One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (6 page)

Brown followed him, from shoeshine to battle royals and into the boxing ring. He wanted people to connect him with Jack, an icon. Truthfully, Brown didn’t need to try that hard. He, too, learned in Augusta to fight till the blood ran from their shoes.

Beau Jack was one of two black figures who had a decisive influence on James Brown, and on Augusta, in the late 1930s and 1940s. The second role model was, in his own way, also a fighter who found a way to sidestep white rage. It was said he had the power to heal the
sick. His fingernails were five inches long, and painted red, white, and blue.

Sweet Daddy Grace was also born with another name. At his birth in 1881 in the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of West Africa, he was called Marcelino Manuel da Graca. By the time he built his first church, the United House of Prayer for All People, in Massachusetts in 1919, he had Americanized his name to Charles M. Grace. But to his followers, of whom there were thousands, he was known as Sweet Daddy.

He came to Augusta in 1927, intent on establishing a foothold in Georgia. He pitched a tent on Wrightsboro Road, at the edge of the Terry, and staged a revival that lasted for months. The tent held 2,500 followers, but twice as many showed up to hear Grace theatrically attack mainstream black churches and watch him miraculously restore the sick to health. Speaking to those who were new to town, uprooted from the Depression or disconnected by poverty, Grace offered a message of self-help and a sense of community built around social activities, music, and food. Prosperity was his subject and his appeal, and soon he had enough money buy land in Augusta and build a proper House of Prayer.

Grace’s frequent trips to Augusta were front-page news. He was a fascinating, mysterious presence who spoke with an exotic accent and had shoulder-length straight black hair, a wispy mustache, and a dainty goatee. “All together,” a local reporter put it, “his countenance is like that of a suave Oriental.”

The laborers of the Terry tucked dollar bills in Grace’s pockets on his stroll to the dais; his deacons practiced hard sell, soft sell, and in-between salesmanship to separate black Augustans from their hard-earned cash. Grace would walk through the seats and demand churchgoers hand over their jewelry and open their purses to him. The Bishop required members to be baptized once a year and charged a dollar a dip, drenching 2,000 believers at one time. There were concession stands at the back of the House, and Grace sold copies of
Grace
,
the magazine, at each service. He also sold face powder, cookies, writing paper, buttons, badges, swords, batons, and walking sticks. Until Augusta’s health inspectors stopped him, he even bottled the used baptismal water, claiming it had miraculous powers. Beau Jack measured success by the sweat he shed in the ring; Grace literally sold his perspiration.

If money was elusive in one’s daily life, at the United House of Prayer one could get close to someone who had mastered it, and at least bask in its glow. It was a hard-currency faith. “If the angel from heaven comes down and wants an extra pair of wings, don’t trust him,” said Grace. “Tell him you ain’t got no time to keep books today. He have to pay cash.” Perhaps his finest accomplishment was taking some of the sting out of the power money held over poor people, by making it, improbably, seem less real.

He said with a calm face, “I have never suffered discrimination or Jim Crow in any form. I don’t bother with these things. The white man loves me and so do colored people. I won’t talk about prejudice or discrimination, because I am not political. I talk to God. I am God’s child. And God is colorless.” Grace moved through the South, a man who defined himself and considered the judgments and descriptions, all the things white America might try to put on him, as mere trifling. It was something a poor black Augustan could yearn for.

As his image grew, so did word of the music coming out of the United House of Prayer. Grace brought drums more fully into the Pentecostal scene than anybody had before, and deeply incorporated rhythm into his services. In Augusta there was a string band, a tambourine band, a brass band; groups called the Gold Eagle and the Blue Ribbon played at parades and events.

The parades were attended by white and black Augustans, believers and skeptics alike. They were events. Drum corps and flag bearers, deacons and flower girls were all part of the show, as was music—“actually ‘swinging’ bands, which might have passed for those of the ‘street’ jazz era,” enthused a writer for the black
Atlanta Daily World
on a visit to Augusta. “A loud trombonist in one of the several band units carried the crowd with him as he ‘hot lipped’ down the avenues. A few sisters and brothers neatly ‘trucked on down’ to the rhythms.”

James Brown loved what da Graca built in Augusta—not as religion per se, but as spectacle, as an expression of doing for yourself, as a lesson in cash-ology, as a stone groove. Decades later, when he was an adult again living in Augusta, Brown was driving with his aide-de-camp, Reverend Al Sharpton. They heard the singing and parked their car in front of the House of Prayer.

“He said, ‘I learned rhythm from the band in the House of Prayer’,” explained Sharpton. “He absolutely admired Daddy Grace and he fashioned some of his band stuff after Daddy Grace’s bands.

“We went there more than one night, sitting in the car for four hours listening to the House of Prayer. He’d hit my knee and say over and over, ‘listen to that drum.’ He’d go to the church, listen to the services, just to hear the band.”

T
hrough the 1930s and into the 1940s, during Brown’s youth in Augusta, the city was run by a homegrown political movement with a name that functioned as its calling card: the Cracker Party. The party’s supporters were the descendents of those immigrants who had moved down the Appalachians into the Georgia and Carolina backcountry in the colonial era. A century later they were the core of an explosive social movement led by agrarian populist Tom Watson. At the end of the nineteenth century, Watson organized them in Augusta, and almost achieved power, too, with a heady mix of Puritanical moralism, prohibition, and white supremacy—until another part of his platform, anti-Catholicism, cost them too many votes.

By the twentieth century,
their
descendants wore the term “cracker” like a wool hat. The white working class was pouring
into Augusta as the Depression and the boll weevil laid waste to the countryside. The pols leading the Cracker Party were smart enough to name themselves after the voters they were chasing and turn a term of scorn into an expression of pride.

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, the Crackers ruled Augusta as a virtual one-party dictatorship. They were affable, loquacious, scheming, hard-edged politicians who thrived by manipulating a ward system that reached into every neighborhood. But most of all, the Cracker legacy was the kind of graft and mismanagement that comes from single-party rule. As historian James C. Cobb has noted, every citizen of Augusta knew about the “black satchel,” the fabled coffer into which all city and county employees had to tithe to the party. So assured was their hold on Augusta that, in 1937, the local election was cancelled—all the candidates were Crackers, and thus certain of election, so what was the point? Gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution all existed in Augusta with the blessing of, and kickbacks to, the Crackers. The party successfully kept prohibition in effect even after its federal repeal, not out of a moral objection to booze, but because they would lose a mountain of bribes once the state made booze legal.

They were kept in power by the white primary, which excluded blacks from voting in political primaries and thus shut them out of the political process. There was one crucial way, however, in which the Crackers
did
pay attention to black life, and that was wherever there was a black bootlegger or numbers runner or prostitute in operation. All were under the thumb of the police, collecting from them on behalf of the party. The bootlegging and prostitution that Aunt Honey engaged in would not have lasted long if she hadn’t been making her own contribution to the political structure.

The Crackers were riding high, but by World War II an undercurrent of change was dissolving their base. The Supreme Court outlawed the white primary in 1944, and suddenly there was competition from black-
supported candidates. Simultaneously, soldiers returning from the battlefields of Europe fed a reform movement. The Crackers were cracking up, and then came sweeping investigations of police and civil commission ties to vice lords, finally laying bare the huge network of bribes. In the spring of 1949, two members of the civil service commission, the police captain, a police sergeant, and a tavern owner were all indicted for funneling gambling profits to local officials. Such purges had happened before, but now the public saw a real possibility for change and was hungry for prosecutions.

A fiery, ambitious solicitor led the case against the officials, the biggest swipe yet against the old political order. In the end, though, the case fizzled, and the only crook remaining in his net was an unknown black teenager named James Brown.

The military had shut down Aunt Honey’s brothel, closing off one source of income for Brown. Pops was in the navy serving on a ship in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945, and during that period, James dropped out of Floyd School. He occasionally hopped trains to peek beyond Augusta, he picked cotton and cut sugarcane until his hands bled. But Augusta was what he knew. From Beau Jack’s old corner of Broad Street, Brown had the ebb and flow of downtown life under his gaze.

Others had him in
their
gaze; he knew the police were after him. His reputation with them was established, and more than once Brown had robbed an oil company on Twiggs. “He’d steal anything that wasn’t tied down,” recalled James Carter. He worked when he could and harvested from the streets when he had to. Whatever he got from it was quickly spent. He had nothing.

One friend said Brown told him the police thought he was a suspect in a brutal crime, and when they couldn’t get him for it they settled for less. On May 7, 1949, he was caught breaking into four cars, chased around downtown, and cornered in an alley. What
sealed his fate were the goods found in his possession. Here was his pitiful bounty, as recorded on a court docket:

1) “one (1) Suitcase of Clothing, of the value of $34.65”

2) “one (1) Trench Coat, of the value of $44.00, and one (1) Man’s Brown Suit of Clothes, of the value of $59.00”

3) “two (2) Richmond Academy uniforms of the value of $50.”

4) “Dark Blue Suit, Men’s Clothes, of the value of $25.00; one (1) Pair Men’s Green Gabardine Pants of the value of $5.00”

Perhaps nothing underscores Brown’s condition like that sorry sundry of men’s clothing. For a boy who grew up wearing underwear sewn from old flour bags, this was a treasure. A black kid stealing from whites wasn’t likely to see much lenience in court, but in the end, Brown’s acts weren’t what sealed his fate. It was the black satchel.

His arrest was posted in the local paper, the petty act and the race of the suspect relegated to the inside blotter; the front page featured the latest on the big bust-up of the Cracker officials being prosecuted by the ambitious solicitor George Haines. When Haines tried the Crackers, the
Augusta Chronicle
said the courtroom would be haunted by “the ghost of Augusta’s political past.” Soon the paper topped itself, calling the corruption trial “the city’s most sensational case in perhaps its entire history.”

After numerous delays, on June 13, the corruption trial finally arrived. The court was packed with interested observers who filled the ground floor; blacks filled the balcony. With all the seats taken, members of the local press stood in the aisles. Then a twist. Haines surprised everybody by requesting another delay. Disappointing the whole city, the judge rescheduled the trial.

But with a house full of reporters and observers, perhaps Haines sensed he had to offer a public hungering for retribution
something
for their time. Letting the room empty then and there would have been like letting the air out of a blimp you’d spent weeks blowing up. Before the press exited the courtroom, the prosecutor quickly brought up the next item before the judge. It was the prosecution of four blacks, their picayune cases grouped together for the sake of brevity. When his name was called, Brown stood and pled guilty.

If he expected a deal, he did not get it. Brown said he had no legal representation; court records list the name of a young lawyer, one who specialized in divorces. Before the impatient eyes of the city, Brown was given a sentence of two to four years for each of his four counts, to run consecutively. He was remanded to a state penitentiary, and the punishment Haines demanded called for hard labor.

“Tell daddy, try to get me out,” Brown urged his cousin, Willie Glenn, the next day. A certain sum of money to the solicitor, he believed, would secure his freedom. For the next four months, Brown was kept in a grim downtown facility, a teen locked up with adults.

Haines threw hard labor at him, but then let him sit for months in the downtown jail. James felt strongly he was in jail only because Haines was waiting for a pro forma bribe. But Joe didn’t even put up bail for James, and he did not offer the solicitor a payment. After months in the Richmond County jail, Brown was finally shipped out—not to some highway crew that the sentence of hard labor would have allowed, but to a juvenile facility, with young men his age and younger.

His dad’s failure to act was something Brown never forgot. “He loved his father. His father loved him. His father just made a mistake,” said Glenn. “Lot of things he could have did for him and he didn’t. Lot of things he could have gave him and didn’t give him.” He entered as a sixteen-year-old, but when Brown left incarceration, he was on his own, a parent to himself.

Chapter Four

TOCCOA

E
ugene Talmadge stopped eating poached eggs. It was just like him to tell his doctors to go to hell. He knew best. The man who once called himself “just as mean as cat shit” had, in 1946, again won the chance to be governor of Georgia, and right then his stomach started hemorrhaging something fierce. Doctors put Talmadge on a strict boiled egg diet and it seemed to be working, too. But then he put his red suspenders on; checked himself out of the Florida hospital; and drove to Georgia for Thanksgiving, where he indulged in turkey, ham, biscuits, red gravy, and grits. A week later the governor dropped dead.