Kill 'Em and Leave (25 page)

Michael, like James Brown, had few friends outside of his family. Those two were public property. They were two dinosaurs who walked alone. Two black superstars. And each knew the abject loneliness of the other.

In 2003, when Michael was facing seven counts of child molestation, Al Sharpton was living in New York, sipping civil rights soup by the gallon, when his cellphone rang. He picked it up. It was Brown. “Rev, where you at?”

“I'm in New York.”

“You ought to be out there in California helping Michael out.”

“Well, Michael's in trouble.”

There was a pause for a moment, and Sharpton could feel Brown gathering steam. “Oh, s'cuse me,” Brown said. “I'm sorry. I got the wrong number. I got the American Legion. I thought I called the civil rights headquarters. That's what you're in business for, handling people in trouble, right? Pardon me, sir. I forgot who I called.”

He hung up. Sharpton called him back.

“I didn't say I wasn't gonna help,” Sharpton said.

But Brown was already giving him a mouthful. “Didn't Michael come to your headquarters in Harlem when you had a problem?” Brown asked.

“Yeah.”

“So a man comes to you. And you're going to leave him.”

“I didn't say that, Mr. Brown.”

“I didn't raise you for that,” Brown said. “You go where the rest of them ain't got the guts to go. The reason they ain't going to Michael is because they think he's guilty and they're scared. I never taught you to be scared.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharpton hung up the phone, packed his bags, and got on a plane to California. After the verdict was announced, when Michael was exonerated, I watched on TV as Michael was rushed out of the courtroom to the clicking of photographers' cameras. Michael stood there, tall and ever thin—people forget how tall he was—and next to him, with the trademark James Brown hair, combed with the giant rake comb that his adopted father James Brown had given him, was Rev. Al Sharpton in a suit, the jogging outfit and gold medallion long gone. As the cameras clicked and the tapes whirred, Michael said nothing, but Sharpton, James Brown's adopted son, said plenty. He said everything James Brown himself wanted to say and would have said if he could have, which amounted to, “I knew it all along. I told y'all. Y'all hung him out to dry without even knowing who he is.”

Three hours into Jackson's visit, Reid found himself giving the King of Pop a tour of his facility. Most people shy away when it comes to death, Reid noted, but not Jackson. He asked pointed and thoughtful questions. He asked about the preparation of the body, a subject people usually avoid. “He wanted to know how it was done,” Reid said. “What types of fluid do you use?” Michael asked.

“He wouldn't ask a question unless he thought about it,” Reid told me. “That's how precise he was. Whatever he asked, he was very interested in. ‘Do we freshen it up?' he asked about James Brown's body. He asked if we were going to change his outfits. He wanted to know had his hair been done, how it was done.”

Jackson toured the casket room, and Reid showed him the various models. “Who requested Mr. Brown's gold-plated casket?” Jackson asked.

“Well, it's the family's decision.”

“Is that something Mr. Brown wanted?”

“Entertainers, they always say solid gold,” Reid said.

Michael laughed and they returned to the chapel.

Jackson spoke of his love for Brown, the influence Brown had had on his childhood. He was there for five hours. Not once did Jackson sit down.

Back in the chapel, Reid stood in the back of the room as Jackson lingered over Brown one last time, touching his face, then tidying his hair. Reid looked at his watch. It was 5:30 in the morning. James Brown's service at the arena bearing his name was scheduled for later that day. But that was later. For now, they were just two men, the Godfather of Soul and the King of Pop. They had lived their fantastic lives alone, on the third rail of fame and fortune, even as they electrified and changed the world. One lay in a gold-plated coffin; in less than three years, the other would be lying in his own. It would be the end of an era. And black America has never been the same.

W
illiam Forlando Brown, age twenty-seven, stands at the practice tee at the Heritage Golf Links, a public course in Tucker, Georgia. He pulls his club back with ease and swats the ball mightily. You watch it soar into the air, four hundred feet if it's a foot, and there, in that instant, as the ball is pitched against the clear blue Georgia sky, you see the old man's dream:

They'll gather at his house like they do at Christmas dinner. All the suspects. The whole family. The ex-wives Velma and Dee Dee, and Tomi Rae—loving mother of James, Jr., whom Brown nicknamed Little Man, and all the rest of the kids and the grandkids, including Teddy's daughter. And they'll eat. They'll eat what he eats because he eats good food. “Food that's got grease in it, grease you up, make you limber and strong,” he used to say: rice, beans, smothered steak, chicken. Then, when they're done, they'll head over to Barnwell, to St. Peter church in Elko, not far from old Ellenton, where the family got started. Old St. Peter, the renovated church that he gave thousands to, that looks better than any other church in that area, with new wood beams and a new roof and acoustic ceilings and new instruments and a freshly paved parking lot. On Sundays in his last years he'd slip off to St. Peter to sing with the choir, sing his favorite song, “God Has Been Good to Me,” and open his Bible to his favorite verse, the same verse they found it open to at his bedside the morning after he died, the book of Psalms 37:1, “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.” He'd walk in and say hi to his old friends, the minister, his aunt Saree, and his good friend Ruth Tobin and her children—Ruth, whom everybody called Mutt except for him. He called her Sis. He called her every month or so, saying “Sis, what you doin'? You praying for me? I'm praying for you. Pray for me, Sis.” And she did. And to this day, still does.

They'd sing and pray a while and thank God for everything that he's gifted them with. And after they're done, the family—his family—they'll get back in their cars—his cars. He's got thirty of 'em, and none has more than five thousand miles on it. They'll jump in his cars and ride back to Augusta, head over to the Augusta National Golf Course—a white man's golf course, a golf course that might as well have been on Mars when James Brown was a little boy, and they'll watch his grandson William Forlando James Brown play a round of a white man's game. And he'll say, “I don't know what he sees in that. But he does it good.”

Back in Atlanta, William Brown, tall, slim, athletic, with a serious face, dressed in a smooth jogging outfit and golfer's shirt, watches keenly, his club still held high, as the ball lands about ten feet from its appointed hole. He frowns. “I'm pulling my head too far to the right,” he says.

If he's pulling too far to the right, I can't see it. William is the man James Brown would have been had he been educated. The old man was proud he had a grandchild in college. William Brown and his father, Terry, were the only ones of Brown's claimed offspring who largely refused to participate in the massive deluge of early lawsuits filed against Brown's estate by his children and widow. Terry was so disgusted with the lawsuits that he handed all his rights to his son and said, “You handle it.” William, for his part, has followed his father's path, mostly keeping clear of the legal fray, insisting that Brown's millions go to the kids exactly as Brown intended. In September 2015, his father—and William, as his father's representative—was offered a “settlement” of $2 million to essentially capitulate and join the morass of suing parties who wanted to settle the mess by rewriting Brown's will and spreading Brown's money around among the children, Tomi Rae, and the education trust. They refused. They want the money to go as Brown intended. Says William, speaking for himself and his father, “Why would we want to go against Grandfather's wishes? He worked and danced for that. He sweated for it. He wanted poor kids to have a chance to educate themselves. It's real simple.”

From the time William, or Flip, as Brown called him, entered college at the University of West Georgia as a political science major, Brown, who paid for his education, checked his grades, grilled him about school, and admonished him no end to finish college and do well in school. The old man laid criticisms on him that set the kid's teeth on edge at times, but still, the kid could take it. When Brown walled himself off from the world and announced that his kids would have to make appointments to see him, William said, “The hell with that.” He climbed the fence and showed up in his grandfather's living room.

“What you doing here?” Brown asked.

“I'm here to see you. I don't need an appointment.”

Brown loved that kind of moxie. He made the kid work harder in school. He indoctrinated the kid in his ways. One day, while the two were sitting on the porch of Brown's Beech Island house, he handed the kid a broom. “Sweep that grass,” he said.

William swept. For an hour. Two hours. In the hot sun. Three hours. He was exhausted. But he wasn't going to quit in front of the old man. Finally Brown said, “Okay, quit it.”

William was furious. “What's the point of that?” he snapped.

“If you don't have an education, that's the kind of job you gonna have,” Brown said.

So the kid listened. And he did well in school. And when he neared graduation at the University of West Georgia and started thinking about his future, he decided to do what his grandfather did.

He decided to chase a dream.

His dream was to be a professional golfer. He bought a golf club. Then another. Then a set. Then he got a job in a golf store. He sought out golf fanatics, and golf coaches, and finally pros. He read books. He studied the game. He practiced on public golf courses—no private clubs for him, he didn't have the money. Over the course of the next eight years, his game evolved. By 2014, he'd worked himself to the outskirts of the PGA. This is a guy who didn't even make his high school golf team, who was an all-county trumpet player at Stephens County High School, not a golfer. The thought among his teachers was that William would become a musician, or a lawyer, but even back then, he'd already decided, he didn't want to be the next James Brown. He liked the trumpet, but he loved golf. He loved being outdoors. He loved the air, the space. He loved the competition. Today, the kid who couldn't make his high school squad is one of the most promising young golfers in the southern region.

It's been a difficult road. Golfers need professional coaches, private golf courses, and practice times with tutors. Which means, of course, money, of which the struggling athlete has very little. Every cent he's earned on odd jobs—cutting grass, selling golf gear—has gone to golf training. He's getting old for the game. He knows it. But not too old. Not yet. Law school, maybe grad school—that's down the road, that's in his future. He knows that too. Why? Because he's a Brown. He knows that education is everything. But for now, he likes this dream.

He holds his club at his side as he peers at the shot he just made. “Golf is an honest game,” he says. “Either you can do it or you can't. The ball rolls where you put it. You can't magically make it go there. Hard work. That's what this game is. That's what Grandfather taught me.”

He does the things Brown would have done. When Nafloyd Scott died at age eighty, in 2015, and Scott's family was short on funds to bury him, William Brown was one of those who stepped forward to help pay for Scott's funeral. He speaks the way Brown wishes he could've talked. “You speak the language,” Brown told him. And he looks the way Brown probably wishes he could have looked: a tall, cool, almond brown. He's a strikingly handsome young man. And he plays the game the way Brown would have. Fair. And hard. He could, if he wanted, walk over to that nice shot and putt the ball right into the hole. Ten feet he can do with his eyes closed. He can putt with the big boys most days. But he's here today to work on his long game. The other golfers in this park are mostly amateurs, making shots to look good. William is at this public golf course to work.

He lines up another ball. The wind blows. He waits until it stops. He brings the club back and sends it forward with a powerful
whack!

The ball goes high, high, even higher than the first one. And as you follow it, high into the Georgia sky, you see the dream again…there it is….