Kill 'Em and Leave (8 page)

Toward the end of his life, Brown, who could have lived anywhere on earth he wanted, moved into the shadow of that bomb factory. He built a $3.5 million house on a sixty-acre stretch of Beech Island—which is not an island, just a stretch of land—not far from old Ellenton. From the front gate of that house, you can see the giant radio-antenna towers of the Savannah River Site, which reach high into the sky, their red lights blinking clear into east Georgia.

In the last years of his life, after he walled off the world, forcing his children and grandchildren to make appointments with him, after he'd driven off his great musicians, after his son Teddy, his third wife, Adrienne, and his father died, Brown, troubled by his tumultuous fourth marriage, would often look up at the two giant towers from the Savannah River Nuclear Site—towers that sit upon the only place his family truly knew as home—and tell Charles Bobbit, “You see those towers, Mr. Bobbit? The government's listening to me. They can hear everything I say. They're listening through my teeth.”

Y
ou can hear the church three blocks before you get there—the horns, the howling, the soaring music. The sound roars into the silent fog of the Augusta night each time the door opens, then quickly slices off as it shuts. You slip toward the sound in a hurry, walking down the dark street, looking over your shoulder. Only a fool walks south Augusta alone at night, unless of course you're strolling through the nearby Medical College of Georgia, whose grim, gray buildings will likely one day swallow this colorful black community whole. That's coming. But not yet. And certainly not tonight. This September night is special. The United House of Prayer is having its annual throwdown, which means God still rules the world.

I remember the House of Prayer from my own childhood. The adults called it “Daddy Grace's church,” after its founder, a West African immigrant who died in 1960. When I was a kid, Daddy Grace, Reverend Ike, and Father Divine were like the big three automakers—Ford, GM, and Chrysler—or at least in my house they were. My mother liked them all. Reverend Ike, with his fancy pompadour hairstyle, fine suits, and funny sermons about money—she thought he was hilarious. Father Divine's was a place I remember her dragging us to for free food; we had to wear a white shirt and shoes. Daddy Grace's House of Prayer she knew the least about, and now I realize why. The main difference between the three, frankly, is Jesus. For Baptists and Pentecostals, Jesus is the front, back, and middle. At the House of Prayer, they love Jesus too, but they consider their minister an apostle, a kind of prophet with a direct pipeline to God. He's “anointed” to carry a special message from God himself.

That would be the man I'm looking at right now.

His name is Daddy Bailey. He's two successors after Daddy Grace, and he sits behind a pulpit—called the Holy Mountain—in his massive church, waving to thousands who have come to see him from everywhere: Virginia, California, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York. They've come by car, truck, on foot, in yellow school buses, and in fourteen charter buses that cram an empty weeded lot two blocks away.

Daddy Bailey sits on a velvet-lined throne. He's an impressive, friendly looking man, tall and enormous. He has to weigh in the ballpark of three hundred pounds. He's impeccably dressed in a gorgeous gray three-piece suit, smiling like a benevolent king. A pretty young girl in a white usher dress fans him with a giant hand fan. Several ushers with stern faces, also dressed in white, patrol the aisles, looking like traffic cops, collecting money and then suddenly bursting out into smiles when they see a friend. Grim black men in white military caps and brown military uniforms, with medals and braided rope decorations on their shoulders, line the walls looking like Idi Amin soldiers on duty, and they, too, frequently burst into chuckles, cracking jokes with other congregants. The House of Prayer is a happy place. A teenage boy strutting down the aisle wearing a pair of butterfly wings for a praise dance he's about to do gets a warm clap on the back. A woman stands up and hollers that she's happy and gets a hearty hug and a drink of water from one of the “soldiers” on duty. Adults greet one another with smiles and hugs. You can eat all the food you want downstairs for practically nothing. They treat one another well here. The conversation is warm, genuine—and shouted, by the way, because you can't hear a thing. Not a word.

The reason? The shout band.

There is nothing in the world like them.

There must be at least thirty of them. They are squeezed between the pulpit and the front-row pews. They are mostly trombones, with a smattering of trumpets and a gigantic sousaphone. They blast with the power of a marching band, with the swing of a jazz or R&B group. They're backed by a full rhythm section of drums, keys, guitar, and bass. Their soulful blasts are topped by the gorgeous wail of a trombonist whose high notes—he's playing in the range of a flügelhorn—float above the ensemble. It's more reminiscent of a vocalist than any horn I've heard and gives the entire band a heavenly, supernatural feel that's eerie and mesmerizing. The band members are dressed in impeccable black suits with white shirts. They play and sway as one, continuously. Even as an assortment of ministers preach and admonish the congregation, the shout band never quite stops, burbling low underneath as someone speaks, then busting loose when the preachers finish talking, the bells of the trumpets and slides of the trombones swaying skyward. The effect of hearing these men blow and sway with such heart and soul, jamming with all their might, is like watching a Broadway show without the Broadway: it's raw soul. Electrifying. It lifts the room.

Behind them, Daddy Bailey seems in this world and out of it at the same time. As a young minister hollers, congregation members thrust dollar bills in the air. A silent usher dressed in white moves to the edge of the pew. The dollar is passed from one hand to the next until it reaches the usher in the aisle, who takes it, walks it to the front of the church, and hands it to another usher. That usher walks it up to Daddy Bailey. Daddy accepts the dollar—the dollar's a symbolic gesture, really—and hands it to yet another usher, who carefully places it in a big box. Then he waves to the donor of the dollar. It's a friendly wiggle—a kind of giggly, chatty, suburban-housewife peekaboo wiggle.

Squeezed between Daddy's pulpit and the first pew, the shout band, the engine of this whole bit, roars on, charging the room with music, while at the pulpit, a minister hollers out to the congregation: “Thank you, Daddy Bailey! We love Daddy!” And the congregation responds:

“Yes, Daddy!”

“We love Daddy!”

I once went to a funeral in a village in the Ivory Coast of West Africa, and it had this kind of electric drama and excitement: the continuous music, the tears, the celebration, the pounding, the nonstop drums, the continuous preaching, the laughing and dancing. It went on all night. If this event is anything like that one, we might be here till dawn.

I don't know if I'll make it that long. I groove in the frolic a while and raise a couple of my own dollar bills in the air for the ushers to collect for Daddy Bailey's pot—why not? I wanna get in that
long line
when I die, and I don't care how I get in or who gets me there. But after a couple of hours, they're still prayer frolicking and I'm hungry, so I slip downstairs to give my ears and soul a rest. A guy serving food in the cafeteria asks me, “What you doing down here in Augusta?”

Only then do I remember why I am here: this is the very church—on the very same street where James Brown found two of the most important constants in his life. One was music. The other was a man.

One brisk afternoon in 1941, Leon Austin, a tall, light-skinned eight-year-old boy who lived down the street from Daddy Grace's—he was at 1207, Daddy Grace's was 1269—and whose gift for playing piano was so great that he was occasionally corralled into playing for Daddy Grace's church even though he was the pianist for a different church, walked into his classroom at the all-colored Silas X. Floyd Elementary School and noticed a new kid sitting in the back. The boy was a dark-skinned and poorly clad country boy from South Carolina, just across the state line. He'd just moved to Augusta, to the poor side of town called the Terry. Little James Brown.

None of the other kids wanted to bother with little James. But Leon had a kind heart, and when he discovered that James loved music, Leon said, “C'mon home with me. I'll show you some music.” James readily agreed.

Leon grew up playing for Macedonia Baptist, and like musicians the world over, he knew where the real special music could be found. In Augusta, the good stuff was just three doors away from his house. He dragged James to Daddy Grace's House of Prayer. It was there that James Brown saw his future: the blasting trombones, the pounding drums, the nonstop groove, the swaying, high-stepping musicians of the United House of Prayer's legendary shout band. He was awed.

“I've got to do that,” James announced. Leon took James back to the piano at his house and showed him chords, the movement of the left hand, the boogie-woogie that was so popular back then.

That friendship, bound from those first days around the high-swinging shout band of Daddy Grace's House of Prayer, would last the rest of their lives. They became best friends. Leon had older brothers, but he'd been a sickly baby—his parents didn't think he'd survive when he was born—so he wasn't allowed to play and roughhouse like they were. He was a precocious child, tender and kindhearted, a loner who loved music, and James, whose parents had broken up and whose father had slipped off and left him with his aunt Honey, was equally lonely and, Leon later told his wife, “sensitive about things.” They were inseparable, like brothers, so instead of calling each other by name, they called each other Bro, pronounced
Bra
in their southern twang.

“What you doin', Bra?”

“Waiting for you, Bra.”

“You got any money, Bra?”

“Wouldn't know a nickel if I saw one, Bra.”

Broke and having a ball. Broke and being a kid.
Bra
and
Bra
. They were an odd pair. James was a short, dark-skinned poor kid, an outsider at school; Leon was taller, light-skinned, middle-class, and good-looking. Leon taught James two-handed boogie-woogie piano. James, a good boxer, taught Leon how to defend himself with his fists. They sang church songs together. They performed at the local Show Palace Theatre talent shows and at school. Leon enjoyed sneaking over to Aunt Honey's so-called whorehouse, which wasn't exactly a whorehouse but a place where poor folks struggled to live off nickels and dimes. There were a lot of people in that house—eighteen at one point—and while some of Aunt Honey's roomers turned tricks for the soldiers from nearby Fort Gordon, some of them also did what poor folks all over the South did in those days to survive: they sold moonshine and scrap metal; they sewed clothing, knitted blankets, and did odd carpentry and plumbing jobs; some washed white folks' laundry and cleaned their houses; a few made money playing skin, a card game; some went to church all day Sunday and ran numbers all day Monday. It was a busy house in a wild section of town, which made it perfect for two wild boys. James introduced Leon to his cousin Willie Glen—nicknamed Big Junior—and to his humorous, stuttering, cigar-smoking father, who appeared long enough to call James “Little Junior” but never seemed to call on Little Junior enough. James and Leon organized baseball games with neighborhood kids, playing on an empty lot, using a baseball and bat that James bought with money he'd earned shining shoes downtown—a ball and bat that James would collect up and head home with if the bigger boys tried to bully them. The two boys shined shoes on the same block of Broad Street at the same time. James, out on the street, was protective of his turf and would fight someone if they tried to take it, while Leon wisely shined shoes inside the barbershop. Years later, after James bought the radio station WRDW, located on the very same corner where he had shined shoes, he would tell visitors, “I used to shine shoes right here in front of this radio station.” It always made Leon chuckle, remembering how James would fight someone if they tried to take his corner.

The two were inseparable—except when they went to the Bell Auditorium for the suicide box-offs. Five black boys were blindfolded and placed in a ring with a boxing glove on one hand and their other hand tied behind their backs. They would bash each other over the head until one of them was left standing. Leon refused to do it. His mother would see the bruises on his face and ask questions. But James? James had to make a dollar however he could, even after he'd gotten his face bashed in a few times.

“You ought to quit that, Bra,” Leon would mumble afterward.

“Gotta eat, Bra,” James would say. Leon understood. He needed money too. But he had a job.

“Sports and the church,” he would tell his wife years later, “helped save me.” Leon was a track star in school, setting high school records that would hold for decades. And in the early years, he had his piano or organ. He always played Sunday services at Macedonia Baptist, and when their choir traveled to visit other churches, Leon traveled with them. He played events and funerals, a rehearsal here, a practice there. His mom organized the children of the town in a choir. She would parade them in a row from church to church, and he played for that too. Playing the piano and organ helped keep him off the streets during his teen years, whereas James…well, James did not have enough money to buy church clothes even if he'd wanted to go to church. His aunt Honey
wanted
him to go, but she was in over her head. She had that big house with all those roomers and relatives. She couldn't force him to go. Plus, Leon told his wife in later years, “She was Willie Glen's mother, not Bro's. Bro didn't know where his mother was.”