Read Online Kill 'Em and Leave by James McBride - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James McBride
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yelled, “CR! Come here!” He turned to James Brown and said excitedly, “Junior! This is one of your cousins. He’s one of Uncle Six’s grandkids.”
CR watched as James Brown nodded a “howdy” and put his hand in his pocket.
“I thought he was gonna pull out a wad of money and peel off a five-dollar bill,” CR told me, laughing.
Instead, the Godfather of Soul pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, started the car, and drove off.
CR laughed about it. “Maybe he blew his handkerchief because he didn’t want me to shake his hand,” CR said. But CR’s father, Shelleree Gaines, never spoke of James Brown again. And when James Brown died in 2006 and the TV reporters came around to talk to Old Man Shelleree Gaines, wanting to interview folks from James Brown’s family, Shelleree Gaines, son of Six Gaines and great-grandson of the Oscar Gaines who had fled the white man’s injustice more than a hundred years before, Shelleree Gaines, who had never been on television in his life, most of which had been spent picking the white man’s cotton, sawing his lumber, and dodging the white man’s evil like his father and his grandfather before him, refused.
“Junior forgot where he came from,” he said. “And look what it done for him. It done him no good.”
I n the summer of 1950, the black farmers and sharecroppers of Ellenton who stopped in for supplies and feed at the general store began to overhear whispers among the white farmers who gathered there to gossip and pass on local news. Odd things were happening. Strangers with measuring sticks were driving new-model cars straight into white farmers’ fields, digging holes near cow pastures, measuring distances, taking pictures, sighting tree lines. Planes flew overhead. Trucks arrived. Men piled out, took quick measurements, then piled back in and left.
Plenty of the gossip passed from Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mill, and the surrounding towns through the general store in Ellenton. Much of it was puff, some of it was meant for white ears only, but in a small rural community, few secrets live long. Black folks and whites lived together. They barbecued together in summer and congregated in fall and winter during holidays. When there was nothing to do, they watched the early-morning train they called Fido pass through the train depot. There were at least thirty-five churches in and around Ellenton, among them several black churches: Mt. Moriah, Four Mile, the Runs, Friendship Baptist, Steele Creek, St. Luke’s, and St. Peter. In addition to the general store, the church was the telegraph of rural life in those days. And for black residents, many of whom had no phones or electricity and could barely read or write, it was the only pipeline to the world.
That fall, from Sunday to Sunday, among whites and blacks alike, terrible rumors began to spread:
Everybody got to leave this land.
That kind of talk sent everybody scrambling for information. Every single black minister from the black churches walked into the Ellenton General Store, called the Long Store, hat in hand, to check out the rumor with the white folks. The blacks who owned businesses around Ellenton—a gin mill, a cleaning business, a funeral home—poked for answers among their customers, black domestics who worked for white folks, white folks to whom some of those blacks were, in secret, related—for not every black family in those towns around Ellenton and Dunbarton was dark-skinned. (There was, as James Brown’s cousin Shelleree Gaines says, “Plenty tipping going on.”) There were eight thousand farmers in all, the majority of whom, the census notes, were African American sharecroppers—and not a single one of them had a bit of information on the rumor. Neither did the white farmers, many of them barely living above the poverty line themselves; not even the well-to-do farmers who owned cows, mules, wagons, and land that had been in their families for generations had information. That
CR watched as James Brown nodded a “howdy” and put his hand in his pocket.
“I thought he was gonna pull out a wad of money and peel off a five-dollar bill,” CR told me, laughing.
Instead, the Godfather of Soul pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, started the car, and drove off.
CR laughed about it. “Maybe he blew his handkerchief because he didn’t want me to shake his hand,” CR said. But CR’s father, Shelleree Gaines, never spoke of James Brown again. And when James Brown died in 2006 and the TV reporters came around to talk to Old Man Shelleree Gaines, wanting to interview folks from James Brown’s family, Shelleree Gaines, son of Six Gaines and great-grandson of the Oscar Gaines who had fled the white man’s injustice more than a hundred years before, Shelleree Gaines, who had never been on television in his life, most of which had been spent picking the white man’s cotton, sawing his lumber, and dodging the white man’s evil like his father and his grandfather before him, refused.
“Junior forgot where he came from,” he said. “And look what it done for him. It done him no good.”
I n the summer of 1950, the black farmers and sharecroppers of Ellenton who stopped in for supplies and feed at the general store began to overhear whispers among the white farmers who gathered there to gossip and pass on local news. Odd things were happening. Strangers with measuring sticks were driving new-model cars straight into white farmers’ fields, digging holes near cow pastures, measuring distances, taking pictures, sighting tree lines. Planes flew overhead. Trucks arrived. Men piled out, took quick measurements, then piled back in and left.
Plenty of the gossip passed from Ellenton, Dunbarton, Meyers Mill, and the surrounding towns through the general store in Ellenton. Much of it was puff, some of it was meant for white ears only, but in a small rural community, few secrets live long. Black folks and whites lived together. They barbecued together in summer and congregated in fall and winter during holidays. When there was nothing to do, they watched the early-morning train they called Fido pass through the train depot. There were at least thirty-five churches in and around Ellenton, among them several black churches: Mt. Moriah, Four Mile, the Runs, Friendship Baptist, Steele Creek, St. Luke’s, and St. Peter. In addition to the general store, the church was the telegraph of rural life in those days. And for black residents, many of whom had no phones or electricity and could barely read or write, it was the only pipeline to the world.
That fall, from Sunday to Sunday, among whites and blacks alike, terrible rumors began to spread:
Everybody got to leave this land.
That kind of talk sent everybody scrambling for information. Every single black minister from the black churches walked into the Ellenton General Store, called the Long Store, hat in hand, to check out the rumor with the white folks. The blacks who owned businesses around Ellenton—a gin mill, a cleaning business, a funeral home—poked for answers among their customers, black domestics who worked for white folks, white folks to whom some of those blacks were, in secret, related—for not every black family in those towns around Ellenton and Dunbarton was dark-skinned. (There was, as James Brown’s cousin Shelleree Gaines says, “Plenty tipping going on.”) There were eight thousand farmers in all, the majority of whom, the census notes, were African American sharecroppers—and not a single one of them had a bit of information on the rumor. Neither did the white farmers, many of them barely living above the poverty line themselves; not even the well-to-do farmers who owned cows, mules, wagons, and land that had been in their families for generations had information. That
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