Kill 'Em and Leave

by James McBride

  “If there’s a man in there, you want him to come out,” she says. “You don’t want your son fooling around playing half man just because he sees everybody else around him is being a half man. You got to work. Educate yourself. Know things. He wasn’t gonna get those things here. Not in Toccoa. There ain’t but three black families in this whole town, really. We’re all related one way or the other. Some around here learned to live standing up. Some learned to live sitting down.”

  Her branch lived standing.

  —

  Velma’s father, Arthur “Bug” Warren, was a big man: six foot four inches, well over 250 pounds in his prime, and wide around the shoulders. While he was a polite, kind man, Bug took no guff from nobody. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1879, just fifteen years after slavery ended. Most of his family were sharecroppers. When work dried up in Alabama, most of Bug’s friends announced they were migrating north, to New York and Chicago. But Bug’s father told his son, “North or south, it don’t make no difference if you’re waiting for the white man to get outta your way. Stand where you are. Keep your head up and your back straight so you can see what’s going on. Get busy where you are.”

  Bug made his way to Toccoa, where he’d heard that a colored man could make a good living driving railroad spikes if he had a strong back. Toccoa was all dirt roads and farms in those days, but it was a railroad stop and manufacturing center where they made caskets and furniture. Bug got hired by a white man to join a crew driving railroad crossties, laying track for the Southern Railway that cut through Toccoa. That job was tough. The foreman was rough. You had to be strong—strong on the outside and even stronger on the inside. Some of those black fellas, big fellas from south Georgia and Alabama, they couldn’t handle it and they quit. But Bug listened to one of the older drivers, who told him, “Keep your head up and don’t bend your back. Bend your knees. You bend your back and you don’t have to worry about coming on the job tomorrow. You won’t last thirty minutes. Stand straight and swing.” Bug listened, kept his back straight, and lasted. He slammed spikes to earth for most of his life until his carpentry eventually earned him a better living. He got married, bought some land, built a six-bedroom house in 1938 with his own hands, and when his boys Son, Robert, Peanut, AP, and Douglass—there were seven kids in all including daughters Margaret and Velma—grew up, he sent them to drive spikes on the railroad just as he had. He taught his boys what he had learned: “Keep your head up. Don’t bend your back. Stand tall.”

  Bug’s boys were like their father: they were hardworking, big, strong men. Son was six-five, Peanut was six-two. Doug was six-three, AP was six feet, and Robert, at five-nine, was the runt. They were all quiet, firm country men whose hands gripped hammers tightly and whose dark eyes looked at you dead on. That was a dangerous way to be in the South, where a black man who didn’t keep his eyes to the earth and tip his cap and step off the sidewalk anytime a white woman passed could find himself tied to a rope and pulled behind somebody’s pickup truck eating dirt till he was done in. That problem nagged at Bug till he died, that one of his boys wouldn’t toe that line, because his boys followed their daddy: they weren’t prone to tipping their cap to nobody save their mother. But to his relief his boys mostly did okay for themselves. They hammered spikes for the Southern Railway eight to ten hours a day, and every one of Bug’s boys got so that when he raised his driver high in the air and brought it down, he could drive those stakes home with just a single stroke. Bug’s boys could work that hammer, every foreman knew it, and after a few years most of them hammered themselves right out of the white man’s railroad into whatever life they wanted. Bug’s eldest boy, Son, became a bounty hunter. Peanut ended up a brick mason and concrete maker. Robert stayed with the railroad for life. Doug and AP became carpenters and never drove another railroad spike again. Bug’s boys were good men. His family, the Warrens, were a proper, churchgoing family, pillars in the local Mt. Zion Baptist Church. Bug was proud of the family that God had given him.

  But Bug got the shock of his life when he found out that his younger daughter, Velma, was sneaking out of the window of his house on Friday nights with a tiny local runt who stood no more than five foot eight, a kid fresh out of the Alto Reform School at a former National Guard army barracks and training ground, where he’d served more than three years out of an eight-to-sixteen-year term for stealing a car; a boy who sang good-time music, not church music; who’d done a short stint at the all-colored Whitman Street High School before dropping out to work odd jobs and to occasionally run moonshine to South Carolina. A boy from big-time Augusta with a shady past. A boy they called Music Box.

  Fifty years later, Velma, wearing a fine wool sweater and slacks, smiles at the memory of her first love as she sits in her living room in front of the fireplace. “My daddy saw James dance. Saw him sing and perform. He would say, ‘Well, James is insane. James needs to work. James needs a job.’ ” But Velma Warren was strong-minded, just like her father. And when her mind was made up, that was it. She saw the kindness of the young man from Trinity Church, whom she met when he was singing at Mt. Zion Baptist Church one Sunday. The young James Brown promised her he wanted to live proper. “Lots of things in my life ain’t as they should be,” he said, “but I’m working to make things the way they could be. Can’t nobody work harder than me.” All the time, any job he could get, big or small, he worked. She admired that attitude. James joined her church after they started dating and got together with a local guy from Trinity Church named Bobby Byrd to sing on the side. He was a big-city kid from Augusta among small-town kids, and Toccoa was, for him, a brand-new start.

  “James was always neat,” Velma says. “Always clean. Always polite. He appreciated your kindness to him. He had a kind heart. What little he had, he took care of. If James had one pair of dungarees, he’d clean and iron those pants and bleach the cuff on them. And if he had two pairs, he’d give you one of them. He ironed his shirts. He was always careful about his appearance.”

  Few blacks in town wanted part of James Brown in those days. When he arrived from the reformatory, having been helped by a kind white warden who recommended him for a job at a local car dealership, he could not find permanent housing. A black woman named Miss Leeny Wilson finally rented him a room at 235 Sage Street. From there another black couple, a local barber named Nathan Davis and his wife, Dora, living at 144 Emily Street, rented him a room, which is how Brown ended up at Trinity, a Methodist church. “Nathan and Dora Davis took him over to Trinity,” Velma says. “That’s how he joined that choir.” But most of the blacks in Toccoa ostracized him. “They called him Convict,” Velma says. “That was his name around here. They couldn’t forget that he came out of Alto.”

  Velma didn’t care about that gossip. A sixteen-year stint for stealing a car wasn’t unusual in Georgia, where the white man’s justice fell hard on African American heads. James was funny. He made her laugh. He had big dreams. He worked hard. He never asked for charity. And he sang like a bird. She fell in love.

  Her father was displeased, but Bug saw that Velma was not going to be moved, so one afternoon he gathered the couple before him and announced that young James could visit his daughter only at proper times, on Friday evenings, after work. “I don’t want y’all running around to those jukes and good-time houses,” he said. The couple, standing before the towering figure of Bug Warren, who carried every inch of his six-foot-four frame in his thick hands and shoulders, readily agreed. James visited on Friday evenings, and they sat in the living room and talked politely into the night while Bug repaired to his back porch to enjoy a sip or three of white lightning, which never kept him from making it to church on Sunday mornings. They would wait for the joy juice to do its work, and once Bug crawled to bed knocked out, they would climb out the window and dash off to the very spots that Bug had ranted about. “Those were some crazy times,” Velma says, laughing.

  Off they went to the S+M Grill, Berry Trimier’s place, Bill’s Rendezvous, an
d 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 talki
ng 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.