Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

[three_fourth padding=”0 0px 0 0px”]Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul
2 6 | J U L Y | 2 0 1 6

Inside Papa’s Brand New Bag

[dropcap]James[/dropcap] Brown held a prominent place in my constellation of stars. His music was the soundtrack of my black girl life. My middle-school bestie Brunella and I would scoop up tickets to his concerts at the Cow Palace and savor every moment spent shoulder-to-shoulder in the roaring crowd. The Godfather of Soul was a bad mother (shut your mouth), taut and compact like a bulldozer, his slender physique poured to overflowing into a black-on-black ensemble, his hair a swirl of black satin stacked high like his patent leather shoes. Years later, my black was beautiful because of him. Every disc jockey at every house party knew that he had to put JB on the turntable if he wanted the crowd to get down. Sweat descending from our Afros to our faces, we’d stop mid-rhythm, thrust our fists in the air and scream – ‘Say it loud. I’m Black and I’m proud.’ He was never in or outside the box, because there was no box that was big enough to fit.

With that love in mind, I was wary from the moment I read the introduction to Kill ‘Em and Leave, James McBride’s (The Good Lord Bird; The Color of Water) newest release. Living fourteen deep on the wrong side of the tracks in Queens, NY (as did the author, who, incidentally, is also an accomplished musician) couldn’t be so different from coming up hardscrabble in South Carolina. James Brown was a poor kid just like the ones he left his $100 million fortune to and by default, the trajectory his life was set in stone. But even if it was set in stone, James Brown was still the master brick layer. McBride says, ‘we have to figure ourselves out if we want to figure James Brown out.’ But I disagree. We just have to fully acknowledge the truth: that racism – white supremacy in all its deep-rooted nuances and veiled iterations – has sharp teeth and it bites, really, really hard. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″][/three_fourth]

[three_fourth padding=”0 0px 0 0px”]