Kill 'Em and Leave (13 page)

“Where's this picture from?”

“Nineteen fifty-four,” he says. “It was taken down at Berry Trimier's place, way down on Barlow Street.”

“What's it about?”

“I don't remember exactly,” he says.

“Did y'all have a sax player?”

“No, we picked 'em up later on the road sometimes. In the beginning we couldn't afford a bass. So what James did, he got a foot tub, and turned it bottom side up, and got a slab of wood. And nailed it to the side of this tub and run the strings up from the top of that down to the tub.”

He places his elbows on the table and holds his hands in the air, his slender fingers folding, his head nodding slowly, eyes hidden behind his glasses.

“Who played it?”

“James played it. Just a little something to practice on, you know. And then my brother got hold of some bass strings. He put them on his guitar and played bass on that.”

“What about you?”

“My daddy always had a guitar. I'd use his guitar, and when we played these dances, we would take the money we made and put it on a set of drums or guitar or whatever we needed. And after we'd get them we divided up whatever money was left. James always said, ‘We can't make our sound like Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, or Clyde McPhatter and those other groups. We have to create our own style.' Well, you know James did most of the arranging anyway.”

“Did you mind?”

“We didn't mind at all.”

He feels his sandwich with his fingers, lifts it, pauses to bite it, and chews slowly, his face stony, impassive behind those dark glasses. You can't even see the outline of his eyes. But his words sound heartfelt. Looking at him, I'm feeling old myself. How many times have I seen this? A black musician who never got paid. Take his head off his body and screw on another head and you'll see half my friends.

Call me naïve, but how is it that one of the richest nations in the world does so little to aid the artists whose sacrifices created one of our greatest cultural and economic exports? Corporate contributions and government taxes help provide pensions for retired classical musicians in many major cities, musicians who play the music of composers who have been certifiably dead for centuries. They get paid—not enough, certainly, but what's the difference between a guy who plays music that came from the back roads of Vienna, in 1755, and a guy who plays music that came from the back roads of Toccoa, Georgia, in 1955? The music comes from the same place: pain, suffering, joy, life. Half a click from where Nafloyd sits is the old military base where the 506th Infantry Regiment trained. That military base became the boys' prison that held James Brown, and an entire HBO series,
Band of Brothers,
was based around the experiences of those soldiers. There's a big museum nearby filled with material from the show. Wouldn't it be nice if we glorified our greatest export outside of war in the same way?

It's a story so big, and an injustice so wide, that most musicians don't fool with it, Nafloyd among them. He only remembers the good. “We would take the money that we made and buy uniforms,” he says. “I remember the first red suits. We had them made in Dallas, Texas. We had a tour through Texas and Louisiana. Each city we played was pretty far apart, sometimes three hundred, four hundred miles. We'd play one night, maybe stay overnight or half a day, then ride overnight till the next morning and get us a hotel room or rooming house and sleep a few hours.”

He picks up his sandwich, takes a bite, and chews slowly, remembering.

“There was a sign on the road to Baldwin, Louisiana. It said
RUN, NIGGER, IF YOU CAN READ THIS. IF YOU CAN'T READ IT, RUN ANYWAY.
”

He laughs.

“But I still, all my life, I always said I didn't want to live in no big city.”

The memories of 1955 roll off his lips as easily as the whiskey once poured down them, because he confesses that whiskey is what threw him off. That and the women. His fingers dance around the edge of the plate as he talks, thoughtfully spinning backward, confessing to the time when he could roll with it for forty-eight hours, working on three hours of sleep, whiskey or no whiskey, when managers like Clint Brantley and artists like Little Richard and record companies like Federal and King appeared like angels with money, help, commands. Go here or there. Do this gig. Do that one. Play here. Play over there. And there was always the money—thirty-five dollars a night, more than any of them could make slinging furniture or washing cars back in Toccoa. But the road was hard. They worked their way all the way to California twice, maybe more than that, he thinks, and to more places than he can remember: Macon, Pensacola, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Chicago, Detroit, New York. They burned out a '56 wood-paneled Ford station wagon like it was a rolling pin. Then they burned out another car. “One-nighters are a killer,” he says.

I know the feeling. I did tours of one-nighters in my life, once in the States and once in Europe. Never again. You forget how big this world is till you drive it. And I did it in a tour bus, with ten musicians and two drivers. After a week of bouncing from one town to the next, you're exhausted. After six weeks you're ready to lose your mind. Nafloyd did it for the better part of two years, first in 1954, then from 1955 through 1957, in that Ford station wagon, without air-conditioning, in the Deep South, where they were limited in where they could stay, or eat, or go to the bathroom. They'd be burning in the summer, freezing in the winter, always searching for something to eat. They'd experience the rise of playing for the howling audiences, the fall of being the last to leave the club, trying to get your money from some slick hustler, then staring at the grim white line of the highway in the wee hours, half awake, watching the driver—often Nate Knox, brother of band member Nash Knox—fight off sleep, knowing your turn to drive is coming and you're sleepy too.

Nafloyd burned through several guitars trying to keep up: an old Sears model from his dad, then a Gibson, then a Vox. The guitars couldn't hold up to the onstage antics and being tossed from city to city, car to car. He played behind his back. He played between his legs. He tossed the instrument around. The strings busted. The pickups broke. The necks bent. The bridges gave out. As the one-nighters got harder, Nafloyd says, Brown seemed to get stronger. He was impassioned, a man on a mission. And as Brown grew more intent on pushing the band and playing more dates, some of the Flames began to falter, then fall away. As they burned from one city to another, the distances between gigs seemed to grow greater, the long drives grew harder. Arguments broke out. Some guys began to miss their families. Some began to miss dates. The Flames had to find local musicians. It fell to Nafloyd to teach the pickup musicians the songs for the one-nighters. He knew all the keys and all the grooves. “We favored G major and C minor,” he says. The fellow guitarists would ask, “How can you play like that and not read no music?” “I just played what I heard,” he says again. He taught them the music, and when the teaching was done and the gig was a wrap, the Flames moved on to the next town.

“When did the Flames become James Brown and the Famous Flames?” I ask him.

“In the beginning it was nothing but the Flames,” he says. “I never will forget: one day we came from the Douglass Hotel in Macon up to the main house where we would all meet up. And the manager's there, and all of us are there. He said, ‘How do you like these placards I made?'

“We were all together and James was standing by himself, you know. And we look at the placard and it says ‘James Brown and the Famous Flames.' James looked at it. We looked straight to him with his head down. Didn't nobody like it in the beginning, but we had to do it.”

“So the manager made that choice?” I said.

“I think so. But he explained it to us saying people were still coming to see the Famous Flames, but they'd be coming to see two shows. They'd be getting two for one. They'd be getting James Brown
and
the Famous Flames. So everybody finally got over that. James was due most of the credit anyway. He put on a show. We did a lot of shows with Little Richard. Little Richard didn't do nothing but stand up and play that piano and sing. But we put on a show. I played my guitar all over. I changed my strap on the shoulder. Under the leg, played like that. Throw it behind my back, play like that. Throw it behind my head, play like that. People would go crazy. And James—”

He smiled at the memory.

“You know those upright pianos? Where you've got your soundboard on top up there? James would dance and get up on top of that piano and come off that piano in a sweat. And people would go crazy for him.” He chuckled. “James was something.”

Scott left the band in 1957, not because James Brown was stealing the show or mistreating him. He simply wanted to come home. Thirty-five dollars a day was good money, but after more than two years, he'd had enough of the road.

He came home and watched life shove past him with the speed of a passing car. These days he lives with his daughter in Toccoa in a neat, simple house with lots of religious artifacts. With the exception of a brief stint in Pensacola, Florida, he's been in Toccoa all his life.

“What's your favorite song?” I ask.

“Well, James wrote most of them. But my favorite, the beat I like, I think, is ‘Chonnie-On-Chon.' It's got my name on it. I never hear no royalties out of it though, so I guess it never did make no hit. I remember one time after I had quit the band, I was talking to James in Pensacola. James told me if I could find any one of the old records with my name on it, he could get me somewhere around $25,000. But I never found one with my name on it.”

“Did you see him after you left the band?” I ask.

“Sure. Saw him through the years many a day. Anytime he'd come through to Toccoa he'd always come see me. Me and Nash Knox. He'd send his son Terry to fetch us. Or he'd come see us by hisself. One time I was at my house on Whitman Street. That's when he was driving that white Cadillac. He drove up there and so many people came out, he said, ‘Meet me down at Velma's house. They ain't gonna turn me loose.'

“So I went on down there to Prather Bridge Road and met him at Velma's. They wouldn't turn him loose up there on Whitman Street. See, James was too good to some folks.

“He always gave a little something when he came by here. He didn't want to give it in front of the people because they couldn't stop asking him for stuff. He was always generous with me. Even when I moved to Pensacola. He was down there playing, and after the show I went backstage to see him. I told them [the security guards] who I was and he said, ‘Git him back here.' He was always glad to see me.”

The sandwich sits with two bites gone, barely eaten. It's the dead hour between lunch and dinner, and this place was already dead when we walked in. Nafloyd seems tired. “Is that enough?” he asks. “I'll take the sandwich home. Wanna get back home before that sugar gets down on me.”

We chat a bit more as we prepare to leave. “I feel like you're just trying to say good things about James Brown,” I say. “You don't have to.”

Nafloyd raises his head and stares off. His shades are a mask; his expression is a blank. He smiles a small, sad smile. “James don't need my protection,” he says.

The sandwich arrives in a bag and the waitress hands it to me. I slip it into Nafloyd's hand, the one without the pictures in it. He crinkles it in his slim fingers and says, “You gonna run me home?”

“Yeah, man.”

He stands facing the empty street of the town that no longer knows him. There's the museum nearby filled with memorabilia from the HBO series about war, in a town that has a spring fest and a summer fest, and a train museum, and every other kind of celebration of the past good life, but little celebration for the local black musicians whose lives and music are folded into the annals of world cultural history. We move toward the door, him holding my elbow with one hand and his roast beef sandwich with the other. Outside, the fresh air hits him and he stops. Something occurs to him.

“One time James come right out here on Seventeenth and Quincy. He came and got me and took me in the bathroom and gave me fifteen one-hundred-dollar bills. He said, ‘Put it in your pocket.' One thousand and five hundred dollars. And guess what he said. He said, ‘Nafloyd, you better quit drinking that whiskey.' He smelled it on my breath.”

He laughs, a light easy laugh, and we move toward the car.

Three years later, on August 15, 2015, he would be dead at age eighty, broke, his family getting financial help to bury him from a friend and James Brown's grandson William. And thus the last Flame, the last original Flame, is gone.

T
he Lincoln Town Cars and black SUVs are lined up from the corner of Fifty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue all the way to Sixth Avenue. The Grand Havana Room cigar club is upstairs in this shiny building and I can't find parking. Trouble is, I'm riding my bike and there's no place to lock it up. The black, double-parked cars on the street don't have that problem. They have waiting drivers. I guess they don't have many bike riders pedaling up to the Havana cigar club who need to lock up their bikes, and why should they? This is a smoker's joint. A private outfit. No hipsters. No cyclists. Women? Not very many that I saw, anyway, other than staff. This is a tobacco lover's club, where the big boys come to eat, toke, and chew Havana cigars. This is where Rev. Al Sharpton comes to eat.

I watch from my bike as he cuts across the windy street like a ghost, slipping past the double-parked SUVs with the ease of a cat burglar and into the building. I find a good spot and quickly lock my bike up and sprint to catch him, which takes some speed. This is our second meeting, and he nods as he sees me coming, slowing only for a second as I slip into the elevator with him. I'm winded, but he's breathing easy. He moves like a wisp of smoke, quick and slim, 162 pounds lighter than he was in years past, looking smooth and fit in a long black wool-mohair coat, suit and tie beneath it. He punches the elevator button and looks up to watch the monitor…1…2…3….He bears no pad, pencil, or notebook, even though, technically, he's a reporter. He's just come from doing his talk show on MSNBC on this chilly February night. Two passengers in the elevator eye him. One of them blurts out, “Hey, Rev.”

“Evening,” he says. The greeting is friendly and warm.

The elevator arrives and he enters the smoky club. The coat-check lady knows him. The guys at the bar wave. Another fellow across the room waves a greeting. He eases into the room, nodding here and there, and takes a seat on a comfortable couch with a coffee table, just as he does most evenings after his telecast, to chow down on veggies, chomp on a cigar, and talk on his cellphone with the power brokers of the world.

Just as the Rev sits, his cellphone rings.

“Hey…”

As he talks, the other folks in the club, mostly white men, eye him out of the corners of their eyes. A couple of white guys in suits drift by, lollygagging to take a closer look, smiling, as if to say,
Is that Reverend Sharpton?
Twenty-five years ago, these same guys would have backed off him like he was a two-headed Godzilla. In the old days, when he wore jogger suits, sneakers, and gold medallions, back when he tossed New York City on its ear by pulling back the thick quilt of northern liberalism to reveal the institutionalized racism underneath, he was despised. One of the jokes floating around New York back then went like this:
You're in a room with Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Al Sharpton. You only have two bullets. Who do you shoot? Al Sharpton
.
Twice
.

This is the guy who took a knife in the chest while marching in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to protest the 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins, a young African American killed by a group of white men; this is the guy who ran for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election in 1994; who defended a teenager named Tawana Brawley through an infamous lie, in which she claimed she was gang-raped by a group of white men. This is the guy who served time in federal prison for protesting naval bombing experiments on Vieques, Puerto Rico; who stood alone with Michael Jackson against what he considered trumped-up child-molestation charges when no one else in Hollywood would. Sharpton has been sued, stabbed, slimed on, marched on, spat at, hustled, and hated, but he's still here, an easy, grooving 138 pounds of slim, a far cry from the nearly three-hundred-pound fireplug in the James Brown hairdo that once bedeviled the New York media. The same city officials who twenty years ago would reach for the phone to call the cops when Sharpton showed up drop to their knees when he appears these days, hoping to God that whoever created the great sin that brought him to town in the first place will either plop down dead or fall off a bridge someplace. Sharpton wields that kind of influence. He is one of the most powerful black men in America.

And a creation, in part, of one James Brown.

He will tell me that himself tonight, and on subsequent nights, over the course of three hours and a few cigars. That and more. The years they traveled, when Brown was broke, his business collapsing, his private jets confiscated, his radio stations gone, the IRS breathing down his throat, the insufferable weekly drives Sharpton undertook from New York City to South Carolina to see Brown when he was in prison. He was a living witness to Brown's indomitable will, which kept the old man afloat when everyone else considered him finished, polished off by the advent of disco. But before the Rev talks, he must eat. He's hungry. He looks tired. He should have been here eating an hour ago, but he had to do an appearance at CNN after his own MSNBC show was done. “I owed somebody over there a favor,” he says.

He orders as he's talking on the cell, and the waitress disappears. She returns instantly with food, all lightly cooked veggies. No more chicken for this preacher.

The Rev hangs up his phone. He pulls the plate closer. He picks up his fork. It's time to eat.

Just then, a young white man in a suit appears, hovering over him with a pen and a piece of paper. “Hey, Rev? Can I get an autograph?”

You can see he'd like to eat. The man is hungry. But before he became Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights hell-raiser, or Rev. Sharpton of MSNBC, he was just plain Rev, a teenage preacher sitting at the feet of the Godfather, listening to the lessons the old man taught him in those hard, lean years. It's a voice that still rings in his head:
You fought all your life to be known, and you're mad at the people knowing you? You don't have time to sign an autograph? You don't have time to talk to people? Who made you?

The Rev puts his fork down, reaches for the pen, signs the autograph, then chats with the guy for several minutes as his food gets cold, listening patiently as the guy tells some corny story about nothing. Finally the guy leaves, happy.

The Rev turns to his food, his expression blank. The warm veggies are cold. The tea is too. He reaches for his fork and tosses some veggies into his mouth. “Everything I am today,” he says, “a lot of it, is because of James Brown. The most important lessons I learned, I learned from him. He was like my father. He was the father I never had.”

Spin back the clock to New York City in the 1960s, before a delightful Jewish mayor named Ed Koch walked the streets joking and asking, “How'm I doin'?” When Staten Island was still called Richmond and the South Bronx was newly decimated, destroyed by urban planner Robert Moses's Cross Bronx Expressway, which ran through its heart like a butcher knife, sending working-class families fleeing to the suburbs. Back then, Queens was suburban bliss, for black families anyway, most of whom had backpedaled there from Brooklyn and Harlem. Even Manhattan was different tundra, much of it rough land. The Upper West Side was a place where you could get your head bonked in. Times Square was a run-for-your-life situation, with whorehouses and X-rated strip and video joints; and over in Hell's Kitchen, Irish and Italian mobsters were hard at work killing each other—rumor has it that the gangsters cut up corpses at the bar downstairs from the beaten flat at Forty-Third and Tenth where I write these words. New York was a fifteen-cent subway ride to a world spookier than voodoo. It got worse in the seventies. Drive out of the Lincoln Tunnel in those years and a squeegee guy with a face that looked like a combination wire hanger and mop would suddenly appear, covering your windshield with glop and spit, daring you to pull off without dropping a quarter in his hand, which looked like you could get tuberculosis from just looking at it. New York was funky. That was Alfred Sharpton's New York. It was mine as well. We're close to the same age.

Sharpton grew up in Brooklyn, got a taste of middle-class life in Hollis, Queens, for a short spurt, then later was swooped back into the urban jungle of Brooklyn after his father abandoned his mother. He was a boy preacher at Washington Temple Church of God in Christ, one of the oldest and largest in Brooklyn, a child phenomenon who gave his first sermon at the age of four, steeped deep in the soup of black religion. He toured with gospel great Mahalia Jackson at age eleven and was tutored by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., as a kid. In the sixties, when he was a teenager, he was swept up by the civil rights movement, but he was an outsider. Most of his teen friends were black nationalists or Panthers, but Bible preaching and the gospel did not sit well with the little red Mao books that soul brothers were carting around Brooklyn in those revolutionary days, particularly his conservative bent of Pentecostal holiness. Sports? Football? Basketball? He avoided those. His gift was his tongue.

He joined Rev. Jesse Jackson's Operation Breadbasket at age thirteen, then joined Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), but the ultrareligious Pentecostals trusted neither Martin Luther King nor the black radicals like Malcolm X—in those days New York City was Malcolm X's town—nor the white kids who wore SDS buttons and were screaming against the Vietnam War. Sharpton admired both King and Malcolm X; he shared common ground with all of the radical movements, yet fit with none of them. How do you follow God in a world that is gray? What do you do when black power turns out to be a cobweb of continual adjustment, where the Baptists like King and Jesse Jackson looked down their noses at the Pentecostals like him—even as they needed a young voice like his? He saw no space for himself, so he created his own.

Guess who was the guy who showed him how to do it?

“I met Mr. Brown when I was seventeen,” Sharpton tells me. The previous year, he says, PUSH fell apart, and so in 1971 he started his National Youth Movement, a voter-registration outfit. Brown's oldest son, Teddy, joined that movement, and the two were friends for about a year until Teddy's sudden death. At that time, a local New York DJ named Hank Spann introduced Sharpton to Brown during an event at the old RKO Albee Theatre in downtown Brooklyn, to honor Teddy and get black youth to register to vote.

Even now, forty years later, Sharpton, a master of the sound bite, a man who rarely shows his true face, who will keel over before he shows hurt in public, mists a bit sentimental as he pushes back into the memories of his first actual conversation with Brown. They met at a Newark theater to discuss the upcoming voter-registration concert, before a scheduled Brown performance. Just before the curtain rose, Sharpton was ushered into a backstage dressing room. Standing there, combing his hair in front of a mirror, was the Godfather himself. I asked Sharpton, “Were you floored?”

“Are you kidding? The only recreation I ever did with my mother and father was we'd go see Jackie Wilson and James Brown every year at the Apollo. When I met Adam Clayton Powell, I felt I had met the man close to God. When I met James Brown, I thought I had met God. It was like that. I was swept up.”

Brown was very abrupt and businesslike. “He looked at me full, said, ‘What do you want to be, son?'

“I said, ‘Excuse me?'

“ ‘What do you want to be?'

“ ‘Well, I'm in civil rights.'

“ ‘I'm gonna show you how you get the whole hog.'

“ ‘Excuse me?'

“ ‘Gonna show you how to get the whole hog. But you gotta think big like me. I'm going to make you bigger than big. You got to do exactly what I say. Can you do that?' ”

Half of it Sharpton didn't understand. It would take him a year before he could translate the South Carolina twang and rat-tat-tat of Brown's garbled, fast-and-furious delivery, terms that sounded half crocked and some made-up. But he heard the magic words:
I'm going to make you bigger than big.
Sharpton agreed to do exactly as Brown said.