Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  However the split occurred, Joe was alone with a boy he knew he couldn’t raise alone. Junior needed family. Joe had one. A big one. He didn’t have one mother—he had five aunts who were all just like his mother, all those -rees: Iveree, Zazaree, Saree. He knew they would take care of James, just as they had taken care of him. These were the women James Brown was raised by before Joe took him to his “cousin” (read: sister) Honey’s house in Augusta, the fabled “whorehouse” James talked of being raised in. During those young years among the Gaines, Scott, and Evans families in Ellenton, James Brown did what all the children of that family did: he picked cotton and walked barefoot, attending church on Sunday in his one pair of shoes, which he took off on the way home and stored for the next week’s service, thanking God for the one pair that he did have. His great-aunts, Iveree, Saree, and the other Gaines women, saw to that. They understood Junior. His life was tough. He was the only son of an only son. His ma and pa didn’t get along and his pa was a stuttering rascal who left him for long stretches, but he left James in the right place: with family. A family that knew how to work, because the Gaineses pulled their own weight in the world. They loved Junior, and in the little time Joe spent with his son, he always reminded Junior of that—the importance of family.

  But Junior did not always remember.

  Fifty years later, when Joe Brown and his now-famous son James Brown pulled up to a gas station in Barnwell, Joe looked out the window and saw his cousin pumping gas into James Brown’s Lincoln Town Car. Joe Brown rolled down the window and yelled, “CR! Come here!” He turned to James Brown and said excitedly, “Junior! This is one of your cousins. He’s one of Uncle Six’s grandkids.”

  CR watched as James Brown nodded a “howdy” and put his hand in his pocket.

  “I thought he was gonna pull out a wad of money and peel off a five-dollar bill,” CR told me, laughing.

  Instead, the Godfather of Soul pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, started the car, and drove off.

  CR laughed about it. “Maybe he blew his handkerchief because he didn’t want me to shake his hand,” CR said. But CR’s father, Shelleree Gaines, never spoke of James Brown again. And when James Brown died in 2006 and the TV reporters came around to talk to Old Man Shelleree Gaines, wanting to interview folks from James Brown’s family, Shelleree Gaines, son of Six Gaines and great-grandson of the Oscar Gaines who had fled the white man’s injustice more than a hundred years before, Shelleree Gaines, who had never been on television in his life, most of which had been spent picking the white man’s cotton, sawing his lumber, and dodging the white man’s evil like his father and his grandfather before him, refused.

  “Junior forgot where he came from,” he said. “And look what it done for him. It done him no good.”

  In the summer of 1950, the black farmers and sharecroppers of Ellenton who stopped in for supplies and feed at the general store began to overhear whispers among the white farmers who gathered there to gossip and pass on local news. Odd things were happening. Strangers with measuring sticks were driving new-model cars straight into white farmers’ fields, digging holes near cow pastures, measuring distances, taking pictures, sighting tree lines. Planes flew overhead. Trucks arrived. Men piled out, took quick measurements, then piled back in and left.

  Plenty of the gossip passed from Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mill, and the surrounding towns through the general store in Ellenton. Much of it was puff, some of it was meant for white ears only, but in a small rural community, few secrets live long. Black folks and whites lived together. They barbecued together in summer and congregated in fall and winter during holidays. When there was nothing to do, they watched the early-morning train they called Fido pass through the train depot. There were at least thirty-five churches in and around Ellenton, among them several black churches: Mt. Moriah, Four Mile, the Runs, Friendship Baptist, Steele Creek, St. Luke’s, and St. Peter. In addition to the general store, the church was the telegraph of rural life in those days. And for black residents, many of whom had no phones or electricity and could barely read or write, it was the only pipeline to the world.

  That fall, from Sunday to Sunday, among whites and blacks alike, terrible rumors began to spread:

  Everybody got to leave this land.

  That kind of talk sent everybody scrambling for information. Every single black minister from the black churches walked into the Ellenton General Store, called the Long Store, hat in hand, to check out the rumor with the white folks. The blacks who owned businesses around Ellenton—a gin mill, a cleaning business, a funeral home—poked for answers among their customers, black domestics who worked for white folks, white folks to whom some of those blacks were, in secret, related—for not every black family in those towns around Ellenton and Dunbarton was dark-skinned. (There was, as James Brown’s cousin Shelleree Gaines says, “Plenty tipping going on.”) There were eight thousand farmers in all, the majority of whom, the census notes, were African American sharecroppers—and not a single one of them had a bit of information on the rumor. Neither did the white farmers, many of them barely living above the poverty line themselves; not even the well-to-do farmers who owned cows, mules, wagons, and land that had been in their families for generations had information. That answer was a horrible blank.

  Everybody got to leave this land.

  The rumor traveled from ear to ear, from one plowed field to the neighboring field, from one kitchen to another, from one shanty to the next. It gnawed at every cotton picker, maid, cook, mule driver, and housewife, and at the workers who sweated out long hours at the banana crate company and sawed lumber for the International Paper Company. It was too unsettling to be true. Too impossible to believe. But by late summer of 1950, the rumor began to gather steam. By fall, it grew teeth and bones. By December of 1950, it had blossomed into a horrible reality:

  Everybody got to leave this land.

  The announcement was made by the community leaders at a packed, segregated meeting held at the Ellenton High School auditorium, where five hundred people from the town assembled to hear it. The whites sat in chairs, the blacks were crowded into a single doorway.

  Everybody got to leave this land.

  The question was, Why?

  The answer was simple.

  The government says so.

  There was more. It was to protect America. The Commies were coming. This was the Cold War. America needed to be strong. For that, there would have to be sacrifice. The government needed the land to make a bomb factory.

  Why us? Why here?

  That part was never made too clear. The backroom shenanigans of South Carolina’s political machine were a mystery to the farmers of Ellenton and its surrounding areas. From 1932 into the 1970s, the state was basically run by four powerful politicians known as the Barnwell Ring: Senator Edgar A. Brown, state representatives Solomon Blatt, Sr., and Winchester Smith, Jr., and onetime governor Joseph Emile Harley. Wherever those four moved, so went the state of South Carolina. A deal had been struck, one so far over the heads of the good people of Ellenton that it might as well have been made on the moon; it was a deal struck between the state, the federal government, and its big-business partners. The nation needed Ellenton’s land and water—big water, Savannah River water and its surrounding rivers, creeks, gullies, and tributaries—for its bomb factory. On November 28, 1950, the rumor became fact, and the fact became a heartbreaking reality that changed life in Ellenton forever, including the life of its most famous African American son.

  Everybody got to leave this land.

  And they did.

  In 1951, everyone and everything—dogs, sheep, cows, horses, mules, carts, house keys, wagons, family photos, outhouses, had to go; 1,500 homes, 2,300 farms, 8,000 people, the majority of whom were African American. Entire cemeteries—more than 1,700 graves—were dug up and moved. Churches, schools, sawmills, icehouses, drugstores, cotton gins, factories, fifty-six businesses in Ellenton alone, all moved. Six towns in all—Dunbarton, Haw
thorne, Meyers Mill, Robbins, Leigh, and Ellenton—gone. Scattered to the wind, so that the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, General Electric, and the DuPont Company could construct the Savannah River Nuclear Site, the biggest bomb maker the world had ever seen: 310 square miles of government secrets, stretching into three rural counties; five nuclear reactors and a cooling tower; two chemical separation plants; management compounds; offices, labs, checkpoints; and security—a giant engine built to extract plutonium and uranium products from materials superheated in the reactors to make enough bombs to blow up the world one hundred times over. The Cold War had begun, and the people of Ellenton and its surrounding towns were among its first American victims.

  Those who owned homes got new homes built elsewhere or their homes were moved. Those whose businesses were bought out were resettled elsewhere with new businesses. Their schoolhouses were moved or rebuilt elsewhere. They were all uprooted to new towns, where they were strangers.

  There was no giant protest. No rally, no marchers picketing in circles chanting. But there were a slew of stories in the press. Life magazine bit off a touching piece by a white schoolteacher from one of the major families in the area. Other local papers wrote pieces depicting the sad, elderly white residents who tenaciously sat on their porches till the very last, watching in shock as their neighbors’ homes, churches, and local business were literally picked up and carted past their front doors on the backs of trucks; stories about confused schoolchildren crying as their schoolhouses were lifted and carried off or destroyed, distraught farmers gnashing their teeth as their livestock was carted away and the churches where their families worshipped for generations went past like groceries on the back of trucks, to be relocated to “New Ellenton” or some nearby town, or simply destroyed. The press wrote of old people who kicked the headstones off their dearly departeds’ graves so that their loved ones would not be exhumed. It was heartrending, powerful stuff.

  But if there was a single tearful story about the majority of displaced people—the thousands of black sharecroppers from those largely black towns—if there was a single heart-tugging saga of black schoolchildren crying as their schoolhouses were torn down, or a touching story of a brokenhearted old black woman sitting on the tombstone of her beloved husband someplace, determined that he should lie forever in his resting place, I have not seen it. If there is a single stirring piece about an African American farmer whose children quit school at age twelve to pull cotton, who lived in a beaten shack owned by the same boss who came to him every Christmas bearing a contract and pen saying, “Sign your X here and your taxes will be paid for the year,” I have not seen it. Even the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program confesses, “The story of African American displacement caused by the making of the site is little known.” The thousands of blacks there simply vanished into history.

  One of those vanquished was the Gaines family—all the -rees—the Evans family, the Scott family, the Washingtons; all the cousins, aunts, uncles, and relatives of James Brown: Aunt Millie, Aunt Honey, Doll Baby, Aunt Saree. They slipped into history, scattered. Some went to “New” Ellenton. Others went to Blackville, Elko, Barnwell, or Augusta. James Brown’s father went to Barnwell. They went where they could. And most could not go far.

  James Brown’s family—the Gaines-Scott clan—is part of a lost tribe. Like their white counterparts, they would talk about the old country of Ellenton, Dunbar, and the surrounding towns for the rest of their lives: The nine-cent movie theater in town where they sat on barrels in the back; the passenger train, Fido, that chugged through town every day at 4:30; the kind white physician Dr. Finkley, who traveled back roads caring for poor farmers of any color, and whose fee was whatever you could pay—a piece of catfish, or a penny, or a smile would do. The long, hot summer days, the cool evenings watching the stars after the annual barbecues, the birthday gatherings, the funny relatives, the tall tales, the vicious white bosses, the kind white friends. Over the years, the displaced ones would seek each other out. They had annual reunions where they barbecued and drank beer and talked about the Big Move, about jobs that were promised but that never materialized; about the training that was supposed to happen that never happened; about the promises that were made and broken. So much was gone. Aunt Honey, for example, who had helped raise James Brown, would end up buried in Snelling, thirty-five miles from her old birthplace, in an unmarked grave, on a piece of land the family managed to get hold of after the Big Move.

  Dunbarton, Ellenton, Hawthorne, Meyers Mill, Robbins, and Leigh: gone forever. Wiped from the map by the scratch of a distant pen. The only thing left of their homes were the curbs, streets, driveways, and walkways, all off-limits, behind signs marked KEEP OUT. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. Because the government could do whatever they wanted. They could take everything you have, anytime. No matter what your color. All they had to do was walk into your house and hang their hat on the rack.

  James Brown was long gone by then. He was just out of jail in 1951 and living in Toccoa, Georgia, starting his life as a janitor at Toccoa Elementary School and singing at night with a group of young guys who eventually became the Famous Flames. But the Ellenton area, Dunbarton, and its surrounding towns were always home country to James Brown. It was where he learned to pick cotton, skin a pig, and shoot squirrels; where he walked to church barefoot and prayed to God under the careful eyes of great-aunts Iveree, Zazaree, and Saree—in fact, Brown joined his great-aunt Saree’s church, St. Peter, in Elko in the years just before his death. He was baptized there and sang in the choir. He loved his great-aunt Saree. She was one of that extended family of women who understood him, who knew how to raise a motherless child, because they had grown up motherless themselves. “James is a handful,” Aunt Honey would complain to her aunts. “He’s always in trouble. I can’t keep up with him.” But she did her best.

  When Brown was released after serving his juvenile prison term, the place where he might have retreated to, where he might have regrouped and recovered, learned to stay out of wrong and to create real relationships, learn to build something and trust people under the watch of his great-aunts, who were among the few people he did trust: that was wiped off the map. And in its place was a bomb factory.

  We got to leave this land. Government says so.

  It was a bitter lesson for the entire Brown family, and one that Brown—who during the course of his career was wiped out by the IRS twice—would never forget. For years, until his death, James Brown walked around with five or ten or even twenty three-thousand-dollar cashier’s checks in his wallet—the equivalent of cash. His son Terry recalls that when his father handed him cash, often the bills were old and damp, the edges chewed off, like rats or vermin had been at them; they had been hidden in the dirt in his backyard. In one California hotel he hid $10,000 under a carpet, came back a year later, checked in to the same hotel room, pulled the carpet back, and retrieved his money. His accountant David Cannon recalls a “red room” in his Beech Island, South Carolina, house with two or three cardboard cartons full of hundred-dollar bills.

  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.”

  You 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.