One : The Life and Music of James Brown (9781101561102) by Smith R. J

Author:Smith, R. J. [Smith, RJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101561102
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

MASTER OF TIME

By her own admission, the probate judge of Barnwell, South Carolina, did not watch much TV. When a black couple knocked on her door and asked to be married, the name James Brown did not mean a thing to her.

Early on a November 1970 evening, the judge married the couple. She didn’t invite them in. “I got a real nice front porch. I marry most of my colored couples out there unless it is raining,” she told a reporter.

His new wife, Deidre Jenkins Brown, was a red-haired beauty from a good Baltimore family. Friends called her Deedee. They had been together for some time, and were waiting for Brown’s divorce from Velma, in Toccoa, to come through, so they could get married.

At the wedding, the bride wore a cream-colored, pearl-buttoned dress; the groom, a gray knit suit with a white zipper top trimmed with gray. Bobby Byrd was the best man, and Joe Brown and Danny Ray were also present.

They were visiting Augusta in 1970, when the couple surprised everybody by announcing that they would soon be moving there. Deedee was a smart, stay-at-home sort of woman, and did not like the pace of New York City. “I simply love to keep house,” she told a writer from the Baltimore Afro-American. “I look forward to our own home soon and keeping my husband as happy as I am.”

They bought a $116,000 house, and with an extensive redesign turned it into a two-story modern home, with a pool, three bedrooms, and guest house. It was located in a lavish neighborhood on Walton Way Extension. That was a street on the Hill, the white enclave of old moneyed Augusta. A black family living on the Hill in the civil rights era—and nobody can remember another black family in the vicinity—was an indication of racial progress in the city. But progress was relative. When the African American novelist Frank Yerby, who had grown up in Augusta, visited the town he’d left decades before, he put it this way: “Augusta has gotten a little more civilized since when I was a child, but that’s true all over the South. But at least the people of Augusta have reached a stage of kindly hypocrisy, which is a vast improvement.”

A group of Brown’s new neighbors made a presentation to his real estate agent asking him to move elsewhere, but the singer was set on Walton Way, and there was no drama after he moved in.

In lieu of a honeymoon, weeks after the wedding Deedee accompanied her husband to Africa, where the band was playing shows in Nigeria and Zambia. Though Brown had already performed a private show for the leader of Ivory Coast on a quick visit in 1968, this was in many ways his real introduction to Africa. Black Americans were beginning to celebrate his music as a link to the motherland and celebrating Brown as an exemplar of African culture flourishing on American soil. He represented in America an urge to

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