Pleas, Pleas, Pleas: The Tribulations and Trials of James Brown
February 21, 1989
Gus, the pasty-white 300-pound cabbie driving me to
the State Park Correctional Center outside Columbia, South Carolina,
doesn’t need to ask which of the 288 inmates I’m going to see. He just
wants to know if I’m a writer or a lawyer. “Reason I ask,” he says in
his mellifluous, surprisingly feminine drawl, “is if you’re a writer, I
might just wait around for the return trip. Mr. James Brown don’t see
no more writers. They were coming down here by the busload till a few
weeks ago, fans too, but they all went away empty-handed. That roly-poly
preacher from New York seen to that.”
I ask Gus if he means the Reverend Al Sharpton, an old friend of
Brown’s (they cut a gospel single, “God Has Smiled on Me,” together in
1981). Sharpton brought the Brawley family to visit Brown after their
pilgrimage to the Atlanta Democratic Convention last July, then
returned south alone in December to lobby for Brown’s release. Gus,
who’s been fairly taciturn the whole ride up, lets out with a riptide
at Sharpton’s name. “That loud roun’ moun’ of soun’! He was standing on
the courthouse steps in Aiken the day after the trial, holding onto
Adrienne Brown and them ancient photographs of President Bush and Mr.
Brown and him, talking racist verdicts, media circuses, and whatnot,
making that bogus offer to serve Mr. Brown’s time for him. He was here
on Christmas too, holding his candlelight vigil in front of the prison
with that lawyer buddy, Perry Mason, trying to stir up the ministers.
They wouldn’t give him the time of day. People here say James Brown got
his day in court — and more. Got to be every time you turned around him
and that wife’s acting up. Time and again they let them off, time, time,
time and again he’s shooting something up. People behaving like that —
pistols, drugs, shotguns. Me and you’d have got all 30 years he was
looking at, that’s for sure.”
Gus gets pacified as we coast past the rolling green lawns and maples
hedging the State Park driveway and stop in front of what he calls the
“nursing home.” A jet of steam is coming out of the ventilation duct of a
block-long, white-stone hospital to the left; a tacky gift shop on our
right is open, even though it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Down a series of
stone stairways strewn with ivy is the dirty red-brick prison, looking
more like a 1940s subway station on the Grand Concourse than a penal
institution. “Still, I feel for the man,” Gus says as I get
out, “because it was that wife who drove him to it. Filing them charges
for assaulting her, filing them divorce papers, saying his men planted
those PCPs they busted her with all them times, setting fire to their
hotel room up north. She done him in, that’s for sure.”
