Read Online Kill 'Em and Leave by James McBride - Free Book Online

kids, so his mother, Lydree, and all his aunts were raised as a large family by various relatives. Monday they’d stay with this aunt, Tuesday they’d spend with another aunt. “We always knew who family was,” says Shelleree Gaines, one of the many Gaines cousins who was told the story by his grandmother, Joe’s aunt.
    That style of raising children in extended family is how Joe Brown was raised. Joe Brown’s father was never discussed, though Joe was the spitting image of a local sharecropper named Bill Evans. It didn’t matter, because everyone was poor and everyone lived together—the Gaines/Scott/Evans family of Ellenton. They cared for one another’s children, sharecropped the land, tended house for white folks, and over the years, worshipped at Book Creek Baptist, St. Paul Baptist, and St. Peter Baptist Church. They were a large, loving family, with lots of quirks. The Scott side, Joe’s mother’s side, was lighthearted. Their late mother, who was murdered, liked the sound, so all her children had
-ree
in their names. There was Iveree, Tyree, Zazaree, Lydiaree, and so on. To this day, there are
-rees
in the Gaines family tree in Barnwell County and beyond. The Gaines side, Joe’s great-uncle by marriage, were serious, sharp thinkers, and, when riled, dangerous. They had long memories. If you crossed one of them, they did not forget. The story of Cutter Gaines’s death on the railroad tracks was passed down through the family for years. The murderers were never tried, though everyone in Ellenton knew who they were. In 1971, decades after Cutter Gaines was killed, one of his murderers, then an old man, was lying in Barnwell Hospital when two Gaines boys, Johnny and Shelleree Gaines—Cutter’s nephews—were working there as orderlies. They walked into the man’s room to clean it. The old man, lying in the hospital bed, looked up, spied one of the Gaines boys, and thought he’d seen a ghost. “I thought I killed you,” he said. Johnny Gaines leaped for him, and Shelleree had to pull Johnny out of the room.
    Such was the family that raised Joseph James Brown, and later his son James Brown in James Brown’s weaning years. They were hard people because the land made you hard. They were strong people because the land made you strong. They were religious people because only God could help you. “You had to be tough,” Shelleree Gaines told me. As sharecroppers they were tied to laws that kept you always in debt to someone else, laws passed down from slavery and the brutal Reconstruction era that followed it. For generations.
    Joe had no sisters, but his cousins Doll Baby and Honey were raised as his sisters, and because they were family and close in age and lived on the same land and, even at times, in the same house, they had similar dreams. The two strong-minded, practical girls didn’t want to pull cotton. They had plans to move to Augusta. That was everyone’s dream in those days. Getting out. Getting to Augusta, or Atlanta. All the young folks in the Gaines clan dreamed of it, but nobody dreamed of it more than Joe.
    Joe Brown was a handsome, brown-skinned young man with a firm jaw and a quick smile. He was fast on his feet and a quick thinker, with a stutter that masked an intelligence that he learned to keep to himself in a world where a smartass black kid could find himself tossed in jail for thirty days for sassing a white man wrong—he’d seen that happen more than once. Joe saw those cotton fields of Ellenton and saw his future buried in its long rows. That wasn’t for him. He liked to sing in local juke joints and wear fine clothing. He even joined a local singing group as a teenager and picked cotton in his one silk shirt—he liked fine things that much. He loved playing skin, a card game, and his quick wit made him a hit with the local young ladies. “Uncle Joe,” says Shelleree, “was much of a man.” Cocky and humorous, he liked to have fun, and later in life when his son became