One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) (2 page)

I’
m not gonna show you the secret
, James Brown would tell people who asked about the One,
but
…Then he would start talking.

Brown refused to reveal the mystery because the One was a trade secret. It would remain a puzzle because the more mystique it had, the more mystique
he
had, and mystique was good for business.

The One was a way to find yourself in the music, it was a means for drummers to come together with one another. It was a small element in a life’s work, but like the drip was to Jackson Pollock or the footnote to David Foster Wallace, for Brown the One was bigger than it first appeared, a trifling that embodied the world he made.

Maybe most of all, for James Brown, the One was an anchor, an upbeat that put him in touch with his past and who he had become.

As he once explained it: “The ‘One’ is derived from the Earth itself, the soil, the pine trees of my youth. And most important, it’s on the upbeat—ONE two THREE four—not the downbeat, one TWO three FOUR, that most blues are written. Hey, I know what I’m talking about! I was born to the downbeat, and I can tell you without question there is no pride in it. The upbeat is rich, the downbeat is poor. Stepping up proud only happens on the aggressive ‘One,’ not the passive Two, and never on lowdownbeat. In the end, it’s not about music—it’s about life.”

To Brown it was a heartbeat that connected him to the dancers and singers and timekeepers who came before him. The One put him on a timeline, though the way he talked about the beat, it put him at the end of the line: the ultimate expression of a heritage.

He wasn’t gonna show you the secret. But if you listened…

Chapter One

A CERTAIN ELEMENTAL
WILDNESS

B
arnwell, South Carolina, where Bryant viewed the raucous corn shucking, was James Brown’s birthplace. The country surrounding Barnwell, in the nineteenth century called the Barnwell District, once grew cotton and vegetables, though both crops were pretty much exhausted by the time Brown came around. There were ponds in the area, and at one of them, euphemistically called the Red Sea, African Americans gathered from all around. They took off their shoes and kicked up the muck from the bottom of the pond. “Muddying for fish,” it was called, and as they kicked, they would walk in concentric circles, ever tighter, until the little pond was muddied up, all but the center. There, the stompers finished their work, catching with their hands the fish crowding to the middle. It’s a very old practice, which some say points back to Africa.

James Brown’s family ripples out from this region in ever larger circles. His father was named Joe Gardner but took
Brown
from a woman who raised him. He was from Elko, ten miles from Barnwell. His family, Joe said, had musicians in it, including an uncle who won a fiddle contest in North Carolina.

James Brown’s mother, Susie Behling, was from Fishpond, an area no longer on the map but once about ten miles south of the city
of Bamberg. There are many black and white Behlings living in Bamberg and Barnwell, as well as Colleton, Williston, and Smoaks, all small towns in the area. Some whites here trace their roots to a landowning German family from Hanover headed by Lüder Friedrich Behling, born in 1815. Behling inherited the Bella Vista Plantation in Goose Creek, South Carolina, from his wife’s family; Bella Vista had twelve slaves. It’s possible Susie Behling’s family took its name from slave-owning Behlings in the area, but nobody knows for sure.

This is what James Brown wanted us to know about his birth on May 3, 1933: “I wasn’t supposed to be alive. You see, I was a stillborn kid.” Two aunts delivered the boy in a shack surrounded by pine trees. When he arrived, he was told, he was motionless and quiet. Susie wept, but his aunt Minnie refused to give up, blowing strong breath into his lungs until, after infinite minutes, he came to life.

“I was a stillborn kid.” Understand him: James Brown was born dead, and he fought his way into this world. That’s a devastating entrance, one that marks him as forever distinct. It is also impossible, because a stillborn infant is dead in the uterus and, by definition, not alive. But Brown
felt
different, and maybe something special did occur at his birth. He saw his stillborn entrance as the moment his specialness first revealed itself.

One good thing about believing you were born dead is you come to feel nothing can kill you. This belief helped keep Brown alive.

The family roots Brown described were conspicuously far-reaching. He claimed he was Cherokee, Japanese, Indian. His daughter, Deanna Brown-Thomas, joked that every time he went to a country and felt the love, he perceived a genetic connection. To a Milwaukee interviewer, he explained, “I’m part Apache and Aztec myself. My daddy’s nickname was Coochi, which is called Cochise. And I’ve got pictures of Geronimo that look identical to all my kids. I didn’t pay no attention at first, but that’s what it is. I got the head full of hair and I got all that. His [hair] was hangin’ down like mine be hangin’ down in the mornin’.”

Susie told Deanna she had family in Florida. Joe had people in North Carolina and Philadelphia. A few small clues pointing in a few directions. The only recorded lineage, however, never strays from the Barnwell District. It is aunts and uncles and cousins, a web of them, all surrounding the ponds and pines of Barnwell. Brown didn’t draw a family tree in his Bible, and he wasn’t going to draw one up for his children. “He was a personal person and some things he didn’t want out,” said Roosevelt Johnson, a longtime personal assistant.

Once, in a relaxed moment, he told a friend who had asked about his ancestors, “I’m not going to ever say what I’m thinking, because it might be disrespectful to my family. Let’s just say a long time ago something in the milk may not be clean.”

Joe and Susie met in 1929 when she was visiting relatives. Behling was a Baptist, and had long, straight hair that her son said was evidence of her “Geechee” roots. Geechee is how blacks living around the Savannah River referred to their roots in the Gullah culture, a people that flourished on the coastal plain and the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Slave descendants, their cultural and geographical isolation allowed the Gullah to maintain an African identity and traditions far more pervasively than other slave communities. Family lore has it that Susie inherited her straight hair and other features from a Native American bloodline, and James said a great grandmother on Susie’s side was mostly Native American.

Joe had a second-grade education, Susie left school in the fifth grade. Together they lived in a wooden shack with a small stove for heat and no plumbing. The windows were open and held no glass; when the wind blew or it rained, Joe leaned old doors against the opening. That made the house dark and frightening to James, who spent as much time outside it as he could. Joe might be gone for days at a time, and James would be alone day and night. For company he had what he called his friends, the insects that lived beneath the shack. A sickly child, James contracted rheumatic fever three times before he was eight. With no doctor in the vicinity, his parents treated the illness with folk remedies like sassafras tea.

Barnwell is on the western edge of South Carolina’s inner coastal plain, between the Atlantic to the east and the Piedmont highlands. Geologically it is a vast beach, from which the ocean receded east millions of years ago.

In South Carolina, two cultures prevailed. The lowlands, along the coast, were dominated by Charleston and had been colonized from the sea in the late seventeenth century. The uplands were German and Scots-Irish, and were populated from the north in the early eighteenth century. In the lowlands, they dropped their r’s and slurred their words; they erected a facade of white columns and easy living, and believed passionately in the charm and manners that honor them to this day. Those in the Piedmont were restive, marinated in a culture of hard work and brawling. Their way of speaking was streaked with Elizabethan pronunciations and archaic words.

In the fertile flatness between these realms was a less populated, and less defined, region, slowly breached from the north. A royal proclamation in 1763 drew a line down the back of the Appalachians, and banned settlement on the western side. Pioneers had been pushing west from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, but after the law came down, they instead migrated down the Appalachian valleys, pushing into the unsettled backcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia. This was the empty space between the big cities of Augusta and Savannah, and in those cities, folks were notably dismissive of the recent immigrants. Perhaps because of the sound the newcomers’ whips made as they pushed their cattle onward, they were given a name which has stuck ever since:
crackers
. They just naturally set folks off. A representative of the crown thought the newcomers were fixing to do to his beloved Georgia what the Huns had done to Europe. An Anglican missionary passing through the backcountry said the Indians had better manners than this ilk, who were without “the least rudiments of Religion, Learning, Manners of Knowledge (save of Vice) among them.”

These are the outsiders who settled the sparsely populated area
around Barnwell. And defined it. As the region grew, it became drenched in violence, a lore that is lamented every bit as much as it is embraced. Among those who embraced it was Ben Robertson. In his 1942 book
Red Hills and Cotton
, Robertson presented his Carolina people to the rest of the country in a tone meant to simultaneously shock and disarm. He explained the impact of all that isolation, an insulated existence marking blacks and whites and characterizing the region where Brown was born.

“We live in the fields among the growing cotton and the green corn, and we are face to face with ourselves, with all of eternity and its problems. We try to explain the wind and the sun and life and death, the here and the hereafter. We cannot explain, so we turn from the natural to the supernatural. In solitude we reach our own conclusions. We have arrived at many things alone. So we are personal, we are emotional, we have learned to dream, we are romantic. And because there is pride within us and a certain elemental wildness, we sometimes fly off the handle. Some of our people, before they know it, have shot, have slashed someone with a knife. We must attempt to control ourselves, we must be on our guard.”

Matters of honor and respect tilted easily to rage. “We do not as a rule shoot people over property matters; when we shoot we do so because of passion,” explained Robertson. “We shoot on the spur of the moment and do not often meditate a murder. Often it is a good way to shoot—to shoot on the spur of the moment; it clears the air like a thunderstorm.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, around the time Brown’s parents were born, one act of violence among the cypress gums could stand for a great many. A thief had broken into St. Michael’s Church. He stole a Bible and, possibly, a piece of furniture. Nobody was charged with the crime, but gradually suspicion fell on Isham Kearse, described in the press as “a young negro of a roving disposition who sought no regular employment, and it is probable that his living was not honestly made.” Some white men of Barnwell clamored for confrontation, and on the night of December 2 they
got their chance. Kearse, who had been keeping a low profile, was discovered just over the Colleton county line, visiting his mother.

Four Barnwell whites captured him leaving her house, and they tightly bound his hands. Their rope was looped around Kearse’s neck and then tied to the rear of a horse-pulled buggy. Those driving the buggy set off at a fast pace for Broxton Bridge, adjacent to a swamp. Kearse ran behind the carriage until roots and rocks tripped him up, and then he was dragged. Others from the party were sent to collect Hannah Walker, Kearse’s mother, and his wife, the seventeen-year-old Rosa. For alleged knowledge of the stolen Bible, Rosa was also roped, tied, and dragged across country trails.

At a spot near the Salkehatchie River, the three African Americans were brutally interrogated. Isham Kearse denied the theft and the women said they knew nothing about it. The prisoners were stripped naked, while the whites drank whiskey; they were beaten with a new buggy trace, a stiff piece of leather used to tether horses to a carriage. Kearse was tied to a tree and lashed one hundred and fifty times, until he begged the men to shoot him. The women escaped, Walker running into the swamp, Rosa in the other direction. As Isham fell unconscious, the whites put his ragged coat over him and left for their Barnwell homes. His body was found later that morning. Like her son, Walker died from the beating. She was discovered facedown, arms stretched out, resting in a foot of water. Rosa made it home, where she remained barely alive.

There was no mystery as to the four perpetrators; everybody knew their names and they did not deny the abduction. In two trials, one for each murder, the defendants were found innocent of all charges. A jury in Colleton bought the defense argument that Walker died from drowning, an act she caused herself by falling into the swamp.

A triple lynching was unusual, but not extraordinary. Barnwell
had an octuple lynching in 1889; though the victims were taken from the Barnwell jail, they were hanged just outside of town, so the mayor could say the crime wasn’t his problem.

That this was a region of astonishing violence is accepted by many who have studied the region, but why it was has puzzled historians. Some have scrutinized the particularly high number of lynchings along the Georgia–South Carolina border, as if geography could kill. Others suggest that in places like Barnwell, the mingling of the hell-raising Protestant Piedmont folks and the cavalier, coastal Baptists in the middle of the state created an explosive culture clash. The most likely theory, however, is that racial violence coincided with organized efforts by whites to turn back Negro gains made by Emancipation. If anti-Republican forces were going to succeed in South Carolina, African Americans would have to lose political rights and be beaten into submission.