Nonfiction
‘Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul’
By James McBride
Spiegel & Grau
$28, 256 pages
Growing up in Queens in the mid-1960s, James McBride used to linger for hours outside a mysterious mansion not far from his home. The vine-covered compound suggested a royal fortress, and not just because of its moat. McBride and his pals spent months, then years, hoping to glimpse the elusive owner, the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown.
Other celebrities lived nearby: Lena Horne, Count Basie. But to a kid like McBride, who came from a working-class family with 11 siblings from the other side of the tracks, no one could hold a candle to Mr. Dynamite.
“For years, that house was a mystery to me,” McBride writes in the opening chapter of “Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul.”
He brings a spirit of awe to this investigation into the late singer’s tarnished legacy, along with exasperation that “one of the most recognizable entertainers in American history is tumbling toward history as an enigma.” The result is a persuasive tour de force that mixes biography, memoir and blistering essays. More layered and empathetic than a typical celebrity tell-all, “Kill ’Em” connects the dots between a legendary figure’s fall from grace and the nation’s persistent race problems.
“[Brown] is arguably the most misunderstood or misrepresented African American figure of the last three hundred years,” McBride writes, suggesting that his influence is on par with “say, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass.”
More than a dozen previous books have tackled the riddle of Brown, who died in Atlanta in 2006. Two of his children put out sensational memoirs in 2014, one rife with allegations of domestic violence, another suggesting that the singer was murdered by backbiting friends.
That same year saw the release of "Get on Up," a Mick Jagger-backed biopic that McBride calls "roughly 40 percent fiction" and tone-deaf on black culture.
He argues that the truth about “the troubled soul who lived underneath the pompadour hairdo” is a frustrating conundrum insuperably tangled with institutionalized bias. “The whole thing is a troubling metaphor for what the race discourse has become in America now.”
It’s clear from the get-go that McBride aims to restore dignity to the icon who once lived a few streets over.
The author won the 2013 National Book Award for his novel, “The Good Lord Bird,” but his writing career began in journalism. Skills learned from years of chasing stories for magazines are conspicuous in this book’s thorough and layered analysis of beguiling genealogies, betrayals and a host of other controversies.
One of the most gripping chapters details how the construction of the Savannah River Nuclear site in the early 1950s displaced the poor, black sharecroppers of the area and devastated the communities where Brown grew up.
In interviews with a dizzying horde of confidants, ex-bandmates and relatives, the book follows “the hardest working man in show business” from his dirt-poor youth in Barnwell, S.C., through performing on the “chitlin circuit” and ensuing stardom that revolutionized the music industry. Brown sold more than 200 million records during his 45-year career. McBride calls him “easily one of the most famous African Americans in the world, and arguably the most influential African American in pop music history.” That’s a mouthful, to be sure, but the author tempers his adulation with a frank assessment of the singer’s harsh idiosyncrasies.
The book’s title comes from an anecdote shared by Al Sharpton, Brown’s longtime protégé and right-hand man, who was a teenager when he joined the entourage. He recalls flying to Las Vegas for a gig featuring Aretha Franklin and Barry White. Brown demanded to perform last. After tearing down the house, the notoriously vain entertainer skipped the after-party in favor of his usual backstage ritual of having his hair done. Then he called for his private plane. Sharpton was stunned to be departing so soon.
Brown responded, “When you kill ’em, Rev, you leave. … You understand that, son?”
This advice to keep ’em guessing comes up often in the book. Brown was infamous for throwing out multiple, disjointed versions of stories about his childhood. He was even more opaque when it came to money matters, keeping stashes of cash hidden in the floorboards of cars or buried under trees. His mantra to Sharpton was, “Never let them see you sweat. Come important. Leave important.”
The statement is particularly haunting, McBride points out, given the sad deterioration of Brown’s estate into endless lawsuits and the squandering of millions bequeathed to charity. “[T]he James Brown story is not about James Brown. It’s about who’s getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more,” the author says.
In his later years, the once-proud Soul Brother No. 1 became little more than a punchline, thanks to the hobo-faced mugshots and tabloid headlines spilling out his legal troubles. McBride notes the irony that a man who spent his career “preaching the gospel of education and hard work” has ended up being remembered as a convict and a clown.
“He was real and he was funny,” McBride writes. “He was the uncle from down South who shows up at your house, gets drunk, takes out his teeth, embarrasses you in front of your friends, and grunts, ‘Stay in school!’ But you love him.”
