The servicemen started pouring into Augusta in the fall of 1940, when I was seven. At first a lot of them were assigned to Daniel Field, an airstrip on the western edge of the city. Later, Jimmy Doolittle’s men practiced there for their bomb attacks on Tokyo. The old Augusta Arsenal went into high gear making bombsights, and Camp Gordon was built out on Tobacco Road for the cavalry.
The soldiers brought a lot of money into the city and we tried to get our share of it on Twiggs Street. When the troop trains came through and stopped at a crossing, Junior and I and some of the other kids would run off and get sandwiches and Red Rock Creme Soda for them, and they’d tip us. When the cavalry came by in their truck convoys, I’d buckdance for them on the Third Level Canal Bridge. There was a canal that came off the Savannah River and ran through the Terry, and the Third Level Bridge was right beside our house. Big Junior would stand there and pat for me, and I’d do a little old country buck-dance, same as you might see people doing in the South today. When I’d first come to Augusta, Big Junior showed me a few dance steps, and I guess I just took it from there. The soldiers loved it. They threw nickels and dimes, and I worked even harder, adding some steps of my own, trying to get them to throw quarters. Boy, I wanted those quarters. We picked up all the change, and then Big Junior and I would have an argument about it.
“We made the money together,” he’d say, “so we ought to split it.”
“Naw,” I’d say, “I’m going to carry it to Honey.”
And that’s what we’d do. I’ve give it to her to pay the rent. Rent wasn’t but $5 a month, but all of those men and women put together couldn’t come up with it. I don’t know where all the money from the bootlegging and prostitution went, but I know Honey was supporting an awful lot of people. Once we made the rent we might go back and make some money for ourselves so we could go to the picture show at the Lenox Theater, a “colored” movie house on Ninth Street, or to a little Chinese place to get wienie stew for 35 cents.
We steered money into the house another way, too. To get to Camp Gordon from town, the soldiers had to walk right by our house. Big Junior and I would stand out there and ask them did they want a woman. I wouldn’t let ’em say no.
“Come on,” I’d say, “there’s some real pretty ones in that house yonder.” I’d hook my arm in theirs and start tugging, pulling them toward the house. When they’d finally say yes I’d lead ’em right inside.
I guess I saw and heard just about everything in the world in that house when the soldiers were there with the women. It was a funny thing about the soldiers, though. They didn’t want anything freaky. I’m not endorsing it or condemning it, but they didn’t believe in oral sex; they thought it was unholy.
Even though we went out and got men for the women, we still had to stay in our place. We had to say “yessir” and “nosir” and “yes ma’am.” We even said “yes ma’am” to those ladies, regardless of what they were doing.
By this time I had started school. Floyd School, one of the few in Augusta for black kids, had seven grades and about forty kids to a class. When I’d first gotten to Augusta the other kids initiated me by taking off my overalls and throwing them up in a tree. I was a real small kid so I had to get tough pretty quick.
I’d have to say that I was poorer than most of the other kids, and a different kind of poor, too. I was poor because nobody was really taking care of me. I came from a roadhouse, not an organized home. A couple of times the principal, Mr. Myers, called me into his office and sent me home for “insufficient clothes.” It made me feel terrible, and I never forgot it.
Perry Williams, the man who had stolen my mother for my father, used to come by the house sometimes and bring me things, including my first store-bought underwear. Out in the country I’d worn stitched-together flour sacks. When I told him about getting put out for insufficient clothes, he carried me downtown in his truck and bought me some clothes I could go back to school in. That satisfied Mr. Myers, but when my new clothes wore out, it happened right again.
It was through the school that I began to get a sort of identity. At home I was Little Junior, but all the kids at school and all the teachers called me James Brown, like it was one word. I’ve always thought that was kind of strange. I was good at baseball and football, and I always got along with everybody. Sometimes I sang for the class. Once I sang “A Tisket, a Tasket” to the third grade.
Outside of school I was a hustler. Besides entertaining the troops, Junior and I worked at most any kind of job we could find. We shined a lot of shoes, delivered groceries, racked pool balls, picked cotton, picked peanuts, and cut sugarcane. The first time I picked peanuts I ate so many I got colic. Cane kept you bloody. Cotton was just hard.
Shining shoes was another story. There were a lot of shoe-shine parlors in those days, and they all had licenses. They didn’t like competition from freelancers, so they were all the time getting the police to run us off the streets. We had to do a lot of slipping around just to shine shoes. Sunday was the best day—we’d hit all the churches and at a nickel a shine make maybe as much as $20. I’d put some showmanship into it, too, popping the rag and beating the brushes behind my back. When we got tired of dodging the police we went to work for Shoeshine King, a parlor on Broad Street, but we only got to keep 30 cents for every dollar we made.
No matter how much money we hustled, it never seemed to be enough. I was carrying all my money home to help Honey, but we still needed everything and anything we could lay our hands on—including garbage. A grocery wholesaler down the street, C. D. Kennedy’s, threw all its spoiled merchandise into oil drums in back of the place. We went through the oil drums and pulled out all the swollen cans and brought them home and ate the stuff. Everybody in the house ate it. Nobody thought about getting poisoned. We were just trying to survive.
That’s what everything that went on in that house—gambling, bootlegging, prostitution—was about: survival. Some people call it crime, I call it survival. It’s the same thing goes on right today in the ghetto. You can see kids standing on corners selling marijuana. You get it in a bag, and the funny thing is that the bag says “Church Offering.” That’s what hard times bring—makes pimps and prostitutes out of preachers. Prostitute don’t have to be a person who lays down. A prostitute can be a prostitute for whatever.
One of the things that helped me to survive in those days was music. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was so. I wasn’t thinking about music as a career or anything like that, it was just there in the community, and I fell into it, the way you will. At home I sang gospel with Junior and a fellow named Cornelius. We sang “Old Jonah,” “Old Blind Barnabas,” things like that, and tried to imitate the Five Trumpets and the Golden Gate Quartet. Really, gospel is what got me over, especially after I went to prison.
I was learning more instruments, too. A man named Mr. Dink taught me to play drums. At Jack Dempsey’s, a liquor store where I worked as a delivery boy, I met Robert Graham, whose son, Robert, Jr., first taught me some piano. They lived at 707 Twiggs and had an old upright. Robert, Sr., had some good chords, and he could really play a lot of old songs. Robert, Jr., taught me some fingerings and let me fool around on the keyboard. Whenever I wanted I could go there and practice on that piano.
I also learned some guitar from a blues man named Tampa Red who was going with one of the girls at the house. His real name, I believe, was Hudson Whittaker, and in the thirties and forties he recorded a lot of party blues like “It’s Tight Like That.” When he passed through Augusta and stopped to see his girl he sometimes sat and played for us in the front room. He used an open tuning called Sebastopol and fretted with a broken off Coke bottleneck on his little finger. He bent those strings and got sounds out of ’em that I recognized later when I heard B. B. King play.
Tampa Red sang for us, too, and his songs reminded me of the blues my father used to sing when he worked the turpentine camps. I still didn’t care for the blues that much. I’d sing ’em sometimes, but I didn’t like ’em.
I liked country music even less. Whenever I worked for white people there was always a radio tuned in to country music. It was constantly forced on you. Much later on I got to where I listened to country music by choice—Lefty Frizzell, Jimmy Dickins, Tex Ritter—but back then I didn’t pay any attention to it.
I liked gospel and pop songs best of all. I got all the Hit Parade books and learned all the pop tunes—Bing Crosby’s “Buttermilk Sky,” Frank Sinatra’s “Saturday Night Is the Loneliest Night of the Week,” “String of Pearls.” I also admired Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” but I couldn’t play piano good enough to do it.
I heard a lot of church music, too, because I went to all the different churches with a crippled man named Charlie Brown who lived in one of the shacks in Helmuth Alley. He had to walk with two sticks or with somebody on each side holding his arms. On Sundays when we weren’t shining shoes, Junior and I walked Mr. Charlie to one or another of the churches because they’d take up collections for people like him.
At the churches there was a lot of singing and handclapping and usually an organ and tambourines, and then the preacher would really get down. I liked that even more than the music. I had been to a revival service and had seen a preacher who really had a lot of fire. He was just screaming and yelling and stomping his foot and then he dropped to his knees. The people got into it with him, answering him and shouting and clapping time. After that, when I went to church with Mr. Charlie, I watched the preachers real close. Then I’d go home and imitate them because I wanted to preach. I thought that was the answer to it.
Audience participation in church is something the darker race of people has going because of a lot of trials and tribulations, because of things that we understand about human nature. It’s something I can’t explain, but I can bring it out of people. I’m not the only person who has the ability, but I work at it, and I’m sure a lot of my stage show came out of the church.
One thing I never saw in the churches was drums until I went to Bishop Grace’s House of Prayer. Those folks were sanctified—they had the beat. See, you got sanctified and you got holy. Sanctified people got more fire; holy people are more secluded—sort of like Democrats versus Republicans. I’m holy myself, but I have a lot of sanctified in me.
Bishop Grace was a big man, the richest and most powerful of that kind of preacher in the country, bigger than Father Divine or any of ’em. He had houses of prayer in more than thirty cities in the East and South, and he had these “Grace Societies” that just took in the money. Every year when he came back to Augusta there was a monstrous parade down Gwinnett Street for him, with decorated floats and cars and brass bands. Everybody in the Terry turned out for it, and other people came from as far away as Philadelphia to march in it. You could join in it with your car or, if you had a musical instrument, you could fall in with one of the bands.
He was called “Daddy” Grace, and he was like a god on earth. He wore a cape and sat on a throne on the biggest float, with people fanning him while he threw candy and things to the children. He had long curly hair, and real long fingernails, and suits made out of money.
His House of Prayer on Wrightsboro Road in Augusta resembled a warehouse. A sign over the door said: “Great joy! Come to the House of Prayer and forget your troubles.” And everybody did come at one time or another, even people who didn’t believe in him, because he put on such a show. Inside there were plank benches, a dirt floor covered with sawdust, and crepe paper streamers on the ceiling. At one end there was a stage where Daddy Grace sat on a red throne.
He’d get to preaching and the people would get in a ring and they’d go round and round and go right behind one another, just shouting. Sometimes they’d fall out right there in the sawdust, shaking and jerking and having convulsions. The posts in the place were padded so the people wouldn’t hurt themselves. There was a big old tin tub sitting there, too, and every time they went by the tub, they threw something in it. See who could give the most. Later on he had various big vases out there, like urns, one for five-dollar bills, one for tens and twenties, and one for hundreds. It seemed like the poorest people sacrified the most for him.
Daddy Grace had to be a prophet, but seeing him I knew I was an outsider because I couldn’t believe in him. I believed in God, so that made me an outsider right away.
He had his house behind the church, and behind the house was a big pool where he baptized people. Instead of baptizing them just once, he baptized them over and over. Some people had so much faith in him that they took water out of that pool and carried it home by the gallon and drank it when they got sick. They paid for some kind of blessed papers that he put out, too, to put on themselves like a poultice.
That pool was the first place I ever swam in my life. We’d give him a dollar and he’d let us swim in there. They let him get away with that. But he brought a lot of trade to that city, and that’s what it was about—trade. Like the Masters Golf Tournament Elections. Or James Brown.
Meanwhile, the war was coming closer to home every day. First, there were all the soldiers, more every year it seemed like. Then the government started keeping hundreds of German prisoners of war at the Augusta Arsenal. I remember it because they were treated better than the American blacks around there. Pretty soon they started letting the German POWs do farm work around Augusta and in South Carolina, and the U.S. government paid them 80 cents a day for it. That was more than my father got a lot of times.
Eventually the government began to crack down on houses like ours. They put all the liquor joints and gambling places off-limits to the soldiers. Police raids came more often, and it took Honey a little longer to get released when she was arrested. Nobody said anything to me, but I could tell things weren’t right. Finally, one day Honey fixed me a potato pone and set it down in front of me.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“It’s for you to eat,” she said.
She was acting funny, so I watched her the whole time I ate. When I was finished she said: “Baby, we got to move.”
“How come?”
“We just do,” she said.
“Junior and me can get some more money.”
“That ain’t the reason,” she said. “Now go find Junior and bring him here.”
She never would tell us straight out, but we knew it had something to do with the soldiers and the whiskey and the women. I guess the place really was a hellhole, but when you’re a kid your home is home even if it’s a roadhouse, and I was sorry to see it broken up. It wouldn’t be the last time the government reached into my house.