“Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul”
Author: James McBride
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Pages: 232
Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)
James McBride achieved phenomenal success with his memoir “The Color of Water.” Raised mainly in Brooklyn, son of a white Jewish mother who became an evangelical Christian and a hard-working black father, McBride knew tough times. His determined, indefatigable mother, often the lone white figure on the black streets, insisted on discipline and study, and all 12 of his brothers and sisters went to college, becoming physicians and professors among other occupations.
That book stayed on the best-seller list over two years.
Since then McBride has published three novels, all best sellers and all markedly different from one another.
“Miracle at St. Anna,” 2002, takes place in WWII in the Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema. “Buffalo Soldiers” of the famous 92nd Army Division find themselves fighting with Italian partisans against the Nazis.
“Song Yet Sung,” 2008, is set during a slave rebellion in the swamps on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1950.
McBride’s most recent novel, “The Good Lord Bird,” won the National Book Award. This is a fictional reimagining of the Captain John Brown story. The protagonist here is a 12-year-old mixed race boy, companion to the single-minded abolitionist, who disguises himself as a girl for most of the novel as the action moves from Kansas to upstate New York to the climactic events at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.
Now there is “Kill ’Em and Leave”—the James Brown story—no relation.
As with Rick Bragg’s biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, I was astonished at how the fine writing kept me engaged in the exploits of an individual in whom I had no real interest. At first McBride himself was skeptical. After all, there had been 14 previous books on the singer, but with perseverance and luck, McBride found friends and associates who chose to open up, tell their stories, and this book may be the final word on James Brown.
Raised in dire poverty near Augusta, Georgia, James Brown was clearly a kind of prodigy, a musical genius. Brown died in December of 2006 leaving most of his $100 million estate to educate poor children in Georgia and South Carolina. Litigation erupted and now, ten years later, most of the money has been drained off by the 47 lawsuits, managed by 90 attorneys. There seem to have been at least 4 wives, 6 legitimate children and between 4 and 13 “outside" children. As Brown had predicted, the legacy is “a mess.”
The musician’s relationship to money was always a mess. Brown distrusted agents, managers, record producers, promotors and banks. Fearing being cheated, he often insisted on being paid in cash. Brown was even known to book his band for gigs in Europe and tell no one about them. This, of course, did not work. Brown’s concerts were major events, not secret or underground.
There would be big trouble from the IRS, who at one time claimed he owed $15 million and would settle for a fraction of that only when Brown threatened bankruptcy protection.
He did, in fact have a money room in his house. He buried cash in the yard, and sometimes hid $10,000 at a time under hotel room carpets, planning to come back for it another day. Brown gave away gifts and money, sometimes cars or college tuition, until his manager put him on a salary/allowance of $100,000 per month walking around money. Not enough.
There was so much money mainly because Brown was in fact “the hardest working man in show business.”
It is exhausting even to contemplate the hours of rehearsal, working his band to mutiny, chasing a musical ideal. Nothing less would do. Brown was “cruel.” He demanded musical perfection and absolute personal loyalty; he put spies on the band bus who “ratted out any musician who spoke poorly of him.” His musicians “while respecting his musicality and utter showmanship, disliked him intensely.”
Brown put everything he had into his performances, left it all on the stage.
But when the performance was over, “important folks—celebrities, other stars who hung backstage waiting to congratulate Brown—would wait for two or three hours while he sat under the hair dryer in his dressing room getting his pompadour redone, then he’d slip out without seeing anyone.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was in fact a kind of adopted son to James Brown, once said: "There’s important people here! They want to see you!.” Brown replied “Kill ’em and leave, Rev. Kill ’em and leave.”
Brown recorded 321 albums, sold 200 million records. Unable to read music, he wrote 832 songs, 45 gold records.
Brown visited the White House four times, shook hands with four presidents, and, McBride argues, was “the most influential African American in pop music history,” with global reach.
McBride, himself a professional musician, does his best to educate the reader on the distinctions among rock/jazz/fusion/funk/soul/R&B/ and pop.
These distinctions remain unclear to me, as does Brown himself, finally. But McBride comes to understand the blurriness. The Southern black man, he insists “wears the mask,” hides his feelings in a world in which it is not safe to be known. He was afraid he could have it all taken away.
Brown’s oldest confidant, Miss Emma Austin, tells McBride “I’ve never met anyone in my life …that worked harder to hide his true heart….He had a very sensitive heart. If you knew that about him, there was not much else you needed to know.”
Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark with Don Noble.” A shorter form of this review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio.
