Kill 'Em and Leave (10 page)

Leon waited. He learned there was a time to share opinions with James and a time to be cool. Even when James was high, he knew, eventually the James he loved, the James who would laugh and wonder at his own success, who took the whole thing with a wink, would surface.

Brown loved that about Leon, the fact that Bra, whom he sometimes affectionately called Boston because it rhymed with
Austin,
knew the worst parts of him and never judged him, was never put off by his antics, understood and defended him, even to his wife, Emma, who sometimes objected to what she felt could be an uneven friendship: “You forget,” he'd tell her, “I chose him to be my friend. When I take a friend, I take them through thick and thin.” It was something Brown depended on. One of Brown's favorite things in life was to come off the road, drop his bags at his Beech Island home, hop into his Lincoln, and roll by the modest ranch at 1932 Martin Luther King Boulevard in Augusta, telling the kids who were always gathered around Leon's house, “Go fetch Mr. Leon.”

Leon would come to the door and peer through the screen to see Brown in his Lincoln at the curb with his head out the driver's-side window hollering, “Bra! Let's ride!”

They rode together for more than forty years: Brown, Brown's wife of the moment, Leon Austin, and Emma, Austin's wife of forty-two years. Across the state line to South Carolina they'd go, to Brown's “home country”—to Williston and Blackville and Snelling, towns near old Ellenton—to, in Leon's words, “meet Brown's cousins,” and gorge at his favorite chicken stand, to wolf down sardines, cheese, and crackers at some godforsaken soul food spot that only Brown knew about. The argument would always be the same. “Why we gotta eat what you eat?” Leon would ask. “Let's eat something else, Bra. I'll pay.”

“Why you gonna burn your little money up? What's the matter with sardines and crackers?”

Leon would always laugh. He knew it was senseless to argue. “How can someone express love or show love if they don't know what it feels like?” he'd tell his wife. This was Brown's way of showing love. You couldn't argue with him. Just like when they were kids playing baseball. If there was a dispute on the ball field, James would take his ball and bat and go elsewhere. It wasn't about sardines and crackers; it was about friendship, about paying a debt, because Leon also owed James Brown as well—and both men knew it. Brown made him appreciate what he had: One son. One wife. One home. One car. A normal life, not four wives and thirteen children; not thirty cars and a fifteen-room house that meant nothing to him. Leon owed Brown for helping him appreciate that gift. And in return, Leon let Brown express his love in the small ways Brown knew how. And for that reason, in Brown's later years, when his marital, career, legal, and drug troubles dragged him to earth and he became irascible and almost uncontrollable, it was always Leon who would be summoned to the Beech Island mansion by Charles Bobbit with a phone call and the words “Mr. Brown's having trouble.”

Leon would hang up and rush out to Brown's house to find Brown in bed, lying on his back, his knees propped up on a pillow.

“What's the matter, Bra?”

“I don't wanna work no more, Bra. Don't wanna do no more shows. I'm tired. My knees hurt.”

Leon would ask one of the silent, frightened entourage standing about to fetch Brown's hair dryer and comb and hair tools that always lay around the house, because Brown, from the time they were kids, was always funny about his appearance. Then he'd get to work on the hair, wash it, style it, then throw James under the hair dryer, not talking much, knowing how to be silent, because James would want to talk then and did enough talking for both of them, and with the hair dryer blasting, he couldn't hear a thing you said anyway. James didn't want to hear you, really. He just wanted company, not to be alone. He'd shout at Leon, and after he'd shouted himself out, Leon would shout back a few things, both of them airing out, Leon stating the problems of running his barbershop, Brown on the problems of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise that wasn't, Leon knew, so multimillion anymore. They'd talk politics, and women, and cars, and religion. And afterward the two would head to the store for some ice cream—no drinks, no booze, no drugs, just ice cream. Something they couldn't afford as kids. They'd eat enough to start a factory. Any kind they wanted.

Only then, usually on the way home in the car, with the smell of the swampy Savannah River pushing through the windows and Brown's hair done and James feeling good and clean, and both full of ice cream, only then would Leon break in and get to the point.

“Bra, you got to get back to work.”

By then James had softened and he'd confess to Leon the real problem. Sometimes it was work. Or money. Or a promoter. Or a lawyer. Or the problem of playing small houses after years of doing big concerts. But mostly, it revolved around love. “Bra, when
you
go home,” Brown said, “you got a wife. Somebody to say hello to you who cares for you and will rub your feet.”

Leon never interfered with Brown's tumultuous love life. The fact that it never worked out, he told his wife, was not his business. He neither judged nor gave advice. Rather, he always came back to the same business: “I understand, Bra. But you got to work. That's what we do.”

And sure enough, the next day, James Brown, even when he was well past sixty and feeling ninety, would get up on creaky knees—even with prostate cancer eating at him, his teeth hurting from numerous operations, a man allergic to penicillin who could be floored by any ailment and could not get the normal respite because he was not a normal man—and he would flail at his life again.

More than any other man on earth, Leon Austin of Augusta, Georgia, knew how far James Brown had come, because it was Leon who, that first day back in 1941 when he met James in class when they were both eight years old, took him home, and told his mother, “Momma, this here's my friend from school, James Brown.”

Mrs. Austin took one look at the two boys, her son and his little friend—snot in his nose, hair nappy, unkempt, ragged clothes—and said, “I can't stand y'all.” She grabbed them both by the collar and carried them to the back of her kitchen, where she filled an iron tub with hot water. She took James's clothes off. She took Leon's clothes off. She threw both boys in the bathtub and scrubbed them down. And when she was finished, she dressed them both in Leon's clothes and said, “Now I can stand y'all.”

T
hey built a park for one of the world's strongest men in Toccoa, north Georgia, a pretty town on the side of a mountain. Paul Anderson was the 1956 Olympic weightlifting champion. He was born in Toccoa. They have his Olympic team uniform in a museum downtown; it makes you wonder how a guy that small could lift so much. He once set the world record for the heaviest weight ever lifted by a human being—6,270 pounds in the back lift. A sixteen-ton granite marker is located at his birthplace. He's the most famous guy this town has ever produced. Meanwhile, the local library file has about seven references to James Brown, who moved here when he got out of jail and spent his formative years here. Most of the old clippings are about Bobby Byrd, Brown's once-famous sideman.

If a man's dream can shoot into the night sky and glisten with the brilliance of a thousand stars, then die with the sizzle of water poured onto a match, then James Brown's story ends right here. You can find it buried in the shade of a pleasant holly bush on a winding road in the Toccoa cemetery, underneath a tombstone that reads
TEDDY LEWIS BROWN,
1954
–
1973
.

Teddy was only nineteen when he died in a car accident in upstate New York. He and two musician friends, Arthur Ricky Roseman, eighteen, and Richard Young, thirty, were riding to Canada. All three were killed when their car crashed against a bridge abutment in Elizabethtown, New York. The inside rumor was that there was some drinking involved, but it's just rumor, and Teddy wasn't driving anyway.

James Brown had big plans for his first two children, sons Terry and Teddy. Terry, the youngest, was the brains, the legal mind. Also, the high school star athlete. Teddy, the elder, was the sparkle. He was a dancer, a singer. The wit.

Such is the level of smoke around James Brown that it's hard to get the real story on Teddy. Everybody you talk to claims they were there, that Teddy had bad relations with his dad, that his dad gave him a sax and said, “Learn to play this,” that Teddy said things like, “I'll show you, Daddy! I'm my own man.” It's the usual drama, and much of it is nonsense. But all agree on this: Teddy had a gorgeous face, a beautiful smile, and deep talent, perhaps even more talent than his father. And he was all personality. Thirty-five years after Teddy's death, the mention of his name still draws smiles to the faces of the old-timers in Toccoa. “He had unbelievable talent,” says Drew Perry, an undertaker and classmate of Teddy's. “Teddy never met a stranger.” He was “a real special kid,” adds David Neal, a lifetime resident of Toccoa and friend of James Brown. His brother, James Neal, former mayor of Toccoa, told me, “Teddy's funeral was the biggest this town ever saw.”

But the mention of Teddy's name does not bring a smile to the lips of the tall, regal woman who sits before the fireplace of her tidy home on Prather Bridge Road. At seventy-two, Velma Brown, James Brown's first wife, is a handsome woman, stylish, tall, with smooth brown skin, a beautiful smile, and the countenance of an African princess. She's a straight-backed woman with down-home country wisdom and a quick, sharp sensibility that belies a deep thoughtfulness. She rocks in her chair and listens to her son Terry, fifteen months younger than Teddy, talk about his brother in low tones; what her firstborn son, Teddy, could have been, should have been, might have become. A television is glaring nearby, one of those old ones, big and boxy, with speakers. She ignores it. Her eyes glaze over as she listens. She is in another time, another place.

“Teddy,” she says calmly, “was just finding himself. Like young folks do.”

She broke down after Teddy Brown died. The wheels came off. She ate nerve medicine for two years, just to see straight. Only God held her up, and for that she was ever grateful. Because she had taught her boys to be strong. To have faith in His word. To seek learning; to stand outside the small town they lived in and look to the larger world—not cruise through life being sons of a superstar. Teddy's trip to Canada, she knew, was not some fly-by-night attempt to drink and go buck wild and show his daddy he could be a man. He could have done that in New York City, where his father had an empty house, since James was mostly on the road. Or he could have gone to Atlanta, just two hours from her house. He could have found all the wildness he wanted there. Teddy went to Canada because he wanted to see the world. He wanted to be free, to think and be clear. He wanted to be Teddy Brown, not James Brown's son. And she approved of that.

“If there's a man in there, you want him to come out,” she says. “You don't want your son fooling around playing half man just because he sees everybody else around him is being a half man. You got to work. Educate yourself. Know things. He wasn't gonna get those things here. Not in Toccoa. There ain't but three black families in this whole town, really. We're all related one way or the other. Some around here learned to live standing up. Some learned to live sitting down.”

Her branch lived standing.

Velma's father, Arthur “Bug” Warren, was a big man: six foot four inches, well over 250 pounds in his prime, and wide around the shoulders. While he was a polite, kind man, Bug took no guff from nobody. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1879, just fifteen years after slavery ended. Most of his family were sharecroppers. When work dried up in Alabama, most of Bug's friends announced they were migrating north, to New York and Chicago. But Bug's father told his son, “North or south, it don't make no difference if you're waiting for the white man to get outta your way. Stand where you are. Keep your head up and your back straight so you can see what's going on. Get busy where you are.”

Bug made his way to Toccoa, where he'd heard that a colored man could make a good living driving railroad spikes if he had a strong back. Toccoa was all dirt roads and farms in those days, but it was a railroad stop and manufacturing center where they made caskets and furniture. Bug got hired by a white man to join a crew driving railroad crossties, laying track for the Southern Railway that cut through Toccoa. That job was tough. The foreman was rough. You had to be strong—strong on the outside and even stronger on the inside. Some of those black fellas, big fellas from south Georgia and Alabama, they couldn't handle it and they quit. But Bug listened to one of the older drivers, who told him, “Keep your head up and don't bend your back. Bend your knees. You bend your back and you don't have to worry about coming on the job tomorrow. You won't last thirty minutes. Stand straight and swing.” Bug listened, kept his back straight, and lasted. He slammed spikes to earth for most of his life until his carpentry eventually earned him a better living. He got married, bought some land, built a six-bedroom house in 1938 with his own hands, and when his boys Son, Robert, Peanut, AP, and Douglass—there were seven kids in all including daughters Margaret and Velma—grew up, he sent them to drive spikes on the railroad just as he had. He taught his boys what he had learned: “Keep your head up. Don't bend your back. Stand tall.”

Bug's boys were like their father: they were hardworking, big, strong men. Son was six-five, Peanut was six-two. Doug was six-three, AP was six feet, and Robert, at five-nine, was the runt. They were all quiet, firm country men whose hands gripped hammers tightly and whose dark eyes looked at you dead on. That was a dangerous way to be in the South, where a black man who didn't keep his eyes to the earth and tip his cap and step off the sidewalk anytime a white woman passed could find himself tied to a rope and pulled behind somebody's pickup truck eating dirt till he was done in. That problem nagged at Bug till he died, that one of his boys wouldn't toe that line, because his boys followed their daddy: they weren't prone to tipping their cap to nobody save their mother. But to his relief his boys mostly did okay for themselves. They hammered spikes for the Southern Railway eight to ten hours a day, and every one of Bug's boys got so that when he raised his driver high in the air and brought it down, he could drive those stakes home with just a single stroke. Bug's boys could work that hammer, every foreman knew it, and after a few years most of them hammered themselves right out of the white man's railroad into whatever life they wanted. Bug's eldest boy, Son, became a bounty hunter. Peanut ended up a brick mason and concrete maker. Robert stayed with the railroad for life. Doug and AP became carpenters and never drove another railroad spike again. Bug's boys were good men. His family, the Warrens, were a proper, churchgoing family, pillars in the local Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Bug was proud of the family that God had given him.

But Bug got the shock of his life when he found out that his younger daughter, Velma, was sneaking out of the window of his house on Friday nights with a tiny local runt who stood no more than five foot eight, a kid fresh out of the Alto Reform School at a former National Guard army barracks and training ground, where he'd served more than three years out of an eight-to-sixteen-year term for stealing a car; a boy who sang good-time music, not church music; who'd done a short stint at the all-colored Whitman Street High School before dropping out to work odd jobs and to occasionally run moonshine to South Carolina. A boy from big-time Augusta with a shady past. A boy they called Music Box.

Fifty years later, Velma, wearing a fine wool sweater and slacks, smiles at the memory of her first love as she sits in her living room in front of the fireplace. “My daddy saw James dance. Saw him sing and perform. He would say, ‘Well, James is insane. James needs to work. James needs a job.' ” But Velma Warren was strong-minded, just like her father. And when her mind was made up, that was it. She saw the kindness of the young man from Trinity Church, whom she met when he was singing at Mt. Zion Baptist Church one Sunday. The young James Brown promised her he wanted to live proper. “Lots of things in my life ain't as they should be,” he said, “but I'm working to make things the way they
could
be. Can't nobody work harder than me.” All the time, any job he could get, big or small, he worked. She admired that attitude. James joined her church after they started dating and got together with a local guy from Trinity Church named Bobby Byrd to sing on the side. He was a big-city kid from Augusta among small-town kids, and Toccoa was, for him, a brand-new start.

“James was always neat,” Velma says. “Always clean. Always polite. He appreciated your kindness to him. He had a kind heart. What little he had, he took care of. If James had one pair of dungarees, he'd clean and iron those pants and bleach the cuff on them. And if he had two pairs, he'd give you one of them. He ironed his shirts. He was always careful about his appearance.”

Few blacks in town wanted part of James Brown in those days. When he arrived from the reformatory, having been helped by a kind white warden who recommended him for a job at a local car dealership, he could not find permanent housing. A black woman named Miss Leeny Wilson finally rented him a room at 235 Sage Street. From there another black couple, a local barber named Nathan Davis and his wife, Dora, living at 144 Emily Street, rented him a room, which is how Brown ended up at Trinity, a Methodist church. “Nathan and Dora Davis took him over to Trinity,” Velma says. “That's how he joined that choir.” But most of the blacks in Toccoa ostracized him. “They called him Convict,” Velma says. “That was his name around here. They couldn't forget that he came out of Alto.”

Velma didn't care about that gossip. A sixteen-year stint for stealing a car wasn't unusual in Georgia, where the white man's justice fell hard on African American heads. James was funny. He made her laugh. He had big dreams. He worked hard. He never asked for charity. And he sang like a bird. She fell in love.

Her father was displeased, but Bug saw that Velma was not going to be moved, so one afternoon he gathered the couple before him and announced that young James could visit his daughter only at proper times, on Friday evenings, after work. “I don't want y'all running around to those jukes and good-time houses,” he said. The couple, standing before the towering figure of Bug Warren, who carried every inch of his six-foot-four frame in his thick hands and shoulders, readily agreed. James visited on Friday evenings, and they sat in the living room and talked politely into the night while Bug repaired to his back porch to enjoy a sip or three of white lightning, which never kept him from making it to church on Sunday mornings. They would wait for the joy juice to do its work, and once Bug crawled to bed knocked out, they would climb out the window and dash off to the very spots that Bug had ranted about. “Those were some crazy times,” Velma says, laughing.