I wasn’t supposed to be James. I wasn’t supposed to be Brown. And I wasn’t supposed to be alive.
You see, I was a stillborn kid. My mother and father lived in a one-room shack in the pine woods outside Barnwell, South Carolina, and when my mother’s time came, they sent for my Aunt Estelle and Aunt Minnie to help. They’d helped at births before, and when I appeared, they did all the usual things, gave me the usual spanking, all that, but I didn’t respond. They kept trying, but nothing happened. After a while, they just laid me aside.
All during the delivery my father paced outside the cabin, listening to the noise coming from inside. He could tell when it was over that nobody sounded too happy. When he came in to look at his child, my mother was sobbing. Aunt Estelle said, “He never drew a breath, Joe.”
While Aunt Estelle tried to comfort my father, Aunt Minnie picked me up and started blowing breath in me. She just wouldn’t give up. She patted me and breathed into my mouth and rubbed my back. Just about the time my father busted out crying, I did, too. He waited until he was sure I was all right, and then he walked nine miles into Barnwell to record my birth: May 3, 1933.
They were going to name me Joe Brown, Jr. Then, for no particular reason, they added James. Because they didn’t understand the flow, they had it James Joe Junior Brown. Eventually it got straightened out to James Joe Brown, Jr., but the Brown should have been Gardner because that’s what my daddy’s last name was originally.
For a lot of reasons it’s very hard for the Afro-American to trace ancestors. When I look at my family tree, the hardest thing to figure out is where the African came in. It must be from my grandmother, on my father’s side. But my grandfather on that side was pure Indian, a Cherokee, I think. My grandmother was working in someone’s home and had a relationship with him. So on March 29, 1911, about three miles from Barnwell, my father was born Joe Gardner. When his mother, my grandmother, left South Carolina, he stayed behind with a woman named Mattie Brown, who used to take in children when their parents died or couldn’t support them. She raised him, and he took her last name.
There’s some mystery behind my daddy’s mother. After she left South Carolina she married a white fella and went to New York and then to Philadelphia. Some of the first numbers banked in the numbers racket in Philadelphia were banked by them, and the white fella became very wealthy there.
On my mother’s side there is a strong Asian element and some American Indian. My mother is Asian-Afro, but she’s more Asian because her father, Mony Behlings, was highly Asian. I never thought that was possible until I visited Surinam, right next to Guyana north of Brazil, and saw dark-skinned Asians there.
Rebecca Behlings, my grandmother on my mother’s side, was brown-skinned and had hair that hung way down her back. My great-grandmother on my mother’s side, Susan Bryant, was almost a full-blooded American Indian—I’m not sure what tribe—and her hair was so long she could sit on it. She was married to Perry Bryant, who was Afro-American. I don’t know how they got together, but it must have been unusual for a black and an Indian to be together back then. They were both around ninety-eight when they died, which was before my mother and father got together in 1929, so my great-grandfather, and maybe my great-grandmother, too, must have been slaves at one time.
Because of all these different bloodlines, I feel a connection to everybody, not to any special race, but to the human race. I’m very sensitive to the Oriental people, as well as to the African people, and I can tell that the African and the Oriental people have a very strong bond with me.
I know about my grandparents, but I can’t say I really knew them. I saw Rebecca Behlings (she was called Becca) about twice, and I’ve never seen a grandfather in my life. Becca and Mony Behlings lived in Bamberg, South Carolina, and had a son and two daughters besides my mother, Susie. Mony had an organ and used to play blues and gospel on it. That was unusual because most people who liked gospel wouldn’t have anything to do with the blues, which were considered dirty and low-down. Mony later left for Florida with another woman, and the family never saw him again.
Everybody picked on Susie—Becca, the other two girls, everybody. They expected her to do all the work around the house, and they beat on her all the time, until Becca’s sister, Eva Williams, took her away to live with her near Barnwell. That’s where my daddy stole her from—from Eva’s. He stole her because he had to.
Eva didn’t want Susie to marry my father because she didn’t know anything about him and was afraid that Becca would never forgive her if she let it happen. So my father worked out a plan to steal her away. On a certain day at a certain time he got a friend who owned a Model A Ford to drive him by the house. Over her real dress Susie put on an old dress, like she was going to do cleaning. When the car pulled up, she took off. Eva saw right away what was happening. She ran out of the house and hollered for her son Perry to catch my mother. But Perry was in on the plan with my father. He ran her down, but just before he grabbed her, he faked a fall. By the time he got up, she was in the car and gone. They drove off somewhere and got married and were living down in the woods near Barnwell when I was born.
I guess we lived about as poor as you could be. At that time my father did a lot of turpentine work. There were trees all around the cabin, and he worked them. He’d score the tree on each side and place a little trough there to catch the tar that ran down. He’d come back later with a scoop and a bucket and dip the tar into the bucket. When the bucket was full, he poured it into a barrel. When he had enough full barrels for it to pay, he’d take them in to the turpentine company. They paid by the barrel. There wasn’t anybody out there with him, because the trees or the barrels, either one, would show him up if he was slacking. They were his boss.
When I was four years old, my parents split up. I didn’t know why because I was too young to understand, but I understood it was happening. That’s one of my earliest memories: my mother standing in the door of the cabin getting ready to leave, my father facing her.
“Take your child,” he said.
“You keep him, Joe,” she said, “because I can’t work for him.”
I didn’t see her again for twenty years.