I don’t remember when I first started stealing, but I remember why I started—to have some decent clothes to wear to school. My daddy never bought me anything, and Honey and Aunt Minnie didn’t have anything, so it was up to me to look out for myself. I’m not making excuses for anything I did; I’m just saying what was going through my mind at the time. Every time I got sent home for insufficient clothes, it hurt me and made me mad, too.
During the war, when my father’s check was coming in every month, I didn’t have to worry too much. After the war, though, things got tough. Daddy was back in town, scuffling at whatever jobs he could find and losing his money gambling just as fast as he made it. Things got rough for everybody. When the services cut back, the flow of money from the soldiers slowed way down. Food prices went through the roof, and there was a lot less work around.
I kind of fell in with a bad crowd, too. There were a lot of gangs around the city: Sunset Homes and Gilbert Manor, two low-income projects, each had a gang. There was the Downtown gang, which was rough, and the Summerhill gang, which was all right. I was in a little gang around King Street led by Big Boy, Little Boy, Pete, and a boy named Harry Robinson. The gangs weren’t vicious, not like a lot of ’em today. There were some rivalries but nothing deadly. We just liked to swim in the canal, keep the girls out late, shoot dice, and generally enjoy ourselves. When we were out real late the police might chase us, and when that happened I headed straight for the canal and jumped in. Sometimes I found a reed to breathe through so I could stay underwater until the police gave up.
At dice I got very good—too good. So good you can get yourself killed. The layman ain’t got a chance with me. Later I won a lot of money at dice from the Moonglows, before Marvin Gaye’s time, when it was Bobby Lester and the Moonglows. I beat ’em out of enough money to buy me two Cadillacs. Beat the Isley Brothers out of a lot, too.
At first we got where we might steal a pair of skates off somebody’s porch, but that was about all. Later we got into everything that wasn’t nailed down, and we sold it. I took hubcaps off people’s cars, gas caps, whatever. Filling stations would give you a quarter for each hubcap. But the best ones were off the ’46 Ford, because it had the big hub, and you could get 50 cents for one of those. A lot of times, I’d steal the battery or break into the car and take whatever was in it. Breaking in wasn’t too tough because most people didn’t lock their cars.
Honey must have known what I was doing because I had a little trick that almost always worked on her. See, I wore out a lot of shoes playing football, just kicked ’em right out, so I was all the time needing shoes. I’d say, “Honey, I need me some shoes; I think I might go and steal me a pair.”
“Naw,” she’d say, “you ain’t going to steal no shoes. I’ll buy you some.” Then she’d give whatever little money she had, and I’d go get the shoes.
There were two things I never did when I stole. I never took from the Afro-American, and I never let Junior get mixed up in it. I didn’t take from the Afro-American because I knew he didn’t have anything, and I was sort of a Robin Hood. I took from the Caucasian and gave to the Afro-American—sort of redistributing the wealth. Once I stole a whole bunch of baseball gloves and passed ’em out to all the fellas. Also, there were other kids whose clothes were insufficient, too, and I didn’t think twice about stealing them a jacket or a shirt or a pair of pants.
Junior was always pestering me about getting caught and going to jail. He didn’t want to go to jail, and I didn’t want to be responsible for putting him there, so when he was around and I saw an opportunity, I’d say, “Junior, I’m fixing to make a move. You go on home now.” And he’d leave.
Junior was right; I did get caught. Me and another boy were digging a battery out of a car one night when the police pulled up. We were bent so far under the hood concentrating on getting the cables loose we didn’t even hear the police come up behind us. They had to tap us on the shoulder. They carried us in the patrol car to the Richmond County Jail and kept us there overnight, trying to scare us. In the morning a juvenile officer talked to us real stern and then let us go. I think it scared Junior more than it did me because when I got home the next day and told him about it, he said, “I told you, Crip. You got to get away from Augusta.”
His mother was living in New York and had written to Honey about sending him up as soon as there was enough money for a bus ticket. After I got caught he tried to persuade me to go with him.
“Why don’t you come on and live with me and Mama up there?” he said.
“What would I do in New York?” I said.
“You could sing. Play the harp. Dance. New York’s a big old town.”
“I want to stay here with Honey and Aunt Minnie.”
“Police catch you, they going to send you to the penitentiary,” he said.
“Naw,” I said, “they won’t never catch me again.”
“I’m telling you, Crip. Please come with me to New York.”
Honey wanted me to go, too. They both knew I was going to get into trouble if I stayed down there, but I wouldn’t listen. I turned right around and started breaking into cars again.
One night three or four of the fellas and I went all up and down Broad Street getting into all the cars parked along there. I must have broken into three or four myself and gotten out a whole lot of clothes. A couple of the fellas got caught that night, but I got away. The next day I went up to the shoeshine stand on Broad and heard that the police had been around looking for a boy named James Brown. Right while the fella was warning me, a patrol car pulled up and two policemen got out. I started to slip away, but somebody must have pointed me out to them because they started chasing me. They didn’t have a chance. Broad Street, like its name says, was real wide, maybe two hundred feet, with a promenade down the center lined with trees and park benches. I negotiated it like a halfback—dodging cars, people, trees, benches—and man, I could move. After a couple of blocks of that, the cops gave out.
To me the whole thing was a game. I went back to that same shoeshine stand later that afternoon, the police got behind me again, and I got away again. The second time they chased me a lot farther, until I lost ’em behind the Dr. Pepper plant. I hid out for a couple of hours, then went back a third time. Same ’shine stand: Here I come again, there they come again. But now they’re mad. When I take off running this time, instead of chasing me on foot they come after me in their car. And they can drive as good as I can run: I cut down an alley, they come screeching around the corner; I tear across a vacant lot, they charge right over the sidewalk; I duck behind a building, they barrel in the back way. I know that eventually they’ll have to get out of their car, and then it’ll be no contest. But they must have radioed for help because now it seems like every patrol car in Augusta is after me. I’m getting worn out, and I’m thinking, “if only I can get to the canal and jump in, I can lose them.” So I cut down another alley. It turns out to be a blind one, and when I run back out I find myself surrounded by police cars and looking at a whole lot of guns.
This time they took me to jail for real—fingerprinted me, took a mug shot, and threw me in the lockup with adult offenders even though I was only fifteen years old. When the detectives asked me about breaking into the cars, I told them everything I had done. They let the other boys go because none of them had ever been in trouble before, but they charged me with four counts of breaking and entering and larceny from an automobile.
There were some pretty tough cats in that jail, some real hardened criminals, and when I was put in with them I thought I was gone. They didn’t bother me too much, though, just asked for cigarettes, things like that. They did explain to me that there was no point in worrying about anything because the authorities would do whatever they felt like doing anyway. There sure wasn’t any bail or legal counsel or anything like that. It’s funny, but it didn’t really bother me that much that I was in jail. Somehow I knew I was destined to go, and I didn’t have anything to stay home for, so I passed the time lying on my bunk, thinking about things, waiting, but not really expecting anything. It reminded me of the days out in the woods when my daddy was gone because in jail, although you’re surrounded by other people, you’re really alone.
Sunday was visiting day. Junior would go out early in the morning and knock up some money shining shoes or whatever and bring me a pack of Camels and Juicy Fruit chewing gum. We sat and talked in the runaround, a big room enclosed with wire mesh at one end where the visitors came in. Junior told me how Honey and Aunt Minnie were doing and what all the fellas were up to. When he left, he always gave me a few quarters. Honey never came to visit me; she said it would break her heart to see me there. My father never came to see me, either, but I’m not sure why.
After a couple of months in jail, I got hip: You could get out if you could get somebody to bribe the right person. It was like everything else in Augusta then. One boy had stolen a car, not just broken into one like me, and his daddy had gotten him out for $100. That was the going rate. The next Sunday I told Junior about that boy. “Tell Daddy to try and get me out,” I said. After that, whenever I asked Junior about it, he said he was working on it, but he always looked like it made him uncomfortable when I brought it up.
Nearly two more months passed that way. I turned sixteen, then all of a sudden they decided to try me—as an adult. Without any advance notice, they took me and three or four other prisoners over to Richmond County Superior Court. Later I found out why it was so sudden. On that same day—June 13, 1949—they were scheduled to try a sensational bribery case against the chief of police, a civil service commissioner, and six other city officials. The prosecutor asked for a postponement, and when the judge granted it they were left with an empty calendar, so they hustled us over to the courtroom.
The prosecutor was Solicitor George Haines and he was a man who would sink you. People in Augusta loved to hear him plead a case because he put on such a show. If you were being tried for cutting somebody, he had a way of holding the knife so it looked five inches longer than it really was. Sometimes he brought a suitcase into court, and when he made his final argument he’d say: “Your Honor, here’s my suitcase. If you let this man go free”—he’d pick up the suitcase and put on his hat—“I’m going to leave this town.”
When I was brought into the courtroom there were still a lot of people left over from the postponed trial, but I could see Junior sitting way up in the balcony where black folks had to sit. The guard sat me down at the table and pointed out the state’s attorney, R. Lee Chambers III, who was supposed to act as my lawyer. It was the first time I’d ever seen him.
I knew I was in trouble when they tried a little white girl right before me. She had stolen $50 from somebody, and the judge, Grover C. Anderson, gave her two to five years. When my turn came, Attorney Chambers waived the indictment, the list of witnesses, a jury trial, and formal arraignment. Then he pleaded me guilty. I was tried, convicted, and sentenced before I knew it. The sentence read that James Brown “be taken to the jail of said county to await a guard to be sent by the penitentiary of Georgia, where he shall be taken and confined at hard labor therein or elsewhere, as the State Department of Corrections shall direct for the space of not less than two years and not more than four years in each case of four cases, said term to commence from this date, and one sentence to commence at the expiration of the other.” He had given me eight to sixteen years. When he asked if I had anything to say, I begged him to give me a chance.
“This is your chance,” he said. “If you work hard in prison, you can get out when you’re twenty-four years old. If you don’t, you’ll be thirty-two. It’s up to you.”
I didn’t say any more. I knew they had given me all that time because I was a colored boy being tried behind a white girl who had gotten two to five. The judge had to give me the maximum sentence on each of the charges to please the whites. On top of that, he had to make the sentences run consecutively instead of concurrently. What I couldn’t understand was why he was sending me away. There was a boy’s home, a reformatory, right there in Augusta, but he was going to send me to a detention center in Rome.
Mine was a kangaroo court, I knew that. What I have always felt was unjust in this country is that they didn’t allow us to get an education, and yet when we went to court they treated us like we were impresarios who knew what was going on. We can’t be wrong on both ends. If you don’t allow a man to get an education, don’t put him in jail for being dumb. That’s what they did in Augusta—they sent me to prison for being dumb.
The Sunday after the trial Junior came to see me as usual. I could see he was upset at all the time I was carrying, but I knew they were keeping me in Augusta for a few more weeks to give me one more chance to come up with a bribe from somewhere.
“Is Daddy going to get me out?” I asked.
Junior looked all over the runaround before he looked straight at me. “Mr. Joe said there wasn’t nothing he could do.”
I didn’t say anything and neither did Junior. We both knew my daddy could have gotten me out, but he didn’t do it. He just didn’t have the knowledge.
“It looks like you’re going away,” Junior said.
Out of the blue I said a strange thing.
“Don’t worry, Junior,” I said, “when I get out of here the world is going to know about me.”
I don’t know why I said it, except that he looked so downhearted. I didn’t say what the world was going to know me for. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I wanted to do something with my music, to be popular, to do things for people, but I couldn’t put it into words. It was something I could feel. I just knew that when I said what I said I really believed it. Junior thought I was crazy. When he went home he told Honey that being in the cell had affected my brain. He told her what I’d said. She told him, “Junior, the world is going to know about him.” But when he was sitting there with me I could see he was worried about something else, too. Finally he told me what it was.
“Mama sent some money,” he said. “We’re leaving, Crip.”
“Honey too?”
“Uh huh.”
I don’t remember if we hugged each other or not, two tough guys like us, but I remember watching him walk away through the wire-mesh door. I was splitting up from my family again. They were going to New York. I was going to Rome, like the song said.