Kill 'Em and Leave (11 page)

Off they went to the S+M Grill, Berry Trimier's place, Bill's Rendezvous, and the local black juke joints where James and his band of Bobby Byrd, Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox, and Nafloyd Scott and his brother Baby Roy Scott would sing. Velma watched James with one eye and watched the door with the other, hoping Bug's big frame wouldn't darken the doorway. That was the nightmare, that her father would awaken, stumble into the living room, find them gone, then seek them out. The thought of Bug Warren, hot, walking into the S+M Grill, his fists balled tight, gave James and Velma the shakes. James was scared stiff of Bug, and when he finally said to Velma, “Will you marry me, Velma?” she happily agreed. That would be one problem scratched off the list. Bug could not be mad if she was the man's wife.

They married on June 27, 1953, in Mt. Zion, and rented a house on Savannah Lane. Velma got a job at a local furniture factory. Mr. Lawson, of Lawson Motor Company, had taken James on at the urging of the warden, and partly because the booming factories in Toccoa—which were not keen on hiring a young convict out of Alto—had claimed most of the labor pool. Lawson was a kind man who'd taken a chance on Brown, but he didn't pay enough. James wanted more, and after a while he got a job shoveling coal as the janitor for the all-white Toccoa Elementary School.

It would have been a smoother marriage had James's band not become popular so quickly over the next three years. In a small town where there is little for young people to do, the band James sang with, who called themselves the Famous Flames, played high school dances, juke joints, clubhouses, the white high school football games, and school cafeterias, then ventured to Macon, Georgia, knocking the walls off the clubs there, competing with Little Richard, Otis Redding, Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, the Five Royales, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. Five country boys from a no-place town would mount the stage of those small joints and howl at the moon, guitarist Nafloyd Scott playing behind his back, pianist Bobby Byrd hammering the keys like his life depended on it, and the lead guy, James Brown, dancing on the tables, leaping off the piano, daring anybody to outdo him. During those years, Brown held down a day job, supporting a home on Savannah Lane and later on Spring Street with Velma and Teddy and Terry. Even then, he couldn't stop the music from busting out: he sang in the house, on the street, on the job. Brenda Kelly, the retired principal of Stephens County High School, attended Toccoa Elementary School as a kid and remembers the sight of the school custodian, young James Brown, practicing piano in the school basement after slinging coal all morning. “I guess it was 1955 or so. I was in maybe the sixth grade. There was a room down in the basement, down a set of stairs that led under the cafeteria. It held the shop class and the custodian's room. Us kids weren't allowed to go down there, but you know how kids are. There was a piano down there in the hallway. Me and my friend Liz Hoffer would sneak down there at lunch to hear the janitor play the piano. He sounded wonderful. We were his only audience.”

But Brown's audience was growing bigger. His first hit, “Please, Please, Please,” broke a year later, in 1956. The Famous Flames' road gigs demanded they travel farther and farther out: Atlanta; Jacksonville, Florida; Houston. James's onstage antics drew crowds. His road trips became more frequent. He was gone from his wife for longer periods. And he began to change.

Velma saw it happening. “James had a strong mind. He could get stuff together. He could tell people what to do. He'd be sitting in a room with the band, he'd light a cigarette, and then suddenly the whole room would light a cigarette. I said, ‘What's wrong with these people?' I couldn't see that.”

She saw the way the women chased him, saw the accolades pouring in, saw James drift away. He quit the janitor's job. He was on the road all the time. Gone to Macon. Gone to Atlanta. She didn't like it, but times were difficult. “We were very young people,” she says, “and I had no intentions of standing in his way. Those were hard years, and this town was a prison for him. This was his chance to make something of himself. When I heard in the later years what went on between him and those other women he was seeing, that was between him and them. It didn't have anything to do with me. Because he never disrespected me. And I never disrespected him.”

She rocks slowly, thinking back. It's a hard memory. “He was a good father,” she says. “He was never neglectful. Not towards me or his boys.”

When Brown bought the house in Queens, in 1964, he and Velma had already separated. Velma stayed behind in Toccoa. “I told him, ‘You do what you want. I don't need a thing from you. I have my own job.' ” She didn't ask James for a dime, but said, “We have two children and I have to raise them.” Without protest, James paid $150,000 for land and a house near Prather Bridge Road—he had the house built brand-new from the ground up—and handed the title to Velma. She never pressed him for a dime further—never needed to.
He
would ask, and only then, if he'd ask, she'd say, “Well, the boys need this….”

She worked at the furniture plant for thirty years, starting out at a salary of $1.10 an hour, and sent her boys to be with their father in New York City during the summers. “If I had trouble with them, I called their father. And he would respond. If they did wrong here, and I couldn't manage 'em in some kind of way, I'd hand them over to him. Now, I wasn't gonna have one of his women friends fooling with my boys. I wouldn't have that. But they loved their father. And he loved them. And I never kept them from him.

“I do believe James appreciated that. He knows how I am. We were young together. You know just about every funeral in my family over the years, James came? Just about every one. He would come off the road and come here from however far off he was. He'd come from far-off distant places, to show his respect. He was good that way.”

And she was good in her way too. More than once over the years, while James was alive, she'd answer a knock at her door and find a white lawyer in a suit saying, “I can get you millions from your ex-husband.” She closed the door in their faces. “When you fight wrong,” she says, “you lose.” For years she read various accounts of James's life in Toccoa, how so many people seem to remember so much about him, building air castles about the good old times when James Brown asked them for a lift, or asked them for money, or wanted to date their sister, or played baseball with them when he was broke, or stayed in their homes. The fiction, some of it stamped pretty deeply into the James Brown myth, has James Brown staying in the basement of sideman Bobby Byrd's house, care of Byrd's grandmother, who somehow “signed him out” of the reformatory and put him up in her house until he broke big. But the actual dates display the fiction: Brown was released from the reformatory in 1951. His first record, “Please, Please, Please,” was released in 1956. That would have been a stay of about five years living in Byrd's basement, during which, at least part of that time, the deeply talented Byrd was attending college at North Carolina A&T.

“Truth is, nobody gave James much here,” Velma says. “He earned his way. He didn't go round here asking for nothing. We had our own house. We worked. We took care of ourselves. James didn't go around asking for anything, because no husband of mine would do that anyway,” she says simply.

Nobody in Toccoa had any idea what he would become, she says. “If you asked some of the folks around here, they'll tell you that back then he was the best thing since sliced bread and peanut butter. But they were not that nice to him. He was always ‘that one that just got out of Alto.' ”

She stares into the fire. “They never forget that. He could never get past that no matter what he did. After he got big, that's the first thing that come up in the papers, how he come up out of Alto and didn't have nothing; how they all had to help him and give him this and that. He never forgot that,” she says. “I haven't either.”

The two legally divorced in 1969, but for the rest of his life, Brown would slip away from his life in Augusta—the wives, the entourage, the bills, the lawyers, the madness—jump into his Lincoln, and drive the two and a half hours to Toccoa to sit on Velma's living room couch and spend hours talking to the woman he described in his autobiography as “my close friend.” The house he built for her he often referred to as “our house.” Their boys Terry and Teddy—and Velma's son Larry, from a later outside union, whom Brown treated as his own and included in his will—Brown referred to as “our boys.” Their grandson William Forlando he referred to as “our Flip.” Brown adored the kid. He gave William the nickname “Flip” because the kid was funny and reminded him of the popular black comedian Flip Wilson. He checked the kid's homework, paid his college tuition, and, along with Velma, was bursting with pride when Flip hit his college books hard. The couple shared a special bond—and a huge heartbreak, one that would mark each of their lives for as long as they lived, for they each left a great chunk of their souls on a lonely highway in upstate New York during the wee hours of the morning when Teddy moved on to heaven.

They weren't the only ones whose lives were upended. Teddy's younger brother Terry had been accepted to the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta, alma mater to Dr. Martin Luther King and many others. He was about to leave for college when Teddy was killed. Teddy had invited his brother on the road trip, saying they should spend time together before Terry went off to college. Terry had refused. “Momma and Daddy want me to stay home and work because I'm getting a new car to drive to college,” he told his brother. After the accident, Terry tanked. He turned down his acceptance to Morehouse, attended North Georgia College and State University on a basketball scholarship, and quit after two years. A long period of aimless wandering would follow in his life, in which he took on endless manual jobs and worked for his dad's radio station, quitting after arguments with his dad, who leaned on him harder after Teddy died, and falling into drink, until finally righting himself to help his father in Brown's later years. Velma's nervous breakdown did not help matters. Teddy's death changed their world.

And it changed no one more deeply than James Brown himself.

Teddy's death came at a time when Brown was at the height of his career. He had assembled one of the greatest groups of R&B musicians of all time, superseding, it can easily be argued, even the majestic Motown machine factory out of Detroit. James Brown and his band kicked out one hit after another: “Soul Power,” “Say It Loud—I'm Black and I'm Proud,” “Sex Machine,” “I Feel Good.” He had become a musical force of nature, black America's biggest and most unique star. His live performances were real revues, loaded with gags, jokes, free giveaways, and warm-up acts who on their own drew big audiences, often backed by his band, a pounding, tight, chink-a-chink soul music outfit that would change the landscape of American music forever. Moreover, his social message of staying in school and standing on your own was like gold to black America during the civil rights era. Everywhere he went, Brown pleaded with young people to stay in school. He showed enormous generosity to children. He gave out free tickets or charged kids ninety-nine cents to attend his concerts. He gave out scholarships and rarely declined an autograph request. Thirty years after he played the Apollo, there are still folks who recall the night he gave out ten-speed bicycles to raffle winners, or how he stopped his show to congratulate a college graduate someone had introduced him to, or the way he stood outside the theater to chat with children who were waiting in line with their parents to see him, a line that inevitably ran around the corner. Brown's bright love for children burned in his heart for his own two sons more than any others in those years. The loss of Teddy was unfathomable to him.

He covered the pain, of course, with the true mantra of southern pride that he preached to his remaining son, Terry.
Keep it tight, Terry. Keep it proper. You gotta work. Smile. Show your best face.
That was his mantra to Rev. Al Sharpton as well:
Never let them see you sweat. Come important. Leave important.
Too many folks had already seen his suffering and humiliation when he was a boy living in rags, walking around with a snotty nose, shining shoes and dancing for quarters. He would not let them see him cowering or crying as an adult. Letting folks see you hurt was a form of weakness, a form of dying, in a way.

And Teddy's death was just that. It was the death of something bigger, the death of a dream, the closeout on a kind of immortality that would forever elude Brown. And after it happened, as much as he tried, for the first and only time in his life, James Brown, father of proper, could not keep up the front.

James Neal was the director for Teddy Brown's funeral in Toccoa. “I'm seventy-nine years old and been in the funeral business fifty-five years,” he told me. “I've never seen anything like that funeral. Oh, God, the church and streets and everything down to the corner, packed with people. Maybe two thousand people trying to get into Mt. Zion. Every funeral director in my district and some in Atlanta called me, saying, ‘Hey, Neal, we're going to bring a car. You all might need an extra limo. We're going to bring it.' They just wanted to be there.

“James spent twelve thousand dollars on Teddy's casket. It was solid bronze. With the clear glass bubble on the top, so no one could touch the body. Well, we could open it if we had wanted to, but once we had turned all of the turns on there, it's about twenty-five or thirty of them, you don't want to take it loose no more. But it was beautiful.

“I will tell you something that you don't know: we had to go to the Sheraton and pick up that entourage because Mr. Brown brought two buses from Augusta, tons of folks. And we had to lead that motorcade down Prather Bridge Road and make the circle and come back up. God almighty. So many people. So many cars. A doctor from Atlanta called me and said, ‘I'm Mr. Brown's personal physician and I need to sit close to him.'