sphinx, upon Augusta,” Dan Jenkins has written. The hotel was named for the cool breezes that circulated among the sand hills above the city, and had three hundred-plus rooms, riding trails, and a nine-hole pitch-and-putt course. There was Dixieland playing in the entryway, swing playing upstairs, and a piano in the bar. From a balcony the view was incredible.

Inside the ballroom, on a February night in the late 1940s, clusters of men in white jackets sat around tables. This was a classic Southern smoker, and as they waited for the entertainment of the evening, the men chewed on imported cigars and gave the waiters hell with their drink orders.

Tonight’s main attraction, ready beneath naked lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, was a battle royal. An entertainment staple of the South, the battle royal sometimes started or finished a fight card, and sometimes was an event unto itself. The concept was simple: A handful of young black men would enter a boxing ring. Blindfolds would be applied and then everybody came out swinging wildly. The winner was the last one standing. When you won, here is what they gave you: a shower of coins, all you could
stuff in your pockets, perhaps a rustle of bills from the man in charge.

Let’s hear it for tonight’s winner, a bantam Senegambian brawler who makes up with a left hand what he lacks in height: Jimmy Brown!

A dented bell borrowed for the occasion was struck with a hammer, and the fight began. The underlying purpose: to observe a survival-of-the-fittest bloodletting, and to humiliate the young black manhood of the town. Local blacks didn’t have to see it that way. “I’d be out there stumbling around, swinging wild, and hearing people
laughing
,” Brown said with wonder later. “I didn’t know I was being exploited; all I knew I was getting paid a dollar and having fun.” Fighters were ushered out of the Bon Air through the hotel’s service entrance.

Battle royals were a way to make some pocket money, but an aspiring boxer could also get the attention of promoters. And Brown was a talented boxer just getting started, a man whose fights were recorded in the local paper.

According to an Augusta boxing writer, he was a “nice jabbing welter,” who possessed “a fine left, which, after proper tutelage, could be developed into a very damaging weapon.” This “left-jabbing specialist” weighed 140 pounds. He started boxing when he was thirteen years old, an up-and-comer who had a trainer and would jump into a car with other kids to drive around Augusta; Aiken, South Carolina; and towns along the Savannah River, staging small-time fights. Augusta promotor Sam Gantt remembered Brown as “a good boxer for his weight. If he’d stayed fighting, he would have been a masterpiece. He had it in him: courage, desire and he’d do whatever you said to do. When he got hit, he’d never get mad. He’d stay calm.”

As a teenager, Brown studied those around him. “Mr. Brown liked to have idols,” said Emma Austin, who grew up in the Terry. “Somebody
he
could strive to be. He was always looking up.” There was, in the 1940s, a vibrant role model for anybody in Augusta who
had survived a battle royal. His name was Beau Jack. Brown observed him, and eventually would claim Jack had trained him. It wasn’t true, but if you wanted to model yourself after someone, there was nobody better in his field of vision than Beau Jack.

Born in 1921 on a Georgia farm three and a half miles outside Augusta, Sidney Walker was eight months old when his parents abandoned him, leaving him with a grandmother who, for her own reasons, gave him a new name. When he was eight, Beau Jack would get up at five every morning, walk into Augusta, and stake out the downtown corner of Ninth and Broad. It was where the cotton farmers gathered, the best corner a bootblack could have. To work that corner, however, you had to be able to keep it. Early on, a gang beat Jack up and took his money. When he walked home that night, his grandmother stripped him and beat him. “You better fight till the blood runs out their shoes,” she told him. Then next day he went back to his corner. He bashed the assailant’s head on the sidewalk, and kept coming back every day after.

Later he would pick up a nice reputation for himself as a winner, but in black Augusta, he already had a name, and a core lesson was already established: Life was work and you never stopped fighting.

The small-built Jack developed a taste for brawling, and signed up for battle royals at the Bon Air. After seeing him fight at the Bon Air in 1940, golfer Bobby Jones and other Augusta National regulars bankrolled a trainer to launch him on a boxing career. Within a few years, Jack had become a two-time lightweight champion. His 1944 fight with Bob Montgomery raised more than thirty-five million dollars for war bonds; he sold out Madison Square Garden four times in one month, and was
The Ring
magazine’s fighter of the year.

Jack’s accomplishments were taught at Silas X. Floyd Elementary school and discussed wherever blacks congregated. Folks knew him when he was shining shoes, and they knew what might happen if you had a ferocious work ethic, and if you fought the right way. “Beau Jack was the first black fighter to make a million dollars
at Madison Square Garden,” said James Edward Carter III, historian of black Augusta. “He made far more money than people like Jack Johnson. When Beau Jack hit the street, black kids followed him around, we just wanted to be around him and touch him. You’d hear him on fights on the radio, and when Beau Jack was fighting it was like there was a curfew, a silence—there was no crime, no nothing in the streets. Black folks were sitting by the radio. And when he won, folks here would be out in the streets dancing.”

Among the celebrants was James Brown. They had a battery-powered radio at Twiggs, where they listened to the fights. He inherited Jack’s shoeshine stand at Ninth Street and Broad. Doubtless he had to brawl to keep it, too.

Outside the ring, Jack acted the “good sport,” famed for asking after each bout if fans found it a decent fight and liked what they saw. “I’m getting money for this,” he told his trainer. “I have to give them my best.” It was said he earned much more in the ring than he saw; that his manager would fill a pillowcase with one dollar bills and dump it out on a table—see how rich you are! To blacks everywhere, Jack must have embodied a familiar situation. He was allowed to exhibit a measure of prowess and power, because he didn’t fight the powers that be. He fought the “right way,” putting all of his violence in one vector. His dilemma was that he also had to keep winning—not just to continue the flow of money, but because it kept the label of Uncle Tom off him. This was the fate of black heroes who stayed alive in the 1940s.